The Lost Room & MacGuffins

In a lecture he gave at Columbia university way back when in 1939, Alfred Hitchcock defined MacGuffins as, "the mechanical element that usually crops up in any story. In crook stories it is almost always the necklace and in spy stories it is almost always the papers." It's the thing that the main characters want, Marcellus Wallace's briefcase in Pulp Fiction, unobtanium in Avatar, and the meaning of rosebud in Citizen Kane. In the first act at least, it's what drives the characters and story forward.

The Lost Room is a 2006 sci-fi series about the eponymous motel room and a bunch of everyday objects that possess unusual powers. The protagonist, detective Joe Miller, has to hunt down these objects to rescue his nitwit daughter who got lost in the lost room. It opens with some shady deal to get the Key - the Key can open any hinged door and turn it into a portal to the Lost Room - the deal goes south and the Key ends up in the hands of Joe Miller. Each episode revolves around a different object, a different MacGuffin, and the more MacGuffins we meet the more we learn about the mythology of the Lost Room, it's objects and the numerous cabals searching for the powerful objects.

It's a great hidden gem of a show, and demonstrates not only how to use MacGuffins in storytelling, but also how ultimately meaningless most MacGuffins are - they'll propel the characters and story along for the first act or two but after that, the climax and resolution really revolves around the protagonist coming to terms with their personal flaw or solving some internal conflict, which will probably have been externalized with the MacGuffin or via the characters' relationship to it. In the case of the Lost Room it was Joe's stupid daughter and his anxiety about being an inadequate father - an anxiety which was fully substantiated when he lost her in a portal to another universe. Simply, find his daughter and he's a good father.

An interesting example of MacGuffins in modern cinema are the Infinity Stones in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. In the Avengers, and Captain America: The First Avenger, it was the Tesseract, in Guardians of the Galaxy it looks to be the mysterious orb Chris Pratt's Star Lord is trying to steal in the trailer, and in Thor: The Dark World it was the Aether. These are the Infinity Stones and it's these MacGuffins (and the heroes) that tie the plots together of each individual movie, as well as the different phases of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, because, as will transpire in Avengers 3, the uber-villain Thanos is trying to get his big purple mitts on all six of the Infinity Stones - whoever holds all six stones in the Infinity Gauntlet gains omnipotence, omniscience and God-like power - so this Infinity Gauntlet will be the ultimate MacGuffin of not only Avengers 3 but the whole MCU and stopping Thanos will be our heroes' ultimate goal. Their first aim will be to keep the Infinity MacGuffins away from Thanos, except they'll fail, all will be seemingly lost, and there'll be an epic showdown, from which our heroes will no doubt emerge victorious. But not all of them, I bet.