Comment by dragontamer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dragontamer | Hacker News Reader

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> charming mistakes

One character being played by three different actors (either that, or three characters being so similar I confused them as the same character despite being three different actors) is hardly charming IMO.

Longer form stories, such as Game of Thrones (where Azor Ahai, and other such plotlines are literally killed off) are probably more entertaining. It sucks to see a fan theory turn out to not matter at all, but not everything ends up being relevant to the conclusion.

I don't think a 2 or 3 hour movie has any room to dwell on unimportant details. Anime and miniseries do have that time. We can watch Goku mess around with Princess Snake or Krillen get his Namekian power up (which doesn't matter for any fight, but is good development for the character in isolation).

That's probably the charm of Cowboy Bebop. There's so much detail and none of it really matters. The interesting story happened like 10 years ago (in universe time). That's be my pick for a show / story with very little Chekhov gun going on.

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Chekhov gun is probably contrasted with Red Herring, which is explicitly a detail that not only doesn't matter, but purely exists to mislead the audience. Any Chekhov gun heavy plot needs red herrings to balance things out, otherwise it's too predictable.

“ Red Herring, which is explicitly a detail that not only doesn't matter, but purely exists to mislead the audience.”

There is also the McGuffin which appears to matter, but exists entirely to elicit character action. For instance, in “Psycho” the plot line about the stolen money is dropped almost as soon as it is established, but it did its job by getting Marion on the run and into the motel.

The MacGuffin isn’t just there to elicit a response though… it’s a primary motivator for the characters. It’s usually (but not always) a physical object, but that matters less than the fact that the characters are trying to obtain it (usually unsuccessfully). It’s also rarely explained — it is an object that simply exists.

Hitchcock loved the MacGuffin, but Psycho isn’t the example I’d use. The money in Psycho is a useful plot device, but is not a MacGuffin. Money is too common ofna motivation. The briefcase in Pulp Fiction (which is of unexplained importance, but clearly something they want to obtain) is a classic example of a MacGuffin.

The Pulp Fiction briefcase is more of a "pure MacGuffin", where the film director / scriptwriters are playing with the concept of MacGuffin more than actually using it as its intended purpose.

After all, its a Tarantino film. He basically expects the audience to be familiar with film theory (or at minimum: expects the audience to already be familiar with "typical plotlines").

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Your typical action movie / popcorn movies: Raiders of the Lost Arc (The Arc of the Covenant), Mission Impossible (The Rabbit's Foot), and Men In Black (Orion's Belt), and pretty much every James Bond movie, has MacGuffins galore and are better examples of it.

The scriptwriter doesn't care about the MacGuffin. But a well written story has the __audience__ care deeply about it. Otherwise, the escalation and conflict has no purpose. Pulp Fiction / Tarantino used the briefcase as an exercise in how to make the audience care for an object, despite never really explaining why that object is the center of all this conflict.

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Golden Fleece, Apples of the Hesperides (aka: Heracle's 11th task), Holy Grail. It doesn't really matter what these objects do, we just use them as storytelling devices to get the characters thrust into conflict.

the Pulp Fiction briefcase is actually a deconstructed MacGuffin, stripped of everything except the plot device itself - no explanation for why it's important, no inherent meaning, no payoff, just a thing that drives the plot. A lot of Tarantino's work has this kind of postmodern element to it.

I don’t know if I agree that the audience needs to care about the MacGuffin for it to be a well written story though. I think in some circumstances it can help, but it’s not necessary (or sufficient) for a good story.

I mean, I read that Lucas thought of R2D2 as the MacGuffin of “A New Hope”, and thought that it was important for the audience to care deeply about him. And it worked. However, as a film device, I think it’s more important that the audience cares that the protagonist cares about the MacGuffin. I still don’t know why I should care about the Maltese Falcon, but I know that Bogart certainly cared. And for me, that was enough to make the story compelling.

I do agree though about Pulp Fiction. The briefcase was a very meta reference where the audience is assumed to know what is going on. And in that case it helped to provide a common thread through the different plot lines. But from a higher level, it was done with a wink and a nod to the audience. It was basically using the MacGuffin as a foil to use as the “typical linear storyline” when what Tarantino was really doing was playing with time lines and points of view.

With regards to Pulp Fiction, is the Gold Watch another MacGuffin?

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