“Ah, the audience doesn’t care.” But George Lucas, director of the Star Wars film series, isn’t talking about Alfred Hitchhock’s entire film The 39 Steps. Instead, he is referring to a MacGuffin, a common plot device that motivates the protagonist(s) without much additional development of its own. Lucas’s remark can be untraditionally applied to J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, for the dragon Smaug’s ostensibly antagonistic role left the reader ambivalent. However, this is not entirely due to a gross neglect of Smaug’s development as a character, but rather a misrepresentation of his role by the organization of the novel, as Smaug only serves as a veil for the deeper underlying conflict among the different creatures of the land.
At the outset of
At the outset of