Metaphysical McGuffins

I watched I come with the Rain last night (because my partner is obssessed with Lee Byun Hung) and it has a kind of metaphysical mcguffin, centring around a resurrection/faith healing power possessed by one of the characters. No scientific, religious or magical explanations are offered, as if it were merely a property of his personality or something. The sculptures the serial killer makes with his victims could also be seen as a kind of (dark) magic.

The film version of The Children of Men implied a kind of plague, didn’t it? I know the book didn’t.

Does The Twilight Zone count? Rod Sterling seems to explicitly and aggressively disavow the “it’s science” explanation in every episode — so hey, “it’s the twilight zone” is Sterlingese, but does it more properly translate to “it’s magic” or to meta-acknowledgment “we’re relying on a metaphysical McGuffin here” ?

…I thought classification problems like those you consider with regard to Eternal Sunshine were why we’re all supposed to grudgingly switch over to the phrase ‘speculative fiction’ now. Eternal Sunshine is unambiguously speculative fiction in a way that Wizard of Oz is ambiguously not.

Edward Scissorhands

Hm. This might be a Tim Burton thing — Big Fish is a curious example

I’m with you on Unbreakable.

Run Lola Run? Pleasantville?

Anyway, time travel in general is not far from A Christmas Carol.

I should think not, given that the Doctor uses the TARDIS to explicitly alter—

—Wait, are we talking about the 2010 Christmas Special?

Gulliver’s Travels? Spirited Away? Probably quite a lot of genuinely horrific horror movies — if it’s plausible to assume “manifestations of the imagination run amok” holds in the movie world, is that still a metaphysical McGuffin, or is that precisely the kind of implied explanatory mechanism we’re trying to avoid? (If the latter, I take back Big Fish.)

By the end of The City and the City it seems that nothing impossible (in a physical sense) is happening at all. The inhabitants of the two cities conform to strict social norms, and the power of Breach to enforce those norms is self-sustaining. Or maybe this was obvious all along.

or sometimes can operate for no apparent reason at all.

I’m trying to decide if this brings Catch-22 in.

I am possibly unduly overexcited about this topic because I think you’re after something very close to the kind of thing that I am trying to do in my own crummy writing: surgically modify the metaphysics of the world in a small and quiet way that diverges from reality smoothly over time, and watch what happens as the deviation of the story evolves from one little wrinkle into a singularity and defines the course of the narrative. Introduce a kid who can hit anything and watch what happens to baseball (and to the kid). Introduce a kid who understands everything that’s said to them in a way that allows instructors to confer arbitrarily complex academic proficiency, or a world in which imaginative deviation renders one increasingly incapable of rudimentary communication with others, and watch how stories evolve. I dunno, maybe if I get around to attempting to publish a book of short stories I’ll try to bill it as metaphysical McGuffinry.

(This sort of thing is easier to get away with in young adult fiction because the metaphysics of childhood are foot-shuffly and insecure, if not aggressively contrarian. What’s weird is how few examples of YA fiction fall under this category, at least as a proportion of YA. It’s the perfect playground for surgical metaphysics.)

Introduce a kid who can hit anything and watch what happens to baseball (and to the kid)

Rookie of the Year had occurred to me. (For folks who are blissfully unaware, “When an accident miraculously gives a boy an incredibly powerful pitching arm, he becomes a major league pitcher for the Chicago Cubs.”)

I feel like “Primer” might qualify, since the mechanism of the time machine are never even technobabbled. The story simply offers a device that violates the normal rules of reality in accordance with some specific rules and follows it from there.

Lost Highway/Mulholland Drive (they are essentially the same movie) are interesting as an example of a particular subcategory of the metaphysical MacGuffin: the treatment of a psychological reality as if it were an objective physical reality.

The Rapture, Safe, and Liquid Sky are all good examples, as is Tarkovsky’s last film, The Sacrifice.

Though it’s very definitely scifi, the recent film Moon might qualify, too.

Incidentally both Repo Man and Pulp Fiction essentially borrow their McGuffins from Kiss Me Deadly.

I haven’t seen Deep Throat, so I cannot confirm this, but from feminist philosophers’ discussion of same I understand that an unexplained anatomical impossibility is central to its plot.

Reygadas’s Silent Night (as opposed to Ordet).

MacKenna’s Gold (though I believe in this case the impossibility is just a conceptual screwup)

Hmmm. Memento (not Korsakov’s, which is possible, but the fact that he *remembers he has it* (or is this just another conceptual screwup?))

Oh, how about Cet obscur objet du désir? Or does that count? Wow, this is hard.

Deep Throat wins. Go forth and teach John.

Also: speaking of Rivette reminds me of the way his Haut/Bas/Fragile morphs into a musical halfway through, which brings up the question: what about musicals generally? Of course it’s not impossible that people would break into song in (what one might think to be) inappropriate situations; but that people simply accept it as normal (and join in themselves) at least demands explanation.

Zelig.

The mixture of the mystic and swordplay in films both of and influed by the wuxia style.

This is clearly wrong. Acrobatic martial arts aren’t a MacGuffin at all, metaphysical or otherwise. Thinking about why it’s so wrong helps clarify the original concept, though. When John H. refers to movies “in which something impossible happens,” he doesn’t just mean something that couldn’t happen in real life, since that would include pretty much all genre movies (and quite a few non-0genre ones too). Movies that offer a more or less coherent account of a reality different from our own are science fiction or fantasy or whatever. He’s talking about something different. Eternal Sunshine is a nice example because, as he says, the meeting at Montauk is not explained by the premise of the memory-erasing technology.

How about Synecdoche, New York? Or Barton Fink?

How is the Metaphysical McGuffin distinct from Todorov’s Fantastic? Or is it that the latter term is too bound up in specific arguments and literary periods?

… of course there is a whole set of movies where the characters do recognize that they are inhabitants of a classic genre — Scream and so on. And then there’s the opposite (?) case, like in a lot of Coen brothers movies, where the characters think that genre conventions apply but they don’t. But neither of those are mmf in the strict sense, I think.

Isn’t the “implausibly unlikely coincidence”–the cornerstone of innumerable works of fiction, whether cinematic, dramatic or literary–the Ur-MM?

If I understand correctly, it’s not just that there’s no explanation given to us, the audience. There’s no explanation in the world itself. It’s not just that characters don’t know how to explain the phenomenon; it’s that characters can’t possibly explain the phenomenon, because the phenomenon is inexplicable in their world. It’s not even just that characters are baffled, like in 2001, it’s that the movie leads us to belief they have to be baffled — and if they’re not baffled, they must be deluded or imperceptive or dim — because something not just implausible or inexplicable, but flatly impossible, is happening. It’s impossible! It’s happening! And it’s therefore nothing at all.

This differs from the Fantastic in that the McGuffin is, quickly enough, accepted on its own terms. “Oh, okay. We live in a reality which obeys all the rules we’re used to, except apparently you can possess John Malkovich by jumping into a chute. Sweet! Let’s go find out what it’s like to be John Malkovich!” Whereas in a Fantastic work (like Ubiq), the characters are torn with metaphysical questions about themselves and the reality they inhabit, and are hesitant to accept that reality as genuine, in a Metaphysical McGuffin world, the characters more or less just roll with it.

(For folks who are blissfully unaware, “When an accident miraculously gives a boy an incredibly powerful pitching arm, he becomes a major league pitcher for the Chicago Cubs.”)

Eh. That seems different in many senses. For one, the phenomenon is explicable within the world (an accident). Straining plausibility with a silly explanation is different from avoiding explanation or acknowledging explanation as flatly impossible. Really, “this kid is super good at pitching” is not an alteration of metaphysics itself, whereas “this individual seems to be incapable of failing at X” forces some mild reconsideration of what it means to play a game with such a person. In the former, you can cheer the kid on. In the latter, how could you?

The more general case being questioned here seems to be Super-Kid Saves The World type story, a subset of Thing Kid Has Always Dreamed About Comes True. But a McGuffin, metaphysical or no, cannot be the product of an individual ego. If it was, the inherent explanation for the phenomenon would be “this character can impose his or her will upon the world” — that’s how the world works, though perhaps the characters are mostly ignorant of this until they learn it. Therefore, the phenomenon is not flatly impossible in their own world — it was possible all along. For example, kids really can become wizards with Magic Missile, if they find the right amulet. [BTW, thanks for the suggested reading, John. My niece loved it.]

Anyhow, in the crummy story I’m writing the kid isn’t exactly pleased or displeased with this ability, in such a way that clarifies it’s not his will being imposed upon the world, etc, because I’m more interested in exploring what it means to play a game and upon what assumed circumstances of human life that meaning relies. Altering the metaphysics of play, hopefully to learn more about them. Eh. It’s an idea.

Was thinking of this specifically with regard to The Birds.

Yep. I’d typed The Birds only to realize that I’d also have to say “and nearly every meant-to-be-horrific Japanese horror movie I’ve ever seen”

“Acrobatic martial arts aren’t a MacGuffin at all, metaphysical or otherwise.”

While I take your point that a genre is not inherently a MacGuffin, I find many films made in the wuxia style to be inherently so.

Borrowing a quote from Wikipedia, “The defining aspect of a MacGuffin is that the major players in the story are (at least initially) willing to do and sacrifice almost anything to obtain it, regardless of what the MacGuffin actually is.”

In Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Kill Bill, The Matrix Trilogy and Kung Fu Hustle events are set in motion by either characters seeking mystical martial arts abilities or by characters seeking a character that will obtain those abilities.

“I think in order for it to be a McGuffin, it needs to be relatively, experimentally discrete.”

If a MacGuffin is repeatedly used in a genre so much so that it begins to define a major aspect of that genre, does it disqualify it from being a MacGuffin?

What’s the difference between “The Dead Zone” and “Groundhog Day”?

Right, it’s clear they fall on opposite sides of the line, but it’s hard to articulate why. I think there has to be some crossing of narrative levels — it’s not just some strange or mysterious physical process or thing, it’s presenting as if it were a physical fact something that isn’t one at all. Something that has a cause, however vague, can’t be an mm.

The funny thing is that altho this category had never crossed my mind until John H. pointed it out (or invented it?), it now seems perfectly intuitive and well-defined. And yet for some people here, the line doesn’t seem to be visible at all.

A movie I have always lumped togetehr with “Groundhog Day” is “Joe Versus the Volcano.”

Warmer or colder?

. In the true metaphysical mcguffin, there is something more distinctive about the set-up that turns the set-up into an experiment

Hmm. Are you sure about this? I wouldn’t have thought familiarity vs. novelty was part of the equation. In fact, it as you point out yourself, many classic examples of mmf are parallels to more conventional genre stories. Like if we think “The Metamorphosis” is mmf, it’s certainly not because there was anything new about the idea of a person turning into a monster or animal. I agree with you that the mm is inherently a kind of experiment, but I don’t think that’s because it’s new, necessarily.

I’d suggest “Shonen Bat”/”‘Lil Slugger” from Paranoia Agent, a young boy in a ball cap and roller blades wielding a baseball bat, who goes around randomly attacking strangers. He may not seem like one at first, but he is, and I can’t really say why without spoiling the ending.

There are several Borges stories that might or not count, depending on the prcise definition, but I think the clearest example is “Funes el memorioso”. Funes gets the power of perfect, absolute memory without any explanation being propoed or searched for; only the consequences for him are explored.

_Sliding Doors_ ?

What a great thread! I might suggest my favorite Woody Allen film “Purple Rose of Cairo” – it would seem to be an example of a very successful MM in that one accepts the premise (character walks out of the movie screen and into the real world and from then on Jeff Daniels plays the double role of character who wants to be in the real world and actor who wants him to go back into the movie) willingly since it’s so metaphorically clean and persuasive.

films that hinge on more or less bald stipulations of metaphysically preposterous states of affairs

‘The Ten Commandments,’ say?

Surely someone’s mentioned Kevin Smith’s Dogma by now?

Isn’t it too much a commentary-on-its-own-material kind of film, though? i.e. No one in the film need ‘explain’ its metaphysics because the whole thing is meant as a riff on crazy RL metaphysics to begin with. A blog post on film, really.

There’s that movie with Wil Ferrell where he is the tax auditor whose life is being written by an author whose narration he can hear in his head. Forgotten the name of it. Maybe someone else remembers.

Speaking of Tilda Swinton, there is a metaphysically impossible bit in Michael Clayton, essential in a kind of Shyamalan way but not a huge part of the plot. It’s a shame G

I believe “Stranger than Fiction” fits the criteria.

Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court seems to qualify, first for transporting Morgan to the Middle Ages, then for bringing him back. (Don’t know what the movie adaptations did about this.)

Stranger than Fiction seems to fit but on the other hand Ferrell and Hoffman drain all the weirdness out (it’s been a while since I’ve seen it but IIRC Thomson isn’t in quite the same movie), which is itself kind of weird, but. And it may fit into the category of things that have already been done so many times they’re their own genre (I’ve definitely seen straight, non-SF fiction that does the same thing). It is resolutely uninterested in the fact that it’s weird, but not I think in the way those other films are.

I’d like to think that The Woman in the Dunes qualifies, as the reason for her being there is preposterous, but I’m probably just showing off that I’ve seen such a cool film.

The Butterfly effect, although there is an hereditary component to the ability, the mechanism of the ability itself is never explained. For TV, the sadly short lived Pushing Daisies seems to fit.

I’ve got to believe either The Ruling Class or The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man in the Moon Marigolds fits here according to my understanding of the criteria.

One of Damon Knight’s many definitions of science fiction is helpful here in marking the side of the fence that metaphysical McGuffins aren’t on. He wrote that sf appeals to the authority of science to justify its conceits. This doesn’t mean that only hard sf is sf. (Since, for starters, a lot of hard sf is just as wrong as any other kind, and many hard sf authors are quite willing to talk about their cheats and shorcuts in ways that horrify fans who venerate hardness as such.) It’s that if the story hands an explanation that sounds and acts scientific, and expects us to go with it, then what we’ve got is sf.

Thus, to pick an example I happen to like a lot, The Dead Zone, film as well as book, is science-fictional horror. There is a bit of exposition about unusual neurological activity, the evolutionary legacy of currently little-used lobes, and so on. There’s a lot of mystery about the details, but there’s a solid sense of it being a matter of rare circumstance that could happen to others as well, not fate or destiny or anything, nor insoluble mystery. We have a kind of an answer, a framework in which we can expect to find an answer.

I’ve always thought that the “appeals to the authority of” approach is really fruitful. It feels to me like there are two occasionally overlapping sort of stories relevant here: those where the story undermines claims to authority that the characters and/or narrators make, and those where the authorities are not consulted.

Bianca,

there is a metaphysically impossible bit in Michael Clayton

Which bit was that? Maybe I’m not remembering the film well, but recall it as being a pretty tight, conventional paranoid legal thriller; a few typically stupid genre plot devices, but nothing impossible.

Brett,

I thought that was part of the story line: He didn’t actually have any powers.

Obviously Shyamalan (and Willis too, to his credit) played it pretty close to the vest, but Unbreakable wasn’t entirely without evidence of the reality of David Dunn’s super-powers. He has no apparent upper-limit on the weight he can bench press, he walked away from deadly car and train accidents without a scratch, and when he touched people he received visions of their various misdeeds.

Seems an interesting implication of your definitions is that the MM happens only to the central characters. No global disasters allowed, because these would automatically become the concerns of science, mystics, and all manner of truth-seekers. And these central characters, knowing that somehow the rules of the universe have changed just for them, proceed to treat the new rules as if they were a self-consistent universe, and simply move on with living in the new situation — either by living slightly augmented everyday lives, or by switching straight into survival mode.

This makes Being John Malkovich and Groundhog Day the paradigm cases, and Exterminating Angel and The Birds borderline cases. It places Eternal Sunshine pretty squarely within the category, as well, because of the Montauk meeting.

I know it hasn’t come out yet, but how about the premise of that new Matt Damon movie coming out, Adjustment Bureau? It looks like a massive MM that basically becomes a meta-reality that only Matt Damon’s character has access to.

How about this alternate definition: “An event that changes the laws of reality solely for the central group of main characters, so that they have to accept it and see its consequences through to the end.”

Russell,
I meant the part where Clayton’s son tells the Tom Wilkinson character about the sword and sorcery novel he’s been reading, and the TW character reads the book for clues–successfully, IIRC. Am I misremembering? Something from the book makes another appearance later, but that could probably just be “literary,” not intended in any psuedo-mystical sense. It is actually difficult to distinguish a paranoid thriller from hidden connections, especially when there are plot holes, but it’s too much to imagine the novel is part of the conspiracy, and the fact that it’s a fantasy novel suggests maybe we should read the film as a kind of fantasy.

It may be worth pointing out that no. 90 is the answer to the question at no. 86.

Frailty with Bill Paxton.

“Picnic at Hanging Rock” might be a good example. Unlike “L’Avventura” and “Sous le Sable”, you don’t have the (psychologically impossible but physically possible) possibility that the disappeared people went into the water. And unlike “The Last Wave”, no supernatural explanation is given.

Out Of Africa !

In story structure as taught in Los Angeles by both Truby and McKee about 20 years ago, a “McGuffin” (after Hitchcock) is a physical object. It is merely and only the object that both the bad guys and the good guys are chasing (a bag of cash, a nuclear trigger, or the “letters of transit” in Casablanca). A McGuffin does not have meaning beyond that: it may suggest some plot points to the writer, e.g. whether a battle ends up in a factory warehouse or on the moon, but it isn’t integral to the character development.

The One Ring would not be an example, because it is much more than a McGuffin: it is also a talisman of knowledge that drives the understanding of the characters. Search for (or delivery of) a talisman puts you squarely in the fairytale quest genre, with a number of certain and unavoidable rules, many of them formalized long ago by Propp.

A McGuffin doesn’t always “set everything in motion”, at least from the viewpoint of the narrative (i.e., the “telling” of the story, as opposed to the real events if they were put in an omniscient and logical order). For example, the “inciting incident” which starts the protagonist in motion may be some sort of mystery or happening which keeps the character going until the McGuffin is revealed in the middle of Act 2. (Often useful to save the McGuffin for later, because second acts are so difficult to write.)

On the other hand, a “metaphysically preposterous state of affairs” that changes the entire world or arena of the action (e.g. a few Bunuels, Groundhog’s Day etc. etc. etc.) is, in Hollywood, just another “premise”.

If the change instantiates in one individual and begins the story, then it usually follows a superhero story structure, with its own necessary rules: solves problems, certain specific weaknesses, Kryptonite, time runs out, can’t go out in sunlight, whatever. (Superheroes can be in a metaphysically absurd world, or in this one.)

Groundhog’s Day is a clever combination, because the protagonist’s “Kryptonite” is human emotion — he can’t handle it — and there’s a time limit in every day. Better than that, Groundhog’s Day also inverts the “fish out of water” structure, a perennial Hollywood favorite in which an outsider, from another place or class, contradicts the expectations of the other characters from moment-to-moment, and may upset the existing society — common in comedy (e.g. Marx Bros, Meatballs). In the best “fish out of water” stories, the protagonist also teaches the others how to live (e.g. My Man Godrey). Groundhog’s Day inverts this into a self-realization plot, or what used to be called an education plot. Bill Murray is a consummate “fish out of water” comedian — things don’t happen to him, rather he makes things happen to other people — and continually wakes-up thoughout it, making it all the better.

The Romantic turn (from Mary Shelley through Tolkien to Star Wars) combined the early 19th century’s unease with burgeoning scientific technology with timeless concerns about human arrogance and hubris. But a story structure like Groundhog’s Day may work emotionally so well within the feature-film format that you don’t think about whether it is science or magic. In fact, it would be too much information: it makes a whole new subplot to introduce and then dispose of, certainly attenuating the emotional impact and using up valuable screen time.

Slaughterhouse 5?

I am frankly still sort of unclear as to why Eternal Sunshine is a metaphysical Macguffin, and would love a full-plot-spoilers explanation of why. Am I forgetting something?

See, again, I’m not getting this.

I’m glad, because it’s pushing me to think more carefully about a distinction that’s intuitively clear to me but proving difficult to articulate.

The short and unsatisfactory answer is that singular events, things that happen once and then are done, can’t be metaphysical Macguffins. “The laws get bent for a second so we can get on with it” is fundamentally different from “the laws have changed.” The plot of an mmf story revolves around seeking answers to the question, how does this world work? (How do/can I live in a world with this (ongoing, persistent) metaphysical anomaly?)

There are two issues with CYIKAC. One, he gets knocked unconscious and ‘awakens’ elsewhere, which provides a default explanation of ‘it’s a dream’ with a side order of ‘dream is destiny’ [aside: upon further reflection, IMO Spirited Away and Gulliver’s Travels and Waking Life are emphatically not mmf; learning about the rules of a new world into which one has emerged is either Fantastic or fantasy or both — not to say this categories don’t overlap, but to be a Macguffin it must be a discrete identifiable alteration in the metaphysics of one’s own familiar world, not a transition to a different world — but this aside doesn’t apply to CYIKAC].

Also, in CYIKAC, the protagonist assumes the world is pretty much as it was, i.e. no lasting metaphysical change to the universe as a whole, and then goes about living life in an unfamiliar part of it. It’s really not materially different from stories like Gulliver’s Travels, in that sense at least. Sure, he ‘ported to an unfamiliar time instead of an unfamiliar space (both actually), but it’s really a travel story.

Ok, so here’s the point I think. “What if a character went back in time” isn’t asking a question about altering the metaphysics of time, it’s momentarily suspending them. The difference is crucial because in the former case but not the latter, you’re hoping to learn something about the metaphysics of time.

I see it as surgery, and (before this thread) often referred to this idea as surgical metaphysics. As an author, I step in and revise the governing metaphysical rules of the universe in one particular way. The relevant characters react to this anomaly in ways that would be consistent with how real people would react to such an anomaly: they adapt to it, perhaps they attempt to explore or exploit it, perhaps they investigate more carefully how the world works; most of them don’t spend a lot of time wondering why the change happened, or even if it’s a change or just an undiscovered phenomenon (any more than your average person heretofore unexposed to magnetism would wonder why magnets work the way they do upon a first encounter).

I think A.S. Byatt’s The Biographer’s Tale might fit this reasonably well and might write a blog post about why. Byatt most often stays away from fantastical themes she can’t fit into the British literary tradition, so the novel is an interesting rarity.

@Bruce Baugh
I would not say “scientific,” necessarily, but “naturalistic.” The Handmaid’s Tale is definitely science fiction. The Cleft may not be science fiction if only because it represents itself as texts surrounding the origin of a religion. Aliens–as I see them–are naturalistic. Ghosts are not but are sometimes considered by the religiously orthodox as something like the return of the repressed operating among those who only accept naturalism, that is, perverse. Similarly, noir is paranoid but is far from science fiction: the realization that people can lie is really not a revelation for most of us

which is, itself, bizarre and inexplicable

Yeah, this is a fundamental and perhaps inextricable storyteller’s problem. Q. How do you tell the difference between a character and a real person? A. When exposed to an anomalous phenomenon, a character is drawn to it, whereas a real person rejects the impossibility of the anomaly and explains it away.

The roleplaying game World of Darkness plays off of this. A lot of the supernatural effects (like turning invisible) are simply explained away by the witnesses (I must have blinked while he left through that door). The game-playing characters, conversely, witness supernatural activity and seek to investigate it further. In other words, like in a lot of fiction, the cameo bit parts are played by real people and the main parts are played by characters.

My favorite example of that literary phenomenon is DeLillo’s Underworld, with Shay is a main-role character and his brother as a supporting-role real person.

What was it that was so popular a while back? Oh yes, “The Life of Pi”. IIRC the McGuffin there was the mysterious floating island that ate people. Never did figure that one out. I’m wondering if this would count as a metaphysical McGuffin.

The Anchorman. It is a small, but absolutely crucial, element of the plot that animals be sentient and able to communicate across species barriers. The film never explains this phenomenon; it is presented as a given, with no hints of the supernatural or the scifictional. The human characters are not even aware of it.

Mrs. T: Granted that the trans-species animal communication is a critical element of the actual plot of Anchorman, I would argue that the actual plot is not an essential element of the movie. Which is to say, they could have written a different story involving the same characters, and to all intents and purposes it would have been the same movie.

Incidentally, is there a formal limitations period for the prohibition on spoilers, which makes a lot of this impenetrable for people who haven’t seen the particular movie under discussion? Nobody gets mad if you mention that Anna Karenina gets run over by a train, so there is a line somewhere. Where is it?

Ah, shit – was just about to start Anna Karenina. :-)

Do zombie movies count? Some have a quasi-scientific explanation (Night of the Living Dead) and some have a supernatural explanation (Rec) but most just present the characters with the existance of zombies with no attempt at explanation.

Oh, I’ve got a good one. I never actually saw the movie, but a friend once described Basic Instinct to me as taking place in a universe almost exactly like our own, except that an ice pick was a conventionally used piece of home bartender’s equipment.

Anchorman: The one in which Ron Burgundy’s unexplained superpower is the ability to play jazz flute?

Ugh, but Waterworld.

Field of Dreams?

What’s tricky about this is that you’re combining two fairly complex categories, metaphysical and MacGuffin, and you can miss each one on either side. The metaphysical half means, essentially, inserting some non-narrative attribute of a story — a metaphor, as in Exterminating Angel and “Metamorphosis”; a psychological fact, as in David Lynch; a genre convention; or the premise of the story itself, as in Groundhog Day — into physical, causal reality. This rules out anything that is given some kind of scientific/magical/religious explanation. But on the other side it also rules out anything that remains, as it were, purely meta — so the impossibly-unlikely coincidences that are features of all sorts of stories don’t count unless they are treated as physical facts rather than conventions, e.g. by being recognized as impossibly unlikely by the characters. As for the MacGuffin part, it needs to set the plot in motion — this rules out e.g. the coin flips in Rosenkrantz & Guildenstern. But it also needs to be a discrete thing. Not necessarily an object — we have to prefer Holbo to Hitchcock here — but something that can be fully specified in a short sentence. This makes Lost Highway a better candidate than the otherwise isomorphic Mulholland Drive.

So stuff misses by being, let’s say, too physical or too meta, or else too small or too big to be a MacGuffin.

What’s interesting about this discussion is there seems to be a sort of figure-ground reversal going on. Some people — John H. obviously, but also most of us in comments — look at the core examples and see a clear, definite form, even if its boundaries are inevitably a bit fuzzy. While other people see just a set of more or less arbitrary rules and start looking for borderline cases, so that the category quickly dissolves.

A summary of an episode of a GI Joe cartoon:

Cobra Stratovipers attempt to steal the McGuffin Device, which no one knows what it really does. However, GI Joe stops them. In the process, the McGuffin device falls from the firebat into the woods and another Firebat crashes into an orphanage. The Joes save the kids then rebuild the orphanage. Zartan goes alone (since the Dreadnoks are engaged in a deep philosophical debate about mints) to recover the McGuffin Device. After wreaking havoc on the construction site, Shipwreck ends up telling the orphans a ridiculous fairy tale about The Duke and his three sons (Leatherhead, Frog Face and Ship Shape) and their quest to get some hamburgers. Beach Head has Shipwreck go check for unexploded missiles in the forest. Shipwreck finds the McGuffin Device and Zartan finds him. However, Zartan’s Swampfire is located by the Joes, so she disguises himself as Shipwreck and ends up telling the rest of Shipwreck’s story. One of the orphans, Jenny, knows something is wrong and goes off and finds the real Shipwreck. Zartan uses one of the orphans, Bobby (voice David Mendenhall), as a hostage to escape, but Shipwreck stops him and activates the McGuffin Device. The characters from his story come to life and the Cobra jets fall apart. Shipwreck finishes his story.

If the characters asked “why,” then they would be thrown into a different, regular sort of story

A character is a person dispossessed of metaphysical resilience.

And it occurs to me also it’s odd no one has mentioned magical realism, the much-hyped label for so much Latin American literature during the so-called boom, which would seem to share some but not all of these qualities.

bianca: re Michael Clayton I only remember that book as being a bit of faux-symbolism or something, and also as the occasion of a crucial coincidence – not a McGuffin, just a manifest contrivance. Maybe missed it. But it is unsatisfactory anyway.

Btw, fwiw, istm etc – somewhat similar film The American has a lot of the attempted pretentious-portentous, and its failure to pull it off is somehow much more pronounced, perhaps because it (inc. Clooney) obviously tries so much harder. I say ‘perhaps’ – I think it may be a bt of a McMuffin: it has basically all the right ingredients, and doesn’t have anything noticeably out of place, but still manages to be ersatz. (Or maybe a McGonagall – rhymes but doesn’t scan and is fundamentally devoid of insight and originality…bit harsh, and not in the same territory as a .)

**************SPOILER****************
Actually I think much of it is Clooney’s fault, along with a third kind of component, the failure to explain, in the sense of elaborate, something central to the plot that is not impossible nor even as surprising as a coincidence (viz., a bit of forward planning that is only revealed at its culmination, and is either undermotivated or based on second-guessing a double-cross in a rather inscrutable way, lacking the procedural detail required to tauten the plot as the factual noirish theme seems to require.).
****************************************

Actually, so here we go, typology –

McGuffin – central to plot but could be altered without very fundamental plot revision, only going so far as some fairly free-standing motivations of the characters. It need not be not especially – and should not be too – remarkable, being arbitrary rather than surprising. In the purest, Pulp Fiction case, its nature is unelaborated.

Conceit – revision would require fundamental alteration – probably amounting to replacement – of the plot – which is likely to mean that it is introduced or prepared for from the start. Is remarkable but unelaborated. If successful, it or the plot it facilitates will be salient in some way, so it will be accepted as a single premise because salient, much as according to Lewis we accept a single small miracle in the class of possible worlds that corresponds to – is the extension of – a counterfactual supposition (e.g. the lhs of a c-factual conditional.) One example is repeated coincidence, generally of good or bad luck – this generally comic because gradually ramped up in a fairly obvious way, and generally ‘aimed at’ a 1st person central character – the amusing (non horror) side of ‘paranoiac’ fantasy. Should not be a:

Contrivance – revision would require major but not fundamental plot change, it is remarkable and elaborated, but arbitrary and unsatisfying. Coincidence first introduced too late in the game is often an example. A deus ex machina in the nonliteral sense. This is less of a concern in action flicks and other plot-lite genres…

Convention – central to the plot but generally in a pervasive, background, factor-outable way. It is remarkable, usually abnormal, but is understood to be an (prior) openly negotiated, willing suspension of disbelief, its extent often understood in some complex detail. May become habitual, a genre. May be determined by external tradition e.g. religion.

McMuffin – the unsatisfying absence of any remarkable element at all.

Am I misunderstanding, or have you just defined scientists as not real people?

You are misunderstanding, probably because I was unclear. Scientists (and real people generally) believe in a resilient metaphysics. They don’t believe that the metaphysical rules of the universe change some days, just because it’s convenient for exploratory purposes or whatever. I think we agree about this. I think of myself (perhaps unfairly) as a scientist myself, as an apprentice grad-student mathematical physicist, and I admit I believe in a resilient metaphysics. If something weird happens, I’ll assume my own ignorance of a phenomenon, or even hallucination, before I assume the fundamental rules of reality have changed.

Never did figure that one out. I’m wondering if this would count as a metaphysical McGuffin

Defined as something without intrinsic significance, Life of Pi itself is a MacGuffin.

… LB, you really should see Basic Instinct — intentionally or not, it’s a hilarious movie.

There was a surprisingly effective little straight-to-DVD film two years ago that I think approaches what you’re looking for: “Triangle” (Christopher Smith, 2009). A yachting party, disabled by a storm, comes upon what appears to be an abandoned cruise liner. Once they board, they find that someone is trying to kill them off one by one. I don’t want to spoil the gimmick, so stop reading … HERE … if you want to experience it first hand, but I don’t see how I can avoid it in justifying my suggestion.

It turns out that the party is being hunted by the last surviving member of the party in its last iteration, because they have somehow been pulled into a temporal loop that can only be interrupted if all of them can be killed before the next iteration shows up and boards the boat and the cycle starts repeating itself. I don’t remember exactly how (or even whether) the metaphysics all lines up, but the basic idea is that the plot is structured more or less like a musical round (interlocking triangles), and by the time the protagonist has figured out that she (and her friends) are actually being hunted by her (earlier) self, the next ignorant iteration of the group has arrived, and she herself has to start killing them, in hopes of interrupting the cycle. Since each iteration of the protagonist actually *does* manage to escape the killer (a la standard psychokiller-hunting-female-protagonist “final girl” dynamics), the cycle will never end. What’s clever is how the premise gradually inverts the whole hero/villain, happy end/terrible end significance of the horror movie tropes it’s working with. Obviously the Bermuda Triangle is in the background, but I don’t think it’s ever explicitly mentioned. Not a great movie, but better than I had any right to expect when it wheezed out of the Redbox into my guilty palm. And it’s a metaphysical McGuffin; “Groundhog Day” on a Death Ship.

I was going to suggest the rain of frogs in Magnolia, but then realized that it’s probably not actually important enough in the plot to count. I’m glad I’m not the first one to think of some magical realism – The Tin Drum might be a good one, while Like Water for Chocolate and Midnight’s Children seem to be in some ways too well developed to count.

You misunderstand how art works.

This entire comment reads amazingly well in the voice of Detective Frank Drebin. “The movie itself is about men, women, loyalty and betrayal” is pitch perfect cadence, and “Woodworking isn’t about chairs and tables any more than stonecutting is” belongs in a Nielsen movie in spirit as well as in letter. So, thanks for that.

Plot is not argument it’s just the armature

Uh, perhaps you meant to say the winding? The field winding is what spins ’round and ’round the armature to generate the current. Unless you’re analogizing that the current is the story, and the armature’s job is to generate and convey it. But in that case, your thesaurus is getting ahead of you: specifically, you don’t want to be distinguishing the armature from the winding apparatus, and you should say plot is the transducer which converts the potential energy of the characters into the narrative energy of the story. Or you could say dynamo, which sounds cooler. I suppose you could be trying to declare that the plot converts the ambient field of metaphysics into narrative action, which has the benefit of being correct, but then you’d be conceding something incompatible with the contra-this-thread point you’re attempting to raise. Sorry to be boring you with our interest in field components!

.. Riffing a bit, why does Thornhill accept the importance of the MacGuffin in N/NW? You could say it’s because The Government tells him it’s vital, and then compare that to the moviegoer’s blind acceptance of the metaphysical MacGuffin in the kind of movie this post is about.

But that would be mistaken, because Thornhill doesn’t care what the State wants. He’s in love with Eve, and his desire for her leads him to accept the MacGuffin without questioning it. How does *that* compare to our metaphysical MacGuffins? Is the audience’s patience with reality-shifting contingent on caring about or identifying with the characters?

This movie doesn’t seem to exist, but if it did would certainly qualify in spades. As would any truly Dickian adapatation of PKD, none of which actually exist, which is a bit of a metaphysical conundrum in itself.

Teorema

High Plains Drifter could almost qualify, although to make it really fit with the thesis you’d have to edit out all the flashbacks.

Maybe part of the difference between a metaphysical mcguffin and a scifi/fantasy/whatever one is whether the impossibility is part of a traditional/generic system of metaphysical rules. If you wake a sleeping dragon in your story, you may also find a magic sword (if there’s no magic sword, and the dragon is the only touch of fantasy, that’s a marked choice by the author); if the dragon turns out actually to be an invading alien spaceship in disguise, you might deal with it instead by means of a new powerful laser developed by a reclusive scientist. Part of what a scientific/magical/kung-fu/religious “explanation” does is let one impossible phenomenon set your expectations for the fictional world as a whole. But if there’s a door into John Malkovich’s head, what kind of world does that lead us to expect? (The explanation given by the old man is, I think, so vague as not to help tell us what kind of impossibility we’re dealing with.)

Tree-of-Paradise.

I’d say Black Swan, but like others in this thread, I feel that while I can intuitively identify what you’re talking about, I can’t define it precisely.

To my mind, folks who insist on viewing the events in Swan as hallucinations are missing out. These things are just happening. The ballerina standing in front of us is sprouting feathers.

Not certain if this is quite what you had in mind, but I don’t recall seeing How To Get Ahead In Advertising mentioned above.

While explanations are made for the state of mind of Bagley is in which produce his supposed delusion that a boil is turning into a second head, no explanation is ever given for what actually caused the boil to turn into a second head and his original head to revert to a boil.

The Cat Returns (2002) from Studio Ghibli probably fits. Every mystery and strangeness is explained – apart from Haru’s ability to speak with cats, which generates the entire plot. And a lovely film, of course.

I’m looking for examples of films that hinge on more or less bald stipulations of metaphysically preposterous states of affairs. That is, cases in which something impossible happens, and it isn’t identified as science or magic. It just is.

This is basically a definition of the magical realism subgenre, isn’t it? Which itself is best defined as “modern fantasy minus the psychological realism”.

Weird stuff happens, people react to it realistically, and the stuff has a sort-of scientific explanation = science fiction.
Weird stuff happens, people react to it realistically, and the stuff has an explanation to do with supernatural forces = fantasy.
Weird stuff happens, people barely seem to notice or regard it as out of the ordinary = magical realism.

I agree with comments above that this is an un-Hitchcockian treatment of “McGuffin”- but based on what I think you’re asking for, I’d recommend any Carl Dreyer, especially Day of Wrath or Ordet.

Lee # 185 – good example! And I see from Holbo’s next post that Charlie Kaufman thinks along the same lines.

Well, yes, but the rational explanation for everything is subverted in PKD stories. It doesn’t mean there isn’t one. It just means PKD didn’t trust it.

It occurs to me that you have to be REALLY tight about these definitions. Why? Because every fiction is speculative, and every fiction violates the rules of our universe in SOME respect. When you get into trying to figure out why Rookie of the Year is or is not part of this subject, it’s clear you’re off course, ergo the rules have to be tighter. The relevant object lesson here is the Tommy Westphall Universe Hypothesis. Tommy Westphall, St. Elsewhere series finale, snowglobe, autism. It is surprisingly easy to make the case that not only all of St. Elsewhere, but MANY of the narrative TV series you enjoy, exist within that autistic snowglobe, thanks to the nature of cross-promotions and cameo appearances of one character in another series. All of The Wire takes place in the snowglobe. Dr. Who and Star Trek — both fully in the snowglobe. Gomer Pyle — is in the snowglobe.

Anyway. If you haven’t heard about that, go spend an hour melting your brain on the Tommy Westphall problem. But there was a point there, and the point is that all fiction violates the rules of our world on the level of “John McClane cannot watch a Bruce Willis movie.” The gist of the Westphall thing is that that vulgar epiphany can have surprisingly untrivial consequences. I think you need a continuum of “unreality potency,” which separates, as it were, Gomer Pyle from Kafka’s Metamorphosis as two distinct types of unreality. Because Gomer Pyle is speculative too if you don’t watch your p’s and q’s. And of course, Gomer Pyle is ACTUALLY not really speculative at all — that’s the point, let’s restrict the discussion.

I’m kind of sympathetic to the platonism complaint–at least I can understand where it’s coming from, I think. Take Dark City as an example. You’re comparing it with Exterminating Angel but there may be a reason from that. IIRC the director had written the script but needed a cowriter. His cowriter said something like, “This is really an existential drama, so you need to make it more like an existential drama,” and that’s what he added. So there is a story that was there before, and there is an existential drama, and it’s the latter you’re arguing is more or less the essential bit, at least for your purposes in looking for philosophically interesting bits.

In Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven the protagonist can alter all of reality with his dreams, an ability that is never really explained. His power can erase billions of people, alter history, create a race of aliens attacking the Earth, then make the aliens peaceful. Near the end of the book he suggests that the ‘actual’ world was ended in a nuclear war years before and everything that has ‘existed’ since then is the result of a dying dream he had.

Stuart Little: a moused birthed by human parents. Just wacky or a physical comment on the not-insuperable loneliness of childhood? You make the call!

Just to throw one more title out there.

The bus that arrives at the end of Ghost World is a nice minor miracle. It isn’t central to the plot but is, IMO, one of the key elements in making the ending as emotionally satisfying as it is.

“The Odyssey is not information. . .”

Fair enough. . . but does it not contain information? Does it not impact upon our beliefs as well as upon our senses? Doesn’t it impact upon our senses by way of our beliefs?

The content of a work. . . what it’s about, what it means, whether or not it’s true or false. . . is part of the work, and certainly worth speculating about.

It has meanings, not meaning. The S is important.

The assertion that the Parthenon has X*Y meanings instead of just X meaning is in support of an argument that it contains no information?

The Management: This comment responds to an earlier comment by a Seth Edenbaum sockpuppet. As per house policy, the earlier comment has been replaced by a random extract from Jim Theis’ classic The Eye of Argon, greatly improving its writing style and comprehensibility, but sadly rendering this comment redundant. We apologize for any inconvenience.

Thanks management! Especially since I’m pretty sure I read it wrong anyway, so now I look good.

Oh rats.

Actually, I don’t see what’s so wrong with letting 3rd-son-of-Adam be. O.K., so he’s overweeningly arrogant, somewhat maliciously disdainful, adventitious in his references, and utterly repetitious in his declamations. He’s also instantly recognizable. (I’m surprised you missed the hint). But he’s also basically right on a fairly standard account. Works-of-art involve “ideas” in the Kantian sense, but not in the sense that their “ideas” can be cashed out or encapsulated in standardly cognitive concepts. (And the extent to which they can be so encapsulated counts against the quality of such works, renders them mechanical rather than “organic”,- which, incidentally, is part of the standard objection to allegory). Yes, their reading/reception involves a “play” of our cognitive faculties, but in the mode of reflective and not determinate judgment, as purposeful purposelessness, not subservient to referential functioning. And he even grasps, via LeGuin’s comment that such works are “objects, not subjects”, the separate status of works-of-art, independent of both their producers/creators and readers/appreciators. Their reception always involves a simultaneous suspension and maintenance of disbelief, such that they yield the paradox: how can something so obviously fake yield the effect of such convincingness? The criterion for such works is “genuineness” and they serve to cultivate veracity in the sense of accuracy (of expression and disclosure), and not the truth functions or conditions of logic-choppers, which tend to repress such modal concerns. None of this is exactly news, nor does it require endless reiteration. It’s simply a matter of recognizing the criteria for differentiating between discursive domains.

john, i think you should go on all the forums you can find – on any subject – and post that you’re looking for “MMF suggestions”.

and then you should tell us about the suggestions you get.

d

Actually, Tim Wilkinson, S.E. did make a number of distinct points in his comments here, not just the utterly uninteresting one that plot is not the sole function of works. Rather, the general point was plot and other elements function in what he would call a “formal” and I would call a “modal” fashion, and grasping that is crucial to avoiding a lot of silly or stupid mistakes or misunderstandings. (One commenter above said that if a character fails to respond to a cognitive anomaly in the reality of the plot, he regards that character as unreal, er, ignoring the fact that all fictional characters are unreal). And lot’s of such silly or stupid comments, (often in the form of snark that just shows the commenter has missed or is ignorant of the point), occur on these threads. I myself found the premise of this whole thread uninteresting, insofar as not just, as other commenters pointed out, it gets Hitchcock’s notion of a “McGuffin” wrong,- (whereas S.E. got Hitchcock significantly “right”)-, but such speculative premises or conceits are so widespread and various in such works that it amounts to setting off on a wild goose chase. To make realism here normative, (perhaps in league with a scientific/engineering ethos), is just to mistake that it too, in its various forms, is just such a premise.

Conceptual clarification is one thing, but conceptually clarifying the non-or-a-conceptual is another matter altogether. S.E. may be lacking in literary-critical, er, tact, but that anti-philosophical point is basically what he’s always repeating. It’s not exactly news, as aesthetics is 250 years old, and one needn’t be truculent about the matter. But a reminder can be useful in the context of repeated solecisms. And though S.E. is so repetitious that he’s instantly recognizable, that just means that he’s also easy to ignore rather than rising-to-the-bait. A “troll” is always relative to the presuppositions of the house style, and thin-skinned intolerance is not necessarily a credit to the enforcement of community norms.

“I myself found the premise of this whole thread uninteresting, insofar as not just, as other commenters pointed out, it gets Hitchcock’s notion of a “McGuffin” wrong,- (whereas S.E. got Hitchcock significantly “right”)”

This is a little bit like saying that the turn-of-the-last century quest to split the atom was uninteresting because they were misusing the word “atom.” After all, as Democritus defined it, an atom could not be split.

Meanings change, and all concerned were quite clear that Hitchcock’s Macguffin was not at issue.

John Holbo wanted movies that were of a kind with Groundhog’s day and Being John Malkovich. Attempts to define the category involved speculation about how style and philosophical content relate, or can relate.

Whatsisname, for some reason, thought this was silly.

It isn’t.

@213:

Umm…”how humans behave” is what’s in question, not the premise, eh? At any rate, the complexion of fictional characters is relative to that of the fictional worlds that they inhabit. The two mutually disclose each other. How a character reacts and how that world “is” are flip-sides of the same coin. That’s a good part of what is to be discovered. (That “character” is not really separate from world is what is to be gotten into and refreshed; it’s not just a matter of describing furniture). Now fictional characters and worlds will always be underdetermined compared to the real world case. Works always foreshorten and economize their means. But then if they actually sought to provide a “complete” account that would be TMI, utter tedium, which would be an even larger failure, missing the point of providing a work at all.

The point about the character being judged in terms of his, (i.e. actually the reader’s), cognitive functioning is that it amounts to an over-identification with the character, (which is a fictional “nothing” anyway). It’s not that cognitive elements are not involved in reading; it’s that they are being selected and (re)arranged by different “rules”. And works don’t serve to foster identifications, but ultimately to break them. The “function” of works is to “contain” and body-forth otherness, not to maintain the bounded defenses of the reader’s ego, but to foster a confrontation with ek-sistence in the world,- (by means of its fictional re-doubling),- to get the reader into the outside, beside himself.

@215:

The point wasn’t that you got the plain sense of Hitchcock wrong. It’s that the category is so over-generalized as to admit of just about anything. (Cf. the above comment thread). And the addition of “metaphysical” does little to clarify or specify the point: is any playing with the “infrastructures” of meaning thereby metaphysical? (To call the “Malkovich” premise “metaphysical”, is a bit like complaining about all those little people in “Guilliver”). Are the various ways in which works reify metaphors and thereby draw out their “meanings” merely the occasion and pretext for the ensuing rigamarole, which itself must be reduced and explained in terms of the existing physical world? (There are apparently many here who plainly think, “Yes!”). I really don’t need any lectures about atoms, anymore than S.E. needed a lecture about how electric motors actually work, if that, indeed, was the reference of his metaphor. Perhaps rather some people need to learn about how not to iron out and remove, rather than interpret, metaphors! Nor do I need a lecture about how language really works, about which anyone who actually speaks is really ignorant and confused!

Ajay #185 — No, it is not metaphysically impossible for there to be lions in the Scottish highlands. There just aren’t any.

In other words, MacGuffins are not metaphysically impossible, by the original definition.

The point of Hitchcock’s joke is that MacGuffins are interchangeable and unimportant and many of them are finally ridiculous.

On the other hand, a movie premise can be fantastic and impossible, whether or not it is given a magical or scientific exposition.

great thread (except for whatever/whoever edelbaum sockpuppet discussion is supposed to be about). here are two films i have been trying to think about w/r/t lemuel & john’s comments way back abt what distinguishes groundhog day from the dead zone. i also thought of them b/c most of the suggestions so far have been by folks with good…..taste?…..in film. these aren’t necessarily recommended viewing.

(1) what women want (mel gibson acquires the ability to read women’s minds) and;
(2) the invention of lying (nobody in the world except ricky gervais realizes lying is possible)

it seems like john would want to throw out (1) on basically the same grounds as the dead zone. but what about (2)? it’s more like an epistemic macguffin than a metaphysical one, but it shares some qualities w/ the thought-experiment type films john is interested in……no?