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wordnik's word of the day

MacGuffin

• (noun) A plot element or other device used to catch the audience's attention and maintain suspense but whose exact nature has fairly little influence over the storyline.

Hillary Rettig: Perfectionists Love MacGuffins, Huffington Post, October 29, 2012

Commonly, though not always, the MacGuffin is the central focus of the film in the first act, and then declines in importance as the struggles and motivations of characters play out.

The Mother of All Horror Films, Newsweek, January 6, 2010

But the microfilm that the bad guys are smuggling out of the country ? that's just what Hitchcock called the MacGuffin, the pretense for the movie, the silly excuse upon which he pinned his real story: a man is mistaken for another man and nearly murdered because of this mistake.

Matt's TV Week in Review, TV Guide

There's a new MacGuffin, now that we're done with the music box and have put the death of Kate behind us at last: a cache of purloined Nazi loot, art treasures buried for decades in a sunken sub.

While the origin of 'MacGuffin' is obscure, the first recorded usage was in a lecture given by Alfred Hitchcock at Columbia University in 1939. A 'red herring' differs in that it purposely draws attention away from the central issue.