Leave it to Chance... or Laziness

by M. Glenn Gore

Remember the scene from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom where Indy and that kid from The Goonies were trapped in an underground vault while a heavily-bespiked ceiling crept closer with every nail-biting second? Oh, I know how you do. It was tense, gripping cinema played with reckless, edge-of-your-seat abandon.

But what if, at that final, pulse-pounding moment when death was assured, the trap just up and broke? Or a janitor happened along and opened the door to let them out? Luckily, that didn't happen, but if it had, the nauseating disappointment you experienced would have been palpable. That phenomenon, friends, has a name. The damned call it deus ex machina.

Deus ex machina is Latin for "You're a hack who couldn't write your way out of a wet paper bag", and it is the Irritable Bowel Syndrome of storytelling illnesses. The literal translation is "God from the machine." That's because the concept was popular among Greek playwrights, particularly Euripides, who was adamantly opposed to letting his audiences leave in a better mood than when they entered. In the play Medea, Tyler Perry poisons, like, half a dozen people or something, and just when her husband goes to smack her jilted ass, the God of the Sun literally swoops down and rescues her. I think. It's been a while since I read it.

"Of all things upon earth that bleed and grow, a herb most bruised is woman."

This mind-numbingly lazy device occurs whenever the protagonist finds him/herself in a situation that spells certain doom and they are inexplicably saved by a character, object, or previously unmentioned ability. This is also known as what poor authors do when they've written themselves into a corner, and you would not believe how often it happens!

I am an enormous fan of Avatar: The Last Airbender, and it is easily one of the greatest American cartoons ever made. It focuses on a world where many people can control the elements. This skill is known as Bending. The titular character spends three seasons mastering the four elements so he can do battle with Mark Hamill, the series' resident Big Bad. He's a merciless, fire-wielding dick whose designs for world domination must be halted, so it is of the utmost importance that he "get got." However, as the Avatar is a gentle soul, this is simply not a viable solution. Nor is what follows. SPOILER ALERT!

On his way to the final battle, a gigantic, talking turtle gives the Avatar the power to take away another person's Bending, making it the fourth most awesome talking turtle in history, right behind Bowser, Raphael, and that pants-pissingly scary thing from The Neverending Story. The technique is dubbed Soulbending, and it's a deus ex machina because it saves the day at the exact moment we most need it to, despite having never been mentioned before by anybody in the show's 61 episodes!

"Soulbending, my ass! Tell me how to get to the Southern Oracle!"

Jurassic Park is another offender. Not the exceptional novel by the late-Michael Crichton, mind you, but the commercially successful but heinous-sequel-spawning 1993 film. In this light-hearted, fine-for-all-ages tale of desperate, greed-addled men blindly hurdling the fence into God's playground as they go on an abominable foray of amoral genetic exploration, we are introduced to the Velicoraptor, a dinosaur so monumentally badass we never once studied it in school! The movie devotes two of its first three scenes to showing us in graphic detail just how vicious and calculating these creatures are. They're fast as cheetahs, they set traps, they have sickles for feet, and they hate children. They even went so far as to stage the assassination of the film's designated "Raptor Expert" just to prove they could! Why Skynet didn't just send one of these things after Sarah Connor we'll never know! 

"We need your clothes, your boots, and your motorcycle."

Now, lethal as these dudes are, they're no match for the Tyrannosaurus Rex, which, for reasons passing understanding, comes to everyone's rescue at the movie's climax by somehow navigating its way across an entire island and squeezing through a people-sized door without a single person noticing. How does something the size of a Ferris wheel doing a vocal impression of a derailing Amtrak sneak up on you?! We spent - I shit you not - three scenes illustrating the fact that you can hear it coming from miles away and that it couldn't be quiet if it were swaddled in Temper-Pedic mattresses! That ending is so balls-almighty stupid that it threatens to eject you from the movie like a SPECTRE agent from an Aston Martin!

Despite this, the greatest modern addict of the dreaded deus ex has got to be J.K. Rowling! Don't get me wrong; I'm a great fan of the 1st, 3rd, 4th, and 5th Harry Potter novels and an even greater fan of the 1st and 3rd films, but the woman works in convenience the way other artists work in clay. Consider the conflict at the end of her sophomore effort, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. Harry has gone down into Hogwarts' innards to rescue Ginny Weasley from a snake so enormous Evel Knievel couldn't jump over it. At this point in the story, Ron has been foiled by rocks, and Hermione has turned herself into a cat, so Harry has to go it alone.

But don't worry. He's got this. Why does he got this, you ask? Because in the middle of the fight against this ancient and indomitable force he stands no chance whatsoever of overcoming, a phoenix appears (unexpectedly), locating Harry in enough time (implausibly) to deliver unto him the Sorting Cap (okay?), from which Harry draws the fabled sword of Gryffindor (do what, now?), and slays the leviathan.

Pictured above: Bullshit!

I have to give Rowling credit, though. A deus ex machina triple play is a hat trick few writers have been brazen enough to attempt and with good reason. This nonsensical confluence of events comes so fast and from so far out of left field you'd have sworn Barry Bonds threw it!

How there isn't just some written rule about the use of deus ex machina is beyond me. This is a serious problem, and it needs to be snuffed out. It should be treated like plagiarism. If you're guilty of it, you should have to wear a big scarlet "D" on your chest for the rest of your life. It should come with a hundred hours of community service, a public apology, and an online database of registered offenders so you know when one of them moves in next-door to you. After all, it's important we keep our children safe.

Now that I've got that off my chest, Wayne Spencer is going to talk to you about how NOT to make a sequel. Tune in next time.