39 Steps

Mcguffin The void How do you see it play out Formal Narrative form Sound Marriage — love Guilt The wrong man Frame — private — visibility

Whenever Hitchcock was working with a new writer, they would get extremely attached to the concept of MacGuffin, and it did not matter if Hitchcock tried to distract the writers from them. Was the MacGuffin the mechanical formula MacGuffin is nothing — I believe it myself, but cannot convince “Hitchcock got nothing to say” It is a pure semblance: in itself it is totally indifferent and, by structural necessity, absent; its signification is purely auto-reflexive, it consists in the fact that it has some signification for others, for the principal characters of the story, that it is of vital importance to them. The Thirty-Nine Steps, it goes further in this direction than most other Hitchcock films, iden­tifying each new episodic unit with the development of a radically different type of concrete space itself, so that we may have the feeling of a virtual anthology of a whole range of distinct spatial configur­ ations, pinned side by side in some photograph album. Theatricity

I would like to dive into a lacanian interpretation of MacGuffin as the objet petit a, and discuss its relationship with the signification chain, in this case, Mr. Memory. MacGuffin is not some object, but only can be defined or sensed by something that is not. It is the void at the center of the symbolic order. But in the narrative structure, the void is disguised by a mysterious clue that the main subject (Hannay) cannot see. MacGuffin is the object of desire that eventually made Hannay a subject, through his inquiry to the symbolic order for the answer. Hitchcock has defined the MacGuffin in this film as the formula of military plane. But in essence, none of the actual formula matters. In the end, the plot level of MacGuffin was finally recited and revealed by Mr. Memory, and Mr. Memory asked Hannay, “Am I right, sir?” At that moment, Hannay, along with the audience, had to pretend to know what Mr. Memory is referring to. After all, there are no other options of military secrets Hannay and we could get our hands on, so what Mr. Memory recited had to be the object of desire. Here, it did not matter if Hannay and the audience pretended to know, or actually knew the correctness of the formula. Hitchcock also told us it did not matter if the listeners heard the formula clearly, as the background of the dying Mr. Memory is the full-on motion and sound of the cheerful dancers. What mattered was that Hannay answered the call, and at the same time, as we the audience nodded with him, we bought the story and identify with Hannay (who became a subject in the narrative structure). This past weekend, I also read another paper “Hitchcock and the Death of (Mr.) Memory”, in which I was intrigued by the author’s analogy between the opening scene in the music hall and Hesiod’s Theogony. The author listed out some details in the opening sequence that the neon light that spelled “Music Hall”, and Mr. Memory being introduced as a “remarkable man who will donate his brain to the British Museum”. The repeated syllable, both visually and vocally, highlighted the word Muse: Mr. Memory could be alluded to the epic muse Mnemosyne, as the giver of consciousness and poetic text. I think that this interpretation can be connected to the plot where we see Mr. Memory could not help but answering the question about the identity of 39 steps. This allusion might not be 100% accurate, that we don’t need to completely believe in it, or vice versa. I do think such analysis provides an alternative perspective for us to look at the identity of Mr. Memory. He can be seen as a personification of some sort of theatrical machine. The machine’s automation and omniscience, (which can also be read from the analogy between Mr. Memory and the muse) erases Mr. Memory’s subjectivity or agency, and thus Mr. Memory is no longer a human subject, but rather a signification system by itself, with the responsibility and ethics of sharing the knowledge. As mentioned above, MacGuffin can have infinite interpretations if looked from different lens. I wanna end my post with some of them that I think could be interesting to talk about more in class. If we look from the architectural or spatial lens, the journey of looking for the MacGuffin was all about various spatial configur­ations throughout the film; and the MacGuffin could be some sense of final endpoint, or a stable state. If we look from the feminist theory lens, MacGuffin could be the absence of the women subjectivity in the film and original novel. We can almost see the three main female characters as three archetypes: Femme Fatale, the angel of the house, and the urban new woman. It is interesting that this void transcends the original film, and to a degree the MacGuffin bears the mark of Hitchcock’s own subjectivity. Maybe the MacGuffin of Hitchcock’s life is about the presence or absence of female subjectivity.