In crook stories it is always the necklace and in spy stories it is always the papers. -From Wikipedia entry
A MacGuffin is something that all the character’s care about, but its specifics are otherwise irrelevant to the plot.
This is true, I guess, but it misses the point. Something should only be considered a MacGuffin if, in addition to the fact it provides the plot motivation, it doesn’t really exist, and even better, couldn’t really exists. It needs to be absurd.
The glowing brief-case in Pulp Fiction is the classic example, though it itself is a nod to some other movie. By this strict definition, the Rug in Lebowski would have only been a MacGuffin only if we had never seen it. Still, the fact that everyone agrees that it 'tied the room together', makes it somewhat absurd, which is nice.
I’m not entirely alone on this. Hitchcock, who was the master of MacGuffin, understood this subtle distinction, though he didn’t allways implement it:
Interviewed in 1966 by François Truffaut, Hitchcock illustrated the term "MacGuffin" with this story:
It might be a Scottish name, taken from a story about two men in a train. One man says, 'What's that package up there in the baggage rack?' And the other answers, 'Oh that's a McGuffin.' The first one asks 'What's a McGuffin?' 'Well' the other man says, 'It's an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands.' The first man says, 'But there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands,' and the other one answers 'Well, then that's no McGuffin!' So you see, a McGuffin is nothing at all.
In this classic Kids in the Hall sketch, where every card was a wild card, Dave still “had nothing” . His hand is certainly meets the impossiblity criteria, but no plot stems from it, so this isn't a MacGuffin. If we found out about his hand at the beginning of the sketch, it would be perfect.
The GlenGarry leads would fit most people’s definition, but I would be happier if , in the end, we found out that they never really existed.
If Kaiser Sose was fabricated by Verbal Kint, entirely withen that room in the police station, then Sose might merit consideration as a MacGuffin. But as far as I understand The Usual Suspects, Verbal had been perpetuating the Sose myth for quite some time. Macguffins can’t been main Characters, even if their identity is withheld. Now, if they never show up, like Godot, they're perfect.
The second floor of the Gambling Operation in Two For the Money fits all the crieteria perfectly. We never see it precisely because nothing that happened on the floor could really make Pacino’s operation believable. The second floor is just a place for the audience to store its disbelief while it gets on with the real story.
Unfortunately, that second floor is the best part of the movie.
