Subject: Re: Gordon Cole == Origins
From: dfl@panix.uucp (Danny Lieberman)
Date: 1991-05-17, 19:15
Newsgroups: alt.tv.twin-peaks

In article <1991May15.180310.5585@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu> gmcguffi@s.psych.uiuc.edu (Guff) writes:
)In article <1991May14.075413.5238@panix.uucp> dfl@panix.uucp (Danny Lieberman) writes:
** deleted stuff **
)>a MacGuffin but an cute origin to a peculiar character. 
  ^^^^^^^^^^^
)Sorry to dump this in a.t.tp, but my messages got bounced!  I just wanted to
)know the definition of "a MacGuffin."  My last name being McGufficke, I 
)wanted to see if there was a connection.  Again--my apologies to anyone
)who wasted time reading this!
)Guff


    Gee, Guff, I thought all the cinema-files knew that...
from the definitive, book on Hitchcock, "HITCHCOCK/TRUFFAUT", A.H. explains

... "it's the device, the gimmick, if you will, or the papers the spies are
after.  I'll tell you about it.  Most of Kipling's stories, as you know,
were set in India, and they dealt with the fighting between the natives and
the British forces on the Afghanistan border.  Many of them were spy stories,
and they were concerned with the efforts to steal the secret plans out of a
fortress.  The theft of secret documents was the original MacGuffin.  So the
"MacGuffin" is the term we use [in cinema] to cover all that sort of thing:
to steal plans or documents, or discover a secret, it doesn't matter what it
is.  And the logicians are wrong in trying to figure out the truth of a
MacGuffin, since it's beside the point.  The only thing that really matters
is that in the picture the plans, documents, or secrets must seem to be of
vital importance to the characters.  To me, the narrator, they're of no
importance whatever.  You may be wondering where the term originated.  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
one answers "Oh, that's a MacGuffin." The first one asks "What's a MacGuffin?"
"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 MacGuffin!"
so you see that a MacGuffin is actually nothing at all. "

Hitchcock almost invariably had some MacGuffin, or device in every film from
the 1930s onward.  "Who killed Laura Palmer" was a MacGuffin, to bring this
story back into the present newsgroup...

Actually I thought EVERYBODY knew what a MacGuffin is/was !

                                                -- Danny L.


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