It depends on how it fits into the context. For example, if the character suddenly discovered his new power and defeated the bad guy, then the story went on about how his power affected him and other things he was doing, then it would just be part of the story. OTOH, if the whole book was about his struggle with the bad guy, he finally encounters the bad guy, and he suddenly throws a car at the bad guy and the story wraps up shortly afterwards, then it would be.
One GM I used to play RPGs with had a running joke, where whenever he was deliberately pushing us somewhere (like adding a new PC or getting us to start on ‘something significant’), he’d mention ‘you see one of the plot mechanics walk by, working on the deus ex machina’. It was both a joke and a signal that he needed us to do something.
It depends. If the goodguy has been trying to perfect or implement some super power & up to now it hasn’t worked, but it finally magically works when the badguy really needs killing, no. This is not coming from nowhere, but has been slowly developed over the course of the play. If the good guy has had super abilities flashing on & off through out the story - maybe. If it’s handled correctly, it won’t be.
When there is no reason whatsoever to believe that the goodguy is anything but a normal human (nothing, no mysterious spaceships, no strange occurances, no clues that this guy is in any way different) and all of the sudden he can deflect bullets with his wrists and shoot them out of his fingertips. Deus ex Machina
There’s The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, where Colin Campbell and Hazel Long are in a big gun fight with the bad guys, then when things look hopeless for them, their descendents come back in time and rescue them. That killed the story for me, because it was the first time I had read a Heinlein book about the Long family and didn’t know the “mythos”, so it was very much a case of DEM to me.
ANother way that Deus ex Machina can be used could be seen in “the Usual Suspects”. Here, Keiser Soze (or was it… ) ended the whole conflict like a God from the Machine. Yet at the same time, the audience recognized that he was not a god, that it was not contrived, but had been built up and up from the beginning.
Most audiences today would consider a deus ex machina as a terrible cop-out and few writers use them (except ironically or as a joke).
I don’t think there are many examples where one is used to wrap up the entire plot, but there are occasionally small ones:
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[li]In Star Trek (original), there’s an episode where Spock is blinded. At the end of the episode, it’s revealed that Spock has a third eyelid that he forgot about.[/li][li]In The Dark Crystal, the two Gelflings fall off a cliff and are saved because the female has wings – something never mentioned before.[/li][li]“Whenever he gets in a fix/He reaches into his bag of tricks.” ;)[/li][/ul]
Another example was in an obscure French science fiction novel I read in French class: L’homme qui dort cent ans. It’s about an American who sleeps 100 years and can’t adjust to the changes in society. Finally, in the end, he moves to Australia, since it’s suddenly revealed that Australian society was precisely like 100-year-old American society. Not only a deus ex machina, but a preposterous one.
Don’t even get me started on the Star Trek frachise’s use of DEM. If we got rid of every episode that hinged upon Geodie suddenly realizing that if he remodulates the Hoopendorf discombobulator that the enemy’s force fields will be defeated (and we’ve never heard of the Hoopendorf discomboulator before), then ST would be about a 3 episode mini-series.
Now if we visit the infinitely better Babylon 5, we see that JMS used similar devices, but always with much warning. Yes, the alien healing device saves the day late in the series, but we run into it early in the first season.
End of geek rant.
(And I loved that Woody Allen play. It had the two Greek writers, Diabetes and the other guy who’s name escapes me)
“deus ex machina” was also the name of the magically found escape pod joel robinson uses to get back to earth. (when he left the show and mike nelson takes over in the episode “mitchell”)
Aristotle gets the final word. He refers to the “deus ex machina” in this and the previous section of his Poetics. It’s translated “god in the car” here. (Only [symbol]mhcanh[/symbol] appears in the Greek text here, not [symbol]qeoV[/symbol].)
The famous Cavarly coming to the Rescue when the hero is surronded by hostile Indians (They did an interesting take on this Idea in “Indiana Jones in the Temple of Doom”, where the British Army saves Indy from Indian Cultists)
In the noval, “Jurassic Park”, all seems hopeless, then all of a sudden, a the Costa Rican Military arrives with Attack Helicopters, rescuing those on the island and firebombing all the dinos into extinction. Paticulary unexpected since, IIRC, no one could reach a radio to call for help and I don’t even think the Costa Ricans have a military like that.
And finally, a Monty Python parody of it from “Now For something Completely different”…
As a Reponse to the KILLER CARS, A giant mutated Cat rampages through the city of London, chasing away the killer cars, but then proceeding to eat the city. Just then, the scene switches to an animation of a man in a chair reading to his kid, saying “And then, as all hoped appeared to be lost, the streets were suddenly filled with mounted warriors sporting the most beatiful battle dress of a thousand different colors in a scene so magnificent, it could never in your life be shown in a low budget film such as this (Notice my mouth isn’t moving, either). Suddenly, the Earth Spilt open, and…” Animation of the giant cat falling down a huge sewer pipe and eventually evening up in a giant meet grinder.
Nice use of the idea. But you can get away with that kind of stuff as a comedy.
Another example of a deus ex machina that worked is the Coen Brother’s The Hudsucker Proxy.
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At the end of the movie, when our hero, Norville, has fallen from the Hudsucker building and is plummeting to his death on the pavement fifty-plus stories below, the old janitor who works in the building sticks his broom handle into the mechanism of the building’s clock… and freezes time. Meanwhile, Norville, suspended in mid-plummet, is visited by an angel who tells him how to solve all his problems. And yet, the film still works.
The movie Snake Eyes has a pretty good case of DEM when a windstorm (IIRC) knocks over this big ball on a statue that rolls towards the antogonist and knocks him out, or something like that.
And althopugh I have not seen it, I was told The Ice Storm* also has it. Something about a girl being struck by lightning. Maybe someone else knows the details.
When I brought up t"the Usual Suspects", I was talking about Soze’s using the others as a:
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Human Shield to get at his enemies and kill the man he was after.
He used them to track his prey and as bullet soaks to take them down. And then as an alibie.
This was the “Model UN/Lord of the Flies” episode. The voiceover at the end was something like “The children continued to live on the island until they were rescued by, oh, we’ll say Moe.” I don’t think this is DEM as much as it is a case of running out of time. Still a cop-out, though, as was the “pledge break” during the Missionary Homer episode. An actual DEM from The Simpsons would be God raining on Ned’s roof to extinguish the fire caused by Homer.
I don’t consider the Ruby Slippers to be DEM either, because Dorothy knew from the outset that they “must be very powerful” as Glinda says. Glinda herself is more of a DEM since she shows up at the end and spills, although I still don’t think I’d call her a DEM as much as I would a BIG FIBBER.
Something I would consider an example of DEM used to decent effect was Willow from BtVS figuring out how to de-rat Amy by asking for written instructions from the aether (“Reveal-ay”? Is that Latin?).
Nope, definitely not DEM. Operating in some god-like way (e.g., untouchable, invincible, etc.) is not the same thing as swooping in at the last moment and saving the day. For a blatant cinematic example, check out “Mighty Aphrodite.”
I’m not sure I have the concept 100% clear, but in the Hudsucker Proxy (spoiler)
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I don’t think this was the case. The blue letter that gave Norville a second change was introduced at the very beginning of the film as the letter Norville was supposed to be delivering to the head of the company. That letter served two purposes and it was forgotten about until it’s second purpose was needed at the end of the film when he jumps out of the window. Although it wasn’t forshadowed it was introduced in the beginning
The Blue Letter is what made the DEM ending work, because Norville could have gotten out of his predicament without the divine intervention. However, the Coens decided against having him just reach into his pocket and say, “Oh, that Blue Letter I forgot about,” and instead unexpectedly injected a supernatural element to the film. However, the entire climax is clearly a deus ex machina. Moreover, it is a deliberate play on the concept of DEM, providing both a literal God (the janitor) and a literal machine (the clockworks) to save Norville’s life. I think the Coens were doing exactly what the OP was asking about: creating a DEM ending that was dramtically satisfactory.
There is no deus ex machina (a simple, unexpected resolution that is not derived from previous plot or character development) in The Ice Storm. One of the characters, a boy played by Elijah Wood, is electocuted in a freak accident when a downed power line that is dancing around contacts the guard rail on which he is sitting. It isn’t a deus ex machina because 1. It doesn’t resolve any of the problems the family had been dealing with 2. The character had been doing some pretty dangerous things for quite some time that night, including jumping on an ice covered diving board, 3. Several other characters had been engaging in dangerous behavior (drunk driving on ice covered roads, giving someone a dangerous combination of narcotics and alcohol) and 4. The opening voiceover implies that someone is going to die during the course of the story being told, and there is an indirect reference to the event near the beginning of the story. Nah, there’s been some serious foreshadowing going on here for quite some time.
The deus ex machina can work, eg in Lord of the Flies. Virtually any story that ends with “It was only a dream” (with the exception of *The Wizard of Oz *, which had plenty of hints all along that Dorothy was dreaming everything) is a deus ex machina. In most cases, though, it just indicates that the writer could not come up with a satisfactory resolution or a lack of courage in the strength of a story to earn a downbeat ending.
) ended the whole conflict like a God from the Machine. Yet at the same time, the audience recognized that he was not a god, that it was not contrived, but had been built up and up from the beginning.