10 Director Trademarks That You Can't Unsee
2. Hitchcock: MacGuffins
If you've been on a movie website in the last ten years, you've no doubt heard the term 'MacGuffin' thrown around as if it were a bad word. Well, despite what a select few exceedingly vocal folks on the internet might have you believe, these things don't inherently make a movie bad for using them. In fact, one of the greatest filmmakers of all time used them in everything.
In the maestro's own words, the MacGuffin is the device or gimmick that sets a plot into motion. Hitchcock absolutely loved MacGuffins, with them being featured in everything from 39 Steps to his immortal classic, Psycho.
Why would such a director use MacGuffins, a thing viewed today as a trope, so regularly?
It was simple and cleared the baggage out of the way so that he could tell the story he wanted to tell. Take for instance the briefcase full of money in Psycho. It serves no purpose in the plot other than to get Marion to run away and for people to be looking for her. That's it. It doesn't matter to the plot at all, in fact, it is openly disregarded and drowned in Marion's car without much thought.
As Hitchcock himself would go on to describe:
"Here, you see, the MacGuffin has been boiled down to its purest expression: nothing at all!".