Wednesday, October 23, 2019

The Maguffin


Alfred Hitchcock is credited with creating the term "Maguffin."  It's an item in a story that gets the action started, but really isn't important to the story at all.

The classic example is in "The Birds," where Tippi Hedren has a "meet cute" with Rod Taylor in a store in San Francisco, and because of the encounter buys two birds she takes in a cage to deliver to his apartment.  Learning he is away at his mother's for the weekend, she drives up the coast with the birds to deliver them (lest they sit in his apartment building hallway all weekend, and die from neglect).  Ferrying the birds across the bay to the house prompts the first bird attack of the movie, and when she reaches the opposite shore someone from the house takes the bird cage inside as Ms. Hedren is helped from the boat and her wound tended to.

You only see the bird cage again at the climax of the movie, during a particularly tense and otherwise silent moment.  The first 20 minutes or so of the film focusses on that bird cage; and then, having done the job of delivering Ms. Hedren to the locale of the action of the movie, they disappear.

In "Psycho," it's the embezzlement by Janet Leigh, which leads her to the Bates Motel in a thunderstorm.  Once she gets there, we quickly forget about the stolen money, especially after that shower scene.

The whistleblower is the Maguffin of the Ukraine scandal; which is why Trump keeps calling attention to him/her.  He doesn't like the way this movie is playing out.

No comments:

Post a Comment