In this concluding video on the subject of Chekhov’s Gun, I give a thumbnail sketch of its application in his own plays from Ivanov (1887) to The Cherry Orchard (1904). Since the phrase is so popular (yes, really, I have ascertained that), I confidently expect these dry factual videos to go viral amongst young people and lead to thousands of new sales.
There is certainly an affinity between Chekhov’s Gun and, in the film industry, a MacGuffin, but there are vital differences, which I may perhaps leave to Mr John Pym, our resident film crtitic, to elucidate better than I can. At the end of the day, the origins of these two ‘dramatic principles’ seem equally obscure!
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I cannot speak with any authority to Patrick’s query about how, precisely, the use of the ‘MacGuffin’ (or, as one might say, the rarefied red herring) differs from the application of ‘The Rule of Chekhov’s Gun’ in the movies. But I would say that when guns themselves are introduced in almost any film you care to mention, they usually go off – at some point. In two classic 1952 Westerns, however, George Stevens’ Shane and Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon, the plots of which are both predicated on the evil consequences of gunplay, the key element in each film is the hero’s pathological reluctance to discharge his weapon.
For the older film buff, the MacGuffin is most closely associated with several movies directed by Alfred Hitchcock. For Hitch, the great trickster, a magician always on the lookout for the diversionary hand movement, the meaningless red herring became something his latter-day devotees cherished – along with his own cameo walk-on appearances. But these MacGuffins were, in my opinion, essentially a publicity stunt. What spectators eagerly talked about, or puzzled over, in the foyer at the end of the show.
As a footnote, I might add, that the Chekhov work with the highest number of firearms over the fewest number of pages must surely be the short story ‘The Avenger’, about a cuckolded husband determined to purchase a weapon with which to shoot his wife and her lover – and for good measure, perhaps, himself too.
As a schoolboy, and aspiring comic actor, I performed in a stage version of the story (there have been at least two in English) taking the role of the prissy gunsmith. This called for a pedantic enumeration of all the weapons on offer in the gunsmith’s shop, together with an emphasis on their correct usage. But everything, including a blunderbuss, seemed too expensive for the indecisive and increasingly frustrated husband… And, by the time the curtain fell, no gun had actually been fired.