Or the lousy modern equivalent of a McGuffin… The Abram’s Knife.
Abram’s Knife (n): Popularized by director JJ Abrams. A writing convention used by hack writers and incompetent directors where an object (see “Mystery Box”) is suddenly introduced into a story with little or no foreshadowing. This introduction is often the result of a seemingly random contrivance or an act of pure happenstance. Once an Abram’s Knife is found, the main characters have little to no subsequent interaction with it. While the object is treated (for a very short period of time) as something important, once an Abram’s Knife has been used it leads to no functional advancement of the plot, results in no meaningful character development, and it is immediately discarded. For the rest of the story, the existence of the Abram’s Knife is either ignored or forgotten as though it had never existed. Multiple Abram’s Knives are often used in a chained sequence as a means to introduce artificial mystery to a plot and unnecessarily lengthen the story (see “Padding”). Antonyms: Chekov’s Gun … McGuffins
The funny thing is that Abrams does know how to use a MacGuffin intelligently. In Mission:Impossible 3, no one ever explained what the Rabbit’s Foot was or what it did, but everyone wanted it.
And I was just being deliberately obtuse because I was struck by the comedic notion of cancer being a MacGuffin.
You could certainly argue that’s important. You could also argue the framing story is superfluous and even hacky. But that’s a whole 'nother argument.
Really inapt, if you think about it. Romeo & Juliet are members of rival families in a gang war. Rose and Jack—and oh my god I was today years old when I realized their initials were also R&J—are merely from different classes.
This is probably why Billy Zane’s character is so over-the-top. He has to carry the weight of all the violence of a gang war.
And you succeeded in not picking one!
And then some jerk comes along and deliberately misunderstands you for a cheap joke.
I mean, I would suggest that really the answer is “the wizard”, but I feel like there’s a bit that’s being lost in this conversation: the idea that the MacGuffin in and of itself isn’t important.
To use a counterexample, the One Ring is not a MacGuffin because if it weren’t for the way it affects the characters, the story would have turned out very different.
Exactly. Like, to go back to an earlier example I cited, when it comes to the galaxy on Orion’s belt in Men in Black, that doesn’t serve any intrinsic purpose or function in and of itself. The galaxy on Orion’s belt could have been a vase or a pack of string cheese or a Knott’s Berry Farm souvenir for all the direct impact it had on the story’s events.
The ruby slippers, on the other hand, do allow Dorothy to get back home, so we see them affecting the story to the point where they can’t really be called a MacGuffin.
Compare with the suitcase in Pulp Fiction, where the suitcase (and its content) don’t impact anything in and of themselves. Jules and Vincent could have been going after a rare album that Marcellus Wallace loved, for all the purpose/effect it had within the actual story.
