Hitchcock and the MacGuffin
What is a MacGuffin?
It might be a Scottish name, taken from a story about two men in a train.â Hitchcock explaines. One man says: What’s that packckage up there in the baggage rack? And the other answers: Oh, that’s a McGuffn. 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 MacGuffin! So you see, a MacGuffin is nothing at all.So it is nothing at all? Not quite. In this text I examined the term coined by Alfred Hitchcock. Therefore I raised one of the most famous MacGuffins in Hitchcock’s Ouvre as the 40.000 Dollars from the Movie Psycho.
