Disk Jockey (2006) and the Use of MacGuffins

Alfred Hitchcock popularized the name for one of the most famous storytelling elements. He called it the MacGuffin. His description of a MacGuffin stated that it was nothing at all. It was a person, event, or object that drove a story forward, but didn’t matter outside of that. The audience didn’t care about it. The audience didn’t need to know the contents, personality, or use of it. All that mattered was that it existed and drove the story.

Not every story told involved a MacGuffin. The MacGuffin was simply something physical that pushed a character into a story. It could have been the goal; something, someone, or somewhere that the character wanted. It could have been an event that put someone into a location they wouldn’t have normally been in. It could have been a person that recently entered a character’s life. As long as it was physical, and helped thrust the character into a story, it was a MacGuffin.

Consider the 2014 film Winter’s Tale. It was a romantic movie at its core. It had the time travel element where the main character disappeared for a hundred years before reawakening in the present day, but the main thrust of the story was his romance with a dying woman in the past. Yet, everything in the movie, romance included, hinged upon one thing. It was a thing that was made physical through the world-building and the other characters in the movie. The MacGuffin was a miracle.

Keep reading to understand what that meant. There was a miracle, and it was the MacGuffin. Demons were pursuing the main character because they knew he had the ability to perform one miracle and save someone’s life. They wanted to prevent that miracle from happening. During the entire romance, the demons believed that the miracle was going to be saving the dying woman. They threw the man into a river to drown, simply to avoid the miracle taking place. When he returned in the present day, the demons realized that the miracle had not happened. They had not prevented it. They continued their pursuit of him and the miracle.

Was the miracle important to the audience? Not really. The audience was invested in the romance and, later, the main character trying to determine how he was in the present day. The miracle was simply a plot device meant to give the demons a reason to keep chasing the main character. It didn’t matter how the miracle worked. All that mattered was that it drove the story forward, which it most definitely did. It kept the demons after him, and was the catalyst to the time travel moment.

The idea of the MacGuffin was more often used for a specific item that a person could hold in their hands. The miracle was an item, but it wasn’t a truly physical one. It was something that could affect people without taking up physical space. That wasn’t the case in most uses of a MacGuffin. Most times, characters were in search of an item. They didn’t want the wrong person getting the physical item. They needed it for themselves.

That was certainly the case in the two Jingle All the Way movies. The first one featured a father who had neglected to buy the Christmas present that his son wanted. He spent all day Christmas Eve travelling from store to store in the Minneapolis and St. Paul area, trying to get his hands on a Turbo Man action figure. That was his MacGuffin. His goal was an action figure. It was also the goal of any other parent out shopping on Christmas Eve, making it a difficult goal to achieve.

The sequel followed a similar formula. A father and stepfather competed for the affection of a daughter by trying to buy that Christmas’s hottest toy, Harrison the Talking Bear. That item pushed both fathers into a competition as they went to great lengths to get the bear. The main difference was that the father was trying to get the bear to get a bear for his daughter while the stepfather was buying up all the bears with his wealth to stop the father from getting one. The MacGuffin was still the toy because it put the story into action.

Now, to be a true MacGuffin, the toy in each movie had to put the story in motion, but there had to be more to the story than the toy. Jingle All the Way was about getting the toy, but it was also about a neglectful father learning that he needed to focus more on his family and less on his work. His son wanted a Turbo Man action figure because he looked up to Turbo Man as a father figure. The amount of difficulty that the main character went through to get the action figure, as well as his antagonistic relationship with a mailman, taught him the importance of family. Jingle All the Way 2 was about a father and stepfather overcoming their disagreements and learning that they could both care for their (step)daughter and she could care for both of them. The toys simply made those stories possible.

There were other cases where a MacGuffin was simply used to kickstart a story. It wasn’t present through the entire story, instead being a specific element that threw the characters into a new place. Someone cared about it. For a short time, their goal revolved around it. But, in the end, it only mattered to the overall story in so much as it changed the characters’ lives. These MacGuffins could be an important event that brought everyone together, or they could be an object that flashed into their lives for a few seconds.

Snow Buddies had a MacGuffin that was only in a scene or two. It was an item that took the puppies out of their normal lives and threw them into a new experience. One of the puppies liked to eat. He would do anything he could to get food. When there was an open door in the back of an ice cream delivery truck, he jumped in. The other puppies followed to try and stop him. The ice cream then got delivered to Alaska, setting the characters on course to help a boy win a dogsledding race. The MacGuffin was the ice cream. It came into their lives, someone wanted it, and it set their story in motion.

A place or event could also be a MacGuffin. As much as people desire to get something, they can also desire to go somewhere or experience something. They could want to perform a concert. They might want to go on a vacation. Or they could want to get home for a holiday. That somewhere can be as much of a MacGuffin as a Turbo Man doll or a truck full of ice cream because it will lead a character down a path that they wouldn’t have otherwise gone down.

Never on Tuesday began with a MacGuffin. Two of the main characters wanted to drive to Los Angeles. They thought that making it out to the Pacific Coast would help them get rich and get ladies. They got into a car and hit the open road, driving west from Ohio. Along the way, however, the two friends ended up in a car accident with a woman driving a Volkswagen Beetle, and the three people were stuck on the side of the road for an extended time.

The course of the characters’ lives was changed because of the MacGuffin in Never on Tuesday. Had they not desired to make it to Los Angeles, they never would have been on the road. Had they not been on the road, they never would have crashed. Had they not crashed, they wouldn’t have spent so much time with the woman. They wouldn’t have changed as people. The MacGuffin put them there. And, in the end, it didn’t matter. The audience was never shown Los Angeles, just like it was never told how the ice cream tasted in Snow Buddies, the follow up to the kids not having the toys in the Jingle All the Way movies, or the future life of the person who received the miracle in Winter’s Tale. That stuff didn’t matter. What happened with the MacGuffins didn’t matter. What mattered was the series of events that unfolded because of the MacGuffins, not the MacGuffins themselves.

One final movie that used a MacGuffin was Disk Jockey. It actually used more than one MacGuffin. There was a MacGuffin within a MacGuffin. Franky B (Josh Fallon) and Dane (Devyan DuMon) were two gangsters looking to get revenge on an ex-partner who betrayed them. They needed to find that ex-partner’s sister, Rachel (Kristin Busk), who had a disk surgically placed inside her. On the disk was a bunch of incriminating information that could send Franky B and Dane away for life.

The MacGuffin of Disk Jockey was the disk with the incriminating information. That disk was the reason that everything in the movie happened. It was why Franky B and Dane went to Woodberry. It was the reason that three female assassins were in Woodberry. It was what caused the two men and three women to clash. Everything hinged on that disk. But the disk was inside Rachel. Thus, the characters were all trying to capture Rachel to get to the disk. This, in turn, made Rachel into a MacGuffin as well.

The main differentiation between the two MacGuffins was how much the audience would care about what happened to them after the story. The audience was never shown what was on the disk, and what happened to it was also never clear. Did it matter? Not really. The disk was only there as an item for people to want. Rachel was almost the same, though the audience would probably care about her a tad bit more. She was in a life or death situation. She was human. That provided some source of empathy.

A MacGuffin was the key to the success in each of those movies. It set the story in motion by either pushing the characters out of their comfortable lives or giving them a goal to obtain. It might not have been important. Audiences may not have cared about the MacGuffin or even completely understood what it was. The characters thought it was important though. The purpose of the MacGuffin was important. That was what mattered.

Alfred Hitchcock wasn’t the person who wrote the first MacGuffin into a story. It existed long before he defined it for the movie-going public. He simply brought attention to the storytelling device in a way that had not been present before. He told people what a MacGuffin was and those people were able to spot the MacGuffins in other stories. It was a timeless part of storytelling in both good works and bad. Why? Because sometimes one small, or large, thing changed the world. What that thing was didn’t matter. The change that it represented did.

These notes matter regarding this post:

• The movies mentioned in this post included Winter’s Tale (week 89), Jingle All the Way (week 160), Jingle All the Way 2 (week 160), Snow Buddies (week 270), and Never on Tuesday (week 387).
• Have you seen Disk Jockey? What did you think of it? Do you like MacGuffins or are they a cheap way to move the story? Do you think I'm an idiot? Let me know your thoughts in the comments or on Twitter.
• Share any suggestions that you have about what I should be watching on Twitter or in the comments. I’m always open to suggestions, though they don’t always immediately make it into the schedule.
• There’s an Instagram account for the Sunday “Bad” Movies that you may want to check out at some point. Go ahead. Do it.
• Now for a look ahead at what’s to come in the Sunday “Bad” Movies. After a week where I watched a micro-budget gangster action flick, I thought it would be nice to get back to the big budget side of things. The movie was based on a short film and tossed Adam Sandler into the mix. It’s called Pixels, and that’s what will be the subject of next week’s post. I’ll see you then.