A Different View
For filmmaker and drama writing theorist Yves Lavandier, in the strict, Hitchcockian sense, a MacGuffin is a secret that motivates the villains. North by Northwest's MacGuffin is nothing that motivates the protagonist. Roger Thornhill's objective is to extricate himself from the predicament that the mistaken identity has created. What matters to Vandamm and the CIA is of little importance for the protagonist. The same goes for the MacGuffins of The Lady Vanishes, The 39 Steps and Foreign Correspondent. In the broader sense, says Lavandier, a MacGuffin denotes any justification for the external conflictual premises of a work.
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Famous quotes containing the word view:
“Put shortly, these are the two views, then. One, that man is intrinsically good, spoilt by circumstance; and the other that he is intrinsically limited, but disciplined by order and tradition to something fairly decent. To the one party man’s nature is like a well, to the other like a bucket. The view which regards him like a well, a reservoir full of possibilities, I call the romantic; the one which regards him as a very finite and fixed creature, I call the classical.”
—Thomas Ernest Hulme (1883–1917)