Deus ex Machina

Okay. So I'm back from training, at least temporarily. I should hopefully be able to blog and to read blogs every day for the rest of the week. Hopefully.

Anyway, this week I want to talk about what the film and television industries refer to as tropes. My friend Adam Heine from Author's Echo introduced me to TVTropes.org a few weeks ago. I've been fascinated by the immeasurable amount of info there ever since.

Today I want to go over the concept of Deus ex Machina. This plot device, or trope, comes from a Latin phrase that means literally, "god out of the machine." It has its origins in Greek Theatre, when apparently a primitive crane was sometimes used to lower characters playing gods onto the stage. Either way, in plots of fiction, it refers to a sudden and unexpected solution to a problem that had previously seemed unsolvable. As they put it on TVTropes:

If the secret documents are in Russian, one of the spies suddenly reveals that they learned the language. If the writers have just lost funding, a millionaire suddenly arrives, announces an interest in their movie, and offers all the finances they need to make it. If The Hero is dangling at the edge of a cliff with a villain stepping on his fingers, a flying robot suddenly appears to save him.

In other words, the writer has decided to resort to bullshit, and has pulled a solution to the problem out of his ass. This is a particularly grievous offense when it comes to the pact of trust that should exist between reader and author. If a writer uses this kind of trick, and does not do it subtly, it can completely interrupt that oh so important suspension of disbelief.

According to TVTropes there are four main types of Deus Ex Machina:

• Total Deus Ex Machina — A plot element that didn't previously exist and has no logical explanation behind it. Let's say the hero has been pummeled to an inch of his life and the villain has regained control of his gun. The hero then finds a magical remote control under a nearby couch that allows him to pause the scene, take the gun away, and shoot the villain.
• Illogical placement and timing Deus Ex Machina — When something is established and explained in the work, but its use in that situation is jarring and impossible to believe. Building from the example above, let's say that instead of a magical remote, the local militia bursts in and shoots the villain. Maybe it was established earlier that the militia protects the countryside, but for them to somehow divine that there is a fight going on at this isolated farm and to burst in just in time to save the day is a Deus Ex Machina.
• Cut and paste Deus Ex Machina — When Chekhov's Gun is quick-drawn, but it's done in a clumsy way that makes one realize that the author obviously just couldn't write them out of the situation with what they have, so they went back to some earlier point and put in one or two throwaway lines to set up a victory down the road. From the example above, perhaps the hero randomly decided to put a tiny pistol in one of his pockets and just happened to forget that he had it until now.
• Fridge Brilliance — When something seems to be a Deus Ex Machina, but really isn't. The writers were just a bit too clever for their own good. To build from the above, let's say that in some early scene the hero intentionally rigged his gun to blow up should it ever be fired and it both fits with his personality and seems like a logical thing he would do. It might seem like a cop-out at first, but one then remembers he's a Technical Pacifist who doesn't like guns and never wants to fire one in his life in spite of his job.

Probably one of the most famous examples of Deus ex Machina, which I hate to go into here, is J.R.R. Tolkien's use of Manwe's Eagles to rescue Frodo and Sam from the destruction of Mount Doom. I hate it because The Lord of the Rings is one of my favorite stories ever, and I don't like to think about anything that might make it less than perfect.

However, there is an interesting debate about all of this, and TVTropes has some very interesting ideas about the subject: [SPOILER ALERT]

J.R.R. Tolkien occasionally uses Giant Eagles to whisk his heroes away from danger. These aren't just at the end of Rings, but show up in The Hobbit to rescue dwarves from burning trees that are surrounded by wolves, to tip the scales in the book's great battle, and in Rings to rescue Gandalf from the roof of the Tower of Orthanc as well. Tolkien seems to have been unable to resolve the issue of characters marooned on top of high things as well as unable to resist putting them there. Whether these are a Deus Ex Machina is often debated:

• Tolkien called them a dangerous machine that he dared not use often with credibility. He thought them a deus ex machina, though in the books he justified them better.
• The Eagles are Manwë's messengers, so this is a arguably a legitimate case of a true Deus Ex Machina.
• Bored of the Rings had one of them stamped with "Deus Ex Machina Airlines."
• Common objections: The Eagles' place in Middle-Earth's greater cosmology that's All There In The Manual, Gandalf being a wizard and getting this sort of thing as a perk, defining Deus Ex Machina to play a crucial role in the quest when, in Rings, the quest was completed on the main characters' own power and getting out of Mordor alive was no part of it.
• What's most irritating about the Giant Eagles is that they raise serious questions about the story's foundations. Possible objections: Sauron would definitely notice and set up Nazgûl interception and/or tens of thousands of Orcs on the mountain, the Eagles weren't even at the Council of Elrond, Manwë wouldn't send his eagles on a suicide mission, God thinks that defeating evil effortlessly would eventually backfire, Mount Doom is the seat of the greatest power in Middle-Earth and it's uncertain whether anyone could toss away its embodiment there willingly, the Ring corrupts the powerful so that Galadriel and Gandalf refuse to even touch it - and you want to put the thing on Gwahir the Windlord for days on end?!
• Exactly. The Eagles are beholden to no mortal, and it was only through Gandalf being an Istari spirit closely associated with Manwe that he had any sway over them at all. Clearly just getting Gwaihir to save him from Orthanc was a huge "favor", and its obvious he wouldn't be ordering them around regularly.
• Tolkien's own argument was that the eagles would never allow themselves to be used as taxis by other species.
• Speaking of eagles, they're also used at least twice in The Silmarillion: when Fingon rescues Maedhros, and when Beren and Lúthien escape from Angband. Very much deus in machina since the connection between the eagles and Manwë is much more explicit in that book.
  [ END SPOILER ALERT]

Interesting stuff! Anyway, the point is we should all try to avoid using such tropes in our writing. If it must be done, and you've written yourself into a corner, so to speak, at least go back through your work and try to weave the logic for the plot device into the narrative in a way that makes sense. If you don't, it will look like you just pulled a rabbit out of your ass.

BTW, if you, like me, have a hard time pronouncing this phrase, it's said like: Day-oos eks MAH-kin-nuh