Charlie Kaufman On Metaphysical McGuffins

No, he doesn’t call them that. But here’s what he says:

I think you can be as outlandish as you want or as surreal as you want, as long as the characters are based in something real. You can put them in any situation or any reality as long as their reactions have something to do with humans beings and you’re focused on that element of it. I’m not interested in necessarily doing realistic things, obviously. I like fanciful stuff. But it can’t be just fanciful without people in it. Then it’s of no real interest. If you decide that people are turning into carrots or something as your story idea, then I think that I would have to figure out why that’s important to me as a person and why that story resonates in some way. Otherwise there’s no story. It’s just a gimmick. (10)

Quoted in Charlie Kaufman: Confessions of an Original Mind [amazon], by Doreen Alexander Child. (No, I don’t know whether it’s good. Just started.)

This isn’t the most incandescently brilliant theoretical formulation I’ve ever encountered, but … it deals with an issue that arose in comments: namely, why is Groundhog Day a good example and The Dead Zone not such a good one? In each case the protagonist gets a weird gift/curse for no clear reason. Not clearly scientific or magical. Just sort of is. Why aren’t they both Metaphysical McGuffins, in my sense? Before we fight about the term, the difference in the stories is that, in The Dead Zone, the protagonist’s ‘gift’ is just an occasion for writing a psychic detective story. It’s pretty good. I definitely have a soft spot for early Stephen King. (Haven’t seen the TV series.) But the story is driven by ‘wouldn’t this make a ripping crime-horror yarn?’ rather than “what does it have to do with human beings” – as they really are – that they might react to receiving this weird gift in this way?

[UPDATE: as pointed out in comments, I have a soft head for early Stephen King, too. I’ve forgotten half of what the book was about. A dead zone. That, or as a young teen I only cared for the detective bits. Honestly, that’s all I remember. So bad example. But point still stands.]

Now, you’ve got to be careful. Because it’s not as though Groundhog Day is realism, or psychological realism, or any kind of realism. It’s a comedy, and comedy is a genre, with rules, and the film more or less follows them. But it’s about – in a semi-allegorical/semi-thought-experimental way – real human attitudes and issues in a way that The Dead Zone is … not so much. (Alternatively, of course, Groundhog Day is just a rewrite of Hegel’s Phenomenology on the theory that Andy McDowell is even more awesomely desirable than Prussian bureaucracy, or whatever Hegel decided was best.) It’s the difference between Franz Kafka’s “Metamorphosis”, and rewriting the end so that Professor X. saves Gregor S. and invites him to attend his Special School for Transmogrified Youth, after which he joins a crack team for solving crimes no one else can. (He teams up with The Nose, among others.) If the point of the weird thing is just to tell a standard genre story, it’s a Metaphysical McMuffin (as someone suggested in comments.) If it sticks to your ribs, it’s a Metaphysical McGuffin.

But seriously. It needs to be sort of half-thought experiment and half-allegory. It needs to be a thought-experiment that is half-wrecked up by being allegory. And an allegory that is made absurdly cluttered up by thought-experimental lab equipment, as it were. (Obviously I’m making up the rules as I go along, to get the result I want.)

Final note about the term itself. Hitchcock means ‘McGuffin’ to mean, as it were, nominal excuse for getting the action going. That fits The Dead Zone as well as Groundhog Day. McMuffin should be as good as McGuffin. It’s a non-nutritional thing that people will, predictably, swallow. My narrowing/ennobling of this use does seem to stand in some need of justification, yet feels to me justified. A lot of the charm of these productions, the kind I have in mind, have to do with the counterpoint between deep – metaphysics: reasons! – and shallow – no reason for the metaphysics. Of course, Hitchcock’s own use was, as it were, deep through superficiality. The world’s just one great big McGuffin, kid, so up and at ’em! That’ll do for now.