MacGuffin With Cheese

All right, I’m going to upset Scott a bit. Sorry, my friend. I’m going to talk about MacGuffins and why the Sankara stones in Temple of Doom are not a good MacGuffin.

You may have heard the term “MacGuffin” bandied about at the site or at other film sites or even in interviews with directors or writers. The term is generally attributed to Alfred Hitchcock, though it actually is older than that. A MacGuffin is the object that motivates the characters’ actions in a story. In a heist film, it’s the money the heroes want to steal from the bank vault. In a spy story, it’s the film the hero needs to retrieve. But there’s more to it than that.

Being a MacGuffin also implies that the object itself is actually irrelevant to the story. In other words, it doesn’t matter what the object is, all that matters is that it motivates the characters. Indeed, most MacGuffins could actually be swapped out for something else without a change to the plot. For example, in a heist film it doesn’t matter if the characters are trying to steal cash, or diamonds, or an envelope or a giant poodle; all that matters is that the protagonist is interested in the object enough to steal it.

Quentin Tarantino made great use of this idea in Pulp Fiction, when he made the film about the pursuit of a briefcase but never let the audience know what’s in the briefcase. That’s actually the ultimate MacGuffin because it doesn’t even exist, yet it’s driving the story. Another good example is “the process” in David Mamet’s Spanish Prisoner. All you know is that this is something secret and scientific, which will bring tremendous opportunities to whoever has it. It is important enough that an elaborate scheme is created to steal it. . . yet, you never even get hints about what it is.

Both of those examples prove what Hitchcock said about the MacGuffin because they motivate the plot but the fact we never even find out what they are proves that they are actually meaningless.

Interestingly, the Maltese Falcon is a MacGuffin, so is “Rosebud” in Citizen Kane, so is the nuclear weapon in Thunderball. Again, in each case, those objects motivate the characters to act but what they are is irrelevant to the plot itself. Some have suggested that the Ark of the Covenant in Raiders is a MacGuffin. I don’t agree with that, however, because the Ark eventually kills the Nazis and frees Indiana Jones, i.e. it causes plot apart from the characters’ motivation and thus cannot be a MacGuffin.

That brings me to the Sankara stones in Temple of Doom. Are these a MacGuffin? Yes, but they’re not a good one. The problem with these stones is that while the nature of the MacGuffin doesn’t matter, it is important that a MacGuffin seem important enough to motivate the characters’ actions. Thus, for example, a heist for an undisclosed amount of money makes sense to us, but a heist for $1.50 or for a wallet full of bills does not make sense to us. The Sankara stones are that $1.50.

If Indiana Jones doesn’t retrieve the stones. . . well, nothing really horrible happens. According to Jones himself, these fabled stones promise fortune and glory, and we don’t care if the villain has stones giving him vague promises of greater wealth and success. We also know Jones isn’t interested in that either, so what does he really care about retrieving the stones for a meaningless village in the middle of nowhere? In other words, this doesn’t seem like a worthy goal to motivate his actions... “kin you get my lucky rabbit foot back from them thieves?” In fact, I suspect Spielberg recognizes this because he also gave Jones a secondary motivation of freeing all the kidnapped children to motivate him. So while this is technically a MacGuffin, it’s not a good one.

So what are some of your favorite MacGuffins? And do you think the Death Star plans are a MacGuffin?

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Guest Review: Kill Bill (2003)

By T-Rav

In discussing Pulp Fiction last year, several of us remarked that Inglourious Basterds was our least favorite of Quentin Tarantino’s movies (as opposed to Pulp Fiction being perhaps our favorite), for several reasons but mainly having to do with its glorification of mindless violence. The two Kill Bill movies, which I shall treat here as a single entity, fall somewhere between those other works of his. They’re fascinating films and a lot of fun, but there’s a certain emptiness to them, and I’m not sure if this was intentional or unintentional.

** spoiler alert **

Kill Bill is the story of Beatrix Kiddo, aka “The Bride” (Uma Thurman). Kiddo is an assassin for a man we only know as Bill (David Carradine), a powerful and vicious crime lord. Upon learning she is pregnant with Bill’s daughter, Kiddo tries to flee, but he puts a bullet in her head and leaves her in a coma. Upon awakening from that coma four years later, and believing she has lost the baby, Kiddo embarks on a path of vengeance against Bill’s henchmen (or rather, his henchpersons), and finally against Bill himself. But there’s a small wrinkle: Their daughter, B.B., did in fact survive, and is now being raised by Bill, who seems to be a very doting father. This twist radically alters the way in which we view the movie.

Much of what made Tarantino’s early work so captivating is repeated to great effect here. As with Pulp Fiction, the story is told out of order, with extended flashbacks throughout and jumping from the middle of Kiddo’s rampage back to the beginning. In this case, it’s not so clear whether this was done to make a point or to have a dramatic fight when necessary, but either way, it works. Another critical strength is the amount of time devoted to character development.

The people we meet in Kill Bill are not your typical gangsters or hit men. They all give the appearance of being well-educated, can be frequently found philosophizing about various matters, and while they’re frequently in fights to the death, there’s no sense that they and their opponents hate each other. We see a lot of superficial courtesy and even respect. For instance, Bill allows Kiddo to find him at his hacienda, not only so she can meet their daughter, but because it’s nobler to have a face-to-face confrontation than to try to pick her off with a sniper or a car bomb. The use of flashbacks also allows us to see how these characters began and matured over time, and as the story is revealed piece by piece, we get drawn to these people. In fact, I would venture to say that these are some of the best-drawn characters in any work by Tarantino.

Another feature repeated and made into a great strength is the unexpected quality of the showdowns. We get some mesmerizing swordfights and brutal martial-arts violence, but we also get some surprise endings to these battles. For instance, in her fight with fellow assassin Elle Driver (Daryl Hannah), everything suggests Kiddo will have to chop off her head or run her through with her sword to stop her. Instead, she suddenly plucks out Driver’s eye and crushes it. As her other eye was plucked out in the past, this leaves Driver blind and helpless; Kiddo leaves her to thrash about in a rage. And in her final confrontation with Bill, she kills him not with a weapon but by poking the pressure points on his heart, causing it to explode—but only after he’s had time to button his coat and walk out onto his lawn, thus allowing the father of her child a dignified, “clean” death.

These are all positive qualities. But there’s something wrong with the movie nonetheless, which I attribute to the lack of a moral center.

Now, it might seem that Kiddo is the logical moral center/protagonist, since the movie revolves around her, and she’s seeking revenge against the people who left her for dead and (so she believes) caused her baby to die. While this does inspire a lot of sympathy, consider some of her actions along the way. The very first person we see Kiddo in battle with is another of her would-be killers, Vernita Green (Vivica A. Fox), who she manages to kill—in front of Green’s young daughter. This, after Green expressed remorse for her actions and in vain asked Kiddo’s forgiveness. It doesn’t seem to matter to Beatrix whether or not her attackers are sorry or trying to turn over a new leaf (and not all of them are); they deserve to be punished, and she’ll carry that punishment out regardless. In the finale, she doesn’t hesitate to kill Bill even after finding out her daughter is alive and that Bill, whatever his crimes, has been a loving father to her.

To be fair, this story would probably end the same if everyone’s roles were reversed. But that’s precisely the problem—the “hero” and the “villains” have virtually identical moral traits. Theoretically, Kiddo could easily have been involved in someone else’s cold-blooded assassination and become the object of someone else’s revenge. To be fair, the whole point of her leaving “the life” is to give her daughter something better; otherwise, though, there’s nothing about her that sets her apart from her enemies, and when you don’t have that kind of clear-cut difference, it’s hard to root for the protagonist.

Moreover, consider how the movie ends, and what Kiddo’s wrath has left in its wake. She has her daughter back, sure, but she’s also deprived poor B.B. (who doesn’t really know her) of her father, and killed others left and right. Nor does she show any regret for her actions, telling Green’s now-motherless daughter, “I’m not sorry. . . Grow up, and if you still feel like killing me for what I’ve done, I guess I’ll see you then.” Pretty callous, not to mention nihilistic. I suppose it’s possible that Tarantino was trying to subtly criticizing this sort of behavior; early on, one of Kiddo’s trainers warns her that “Revenge is not a straight line—it’s a forest,” one it can become impossible to find your way out of. But given the movie’s efforts to make her the heroine, it’s hard to tell what he was going for here.

Kill Bill is a fun movie to watch, and in its details it’s very well made. But thematically, it’s definitely weaker than Tarantino’s early films, thanks to its lack of a clear protagonist and its glorification of violence for violence’s sake. And anarchy is hard to celebrate.

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Film Friday: Pulp Fiction (1994)

Pulp Fiction is brilliant. It’s easily one of the greatest films of all time. As proof, I could offer its massive box office totals, its continuing heavy rotation on television seventeen years after its release, or its ability to revive sagging careers. I could point out that its scenes have become iconic, its dialog has entered our lexicon, and no one has been able to mimic the film. Or I could just tell you what makes this movie so special. In a word: manipulation.

** spoiler alert **

Movies are all about manipulation. Filmmakers are in the business of tricking audiences into believing that actors on fake sets are real people in a real world. And that’s just the beginning. Good filmmakers need to make you care about the characters. Great filmmakers go further and manipulate how you interpret what you see to teach you something you didn’t know about yourself. Pulp Fiction does that, only at a level no one else has achieved.

1. Twisted Clichés: What Clichés?

When Quentin Tarantino wrote Pulp Fiction, his intent was to take well-worn pulp fiction ideas and twist them. Hence, you have the hitman who develops a conscience, the underling who must chaperone the boss’s over-sexed wife, the returning POW who tells a boy about his lost father, and the boxer who takes a dive. These are clichés. But we don’t recognize them as clichés in Pulp Fiction because Tarantino manipulates our expectations to turn these into original-seeming stories. In other words, we all know the hitman must kill his boss or die, we never expect him to simply leave the film. We all know the boxer will put up the fight of his life against incredible odds, we never expect him to kill the other boxer with ease. . . and we never expect him to run into someone like Zed as he’s fleeing from the mobster he betrayed. By spinning these clichés off in directions we’ve never considered before, Tarantino gives us a movie based on clichés but which almost no one in the audience will recognize as containing any clichés. That's impressive.

2. Film Chronology: How Does It End Again?

From there, Tarantino further spins our heads by rearranging the film’s chronology. We’ve discussed before that the human brain is perfectly suited to reassembling a series of events that are presented out of order. Thus, you know exactly what is happening when I say: peanut butter, eat, knife, bread, lunch. Storytellers know this and often indulge in minor manipulation by presenting something out of sequence, like giving a glimpse of the ending before the story begins. But no one has tried what Tarantino does here. He takes the film and divides it into seven sequences and then reassembles those out of order. In and of itself, that’s highly creative and worth recognition. But he goes further.

Tarantino exploits our expectation that the ending of a film always reveals how the story actually ends. Thus, when Vincent Vega (John Travolta) and Jules Winnfield (Samuel L. Jackson) leave the diner together at the end of the film, the audience assumes they rode off into the sunset. But that wasn’t the end, and people forget that Jules quits and Vincent gets killed in Butch’s (Bruce Willis) bathroom. Yet, this manipulation allows Tarantino to deliver a happy ending, even though the film had no happy ending. Moreover, while people assume that the conversation in the diner relates to everything that happened in the film, very little of what we saw had happened at that point. For example, Vincent had yet to take Marsellus Wallace’s wife to dinner and Marsellus (Ving Rhames) hadn’t met with Butch yet. Thus, many of the things we assume they are reflecting upon have yet to happen, and we are left wondering if Vincent’s opinions would change after those events?

3. Nature of the Film: It’s a Character Study?

But manipulating the film’s plot and chronology only scratches the surface of what is really going on. Would it surprise you if I told you Pulp Fiction is actually a character study?

Most people see Pulp Fiction as a crime story. But it’s really not. What few people realize is how little action takes place within the film. Aside from a few moments of shooting, the entire rest of the film is characters talking about things they believe. Indeed, the characters roam the screen telling us about their morality, their views on religion, love and sex, fairness and equity, their hobbies, etc. What’s more, little of the dialog relates to the plot -- it’s all about the characters themselves. This is almost the definition of “character study.”

Yet, we don’t grasp that this is the true nature of Pulp Fiction because it isn’t filmed like an art house movie. For one thing, the characters don't just sit around in all white rooms spouting pretentious lines. Instead, they get guns out of trunks, wait to kick in doors, buy drugs and a whole host of other “gritty” things. Moreover, the dialog isn’t pretentious; it’s been brought down to “street level.” Thus, you get “do you know what they call a Quarter Pounder with cheese in France?” rather than “One finds that travel broadens the mind.” And you get “I’m about to get Medieval on his ass,” rather than “I feel violated and must find a way to regain my pride.” Because of this, we never grasp that the characters do nothing but talk philosophy throughout the film because it doesn’t register with us that characters who talk like this and who walk around carrying guns aren’t in an action movie.

4. Depth & Mystery From Nothing

Tarantino also cleverly uses a series of MacGuffins to give the story depth. As we noted last week, a MacGuffin is a film term for the item around which all the action in the film is centered, i.e. it’s what everyone wants to steal. Yet, the exact nature of the item is irrelevant to the film as its sole purpose is to motivate the characters’ actions. Thus, a bar of gold could just as easily be a diamond. The audience knows this instinctively and doesn’t get too wrapped up in what the MacGuffin actually is. But Tarantino turns that on its head.

Rather than tossing out an object like a diamond or “the process” and telling the audience, “don’t worry about what it is,” Tarantino turns the MacGuffin into a genuine mystery by giving us clues as to what it might be. Consider the briefcase Marsellus sends Vincent and Jules to retrieve. This briefcase glows gold when it opens and people stare at its contents in awe. They also ask if it really is what they think it is, thereby implying something highly unusual. Yet, we never get to see it. And that creates a mystery, which gives the film depth even though the nature of the MacGuffin is entirely irrelevant to the film. Indeed, people almost immediately start speculating as to what it could be. (FYI, many speculate the briefcase contains Marsellus’s soul, which was extracted from the back of his neck. . . I kid you not.)

Moreover, Tarantino uses multiple MacGuffins throughout the film. Consider the band-aid on the back of Marsellus’s neck. Film audiences have been taught that everything in a film is present for a reason. Thus, when we see the band-aid shown prominently, we expect it to have some meaning. But we never learn what that could be. So like the briefcase, people leave the theater trying to solve the mystery. I would further argue that the film is crawling with MacGuffins, e.g. the watch, Bonnie, “the gimp,” etc., each of which presents a new mystery to consider.

Thus, by manipulating our expectations regarding dialog, props and the use of MacGuffins, Tarantino gives us a character study steeped in mystery, all the while making us think we are watching a fast-paced crime story.

5. Morality: Exposing What We Really Believe

Finally, we come to the most controversial manipulation: morality. Tarantino skillfully exploits two aspects of human morality. First, he realizes our morality doesn't always kick in right away, such as when we laugh at someone slipping on a banana peel. We know this is wrong, but we laugh nonetheless until we can catch ourselves. Tarantino exploits this throughout the film to get us laughing at things we shouldn't laugh at. For example, if you asked people if they would laugh at seeing a man’s head blown off in the middle of a discussion about the occurrence of a genuine miracle, they would emphatically tell you they would not laugh. Yet, everyone in the theater laughed out loud when Vincent accidentally blew Marvin’s head off in the car. The combination of the shock, the comic timing and the characters’ surprised reactions triggered the instinct within us that laughs at the banana peel incident. Some have decried this moment as immoral or as glorifying violence, but if you think about it, we’re the ones with the immoral reaction, i.e. we're the ones laughing.

The same is true when we laugh at Tarantino asking if Vincent and Jules saw a sign on his house that read, “dead n~gger storage,” when Vincent gets shot on the toilet, when Vincent and Lance (Eric Stoltz) argue over saving Mia Wallace (Uma Thurman) from a drug overdose, and when Marsellus “gets Medieval” on Maynard and Zed.

Indeed, this last point is also significant in terms of manipulation. We are told revenge is wrong. We are told capital punishment should apply only in extreme instances where the victim has been killed. And under no circumstances do we tolerate the idea of execution by torture. Yet when we see what happens to Marsellus at the hands of Maynard and Zed, we derive a great deal of joy when Marsellus tells us that he’s about to “get Medieval on their asses.” Thus, we not only condone his decision to kill the two, but we even support his plan to torture them to death. Consequently, Tarantino has exposed hypocrisy within us. We claim to believe certain things, but our reactions show that we may actually believe the opposite. What does this say about us?

Conclusion

This is what sets Pulp Fiction so far apart from other films. This film broke new ground in almost every aspect of its presentation. It sold us clichés without us ever realizing they were clichés. It sold us a character study without us realizing it. It gave us depth and mystery without ever saying a word. And it exposed a flaw within us by showing a gap between what we think we believe and what we really believe.

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