“any resolution to a story which does not pay due regard to the story's internal logic and is so unlikely it challenges supension of disbelief, and presumably allows the author to end it in the way he or she wanted”. (From the *wikepedia* website.)
I want to see if I can come up with some representative examples.
SPOILERS coming***
I’m going to say that the movie Training Day, has a whopper of a D.E.M.
Toward the end of the movie, Denzel Washington’s bad cop character abandons his rookie partner Ethan Hawke in the hands of some Latino tough guys who have been left with the task of taking him out. Hawke’s character simply knows too much.
So, the Latino guys are about to kill Hawke, and a little pink wallet falls out on to the floor. It turns out that the rape victim Hawke saved earlier in the movie happens to be, of all the millions of people living in L.A., one of the tough guy’s cousin. He verifies that Hawke did indeed rescue the girl and decides to let him go free!
So, now the stage is set for Hawke to meet up with Denzel for the story’s final showdown.
This is an example of D.E.M., right? I’d like some other examples. Why? I have school work that I should be doing now but I just can’t get started. This seems much more interesting.
In “The Dark Crystal,” the two gelflings fall off a cliff and are saved when it turns out the female has wings – something never mentioned before.
There was also the Star Trek where Spock thought he was blind, but remembered at the last minute that it was just his extra eyelid closing (how the hell do you forget that?)
There are far better examples of DEM than this. While it is rather far-fetched, I think to be truely DEM it would have to be something like, “the wallet of a girl which he kept after having saved her 5 years ago during his first year on the squad.”
In the situation actually IN the movie, you did see him save the girl. And it’s a result of that action that saves him in the end.
RealityChuck gave what was probably one of Star Trek’s biggest whoppers, but really any episode where they whip out the Particle of the Week would qualify.
This is along the lines of an extremely contrived plot device. Not exactly a D.E.M., since the rape victim was already established. But, it’s close.
Deux ex Machina is Greek for “God in the Machine”, and literally means, the Gods come down from heaven and rescue the hero from his predicament, right when he’s at wit’s end. In ancient Greek plays, this was standard for the third act. Because their culture believed in fate, instead of self-determinism. So the Gods always had to bail out the hero at the end, every time.
With our current culture and style of literature that prizes the individual, the deus ex machina doesn’t work anymore, although that doesn’t stop bad writers from using it anyway. For instance, let’s take those old Saturday matinee “cliffhangers” – the hero’s trapped in a plane, which is about to crash. Suddenly, he locates a parachute under the seat. Classic DEM.
Or, more recently…Harry Potter pulls Godric Gryffindor’s sword out of the Sorting Hat and stabs the basilisk to death, despite having no fencing training and NO indication beforehand that such a sword exists. J.K. Rowling must have written that scene on a deadline.
Deux ex machina wasn’t universal in Greek tragedy – Sophocles never used it, for example. And sometimes having the gods intervene in the ending actually made perfect sense, as in the Oresteia. Just so that nobody thinks the Greeks were total tools.
A good example of a deux ex machina movie ending is Brazil … well, up until the real ending, of course.
To careful readers/watchers, this example is disqualified for the same reason as Training Day:
(book AND movie) Dumbledore tells Harry that at Hogwarts, there will always be help made available to those who need it. He also sets Fawkes up as his agent by mentioning how loyal Fawkes is to him.
(book only) The sword is tied to the plot earlier in the book when Harry doubts that he was put in the right House. Dumbledore tells him that Godric’s sword was offered to him because he is a true Gryffindor, thus dispelling his doubt.
I’m with you on the whole “no weapons training” thing, though.
I always thought Ransom used this device to a liberal extreme. On two separate occasions (IIRC), the kidnappers go through some convoluted procedure to avoid detection and/or render the FBI unable to trace the paths of the money and/or suspect.
The steps the bad guys go through are clever, thorough, and never suggested as being fallible. We never see the FBI tracking these moves, never see how they improvise in their methods to overcome these obstacles. In fact, we barely see them at all in these sequences. But, when the “package” meets the final destination: TA-DA! They’re there, the FBI to the rescue. How? It’s never explained. Somehow, with all these countermeasures and diversionary tactics, the FBI was able to foil the plan–but we never see by what means nor are given an explanation after-the-fact, so it comes across like a huge DEM.
Ron Howard, who directed Ransom, said in a recent Entertainment Weekly that the advisors they hired for the film had to keep tight lips sometimes. They were afraid that real crooks might get ideas, so the writers et al never really got the goods.
That’s pretty vague, and barely works to explain why Fawkes showed up in final battle at all. By that logic, you could have the Wizard of Oz sweep down on a magic broomstick and carry Harry away.
Doesn’t count, because that scene took place AFTER the final battle. You can’t explain away a deus ex after it’s already happened.
Keep in mind, I like the Harry Potter series. But Rowling’s always had a problem with endings, and Book Two was a particularly sloppy one.
The worst one I can think of is in the Sergeant Pepper movie, where at the end of the movie the hero is dead and the bad guy has won, until Billy Preston magically undoes it all. His character isn’t even so much as mentioned in the film before that moment, and nobody even hints that there might be such a thing as magic.
KGS, all I was saying was that something happened in the plot chronologically BEFORE the ending ( you know what I mean)that was related to the ending itself. My impression from the definition in the OP, as well as SuperNova’s refuting of the Training Day example, was that DEX only applies if it is something that has never once been mentioned or suggested by previous events in the story, it’s just something completely out of the blue that makes you scratch your head and go; “Where did THAT come from?”
The CoS ending makes more sense in the light of the whole story, not less (as it would if a DEX was used).
I’m not one of those people who thinks Rowling is Gawd, I still thinkSuperNova’s point is relevant.
And it’s even more of a rip-off because they had just finished that moving funeral for strawberry fields(complete with “You’re gonna carrry that weight”).
Then when everything goes back to as it was before, you feel emtionally cheated.
Babylon 5 where he’s falling down a pit with a Nuclear explosion going on over head but he’s saved by a god like being in the pit
Signs, water kills the aliens and ‘oh his lungs were closed’ (though that’s borderline I know)
Dark City, he manages to over come the builders of the machine using it’s powers against them??? Why is he so much stronger then the ones that built it and used it all thie time
Evil Dead, Destroying the book undoes the demons? Why?
Switch, my baby loves me rolls eyes
The Sixth Sense, Just talk to them and it’s all ok (this one really pisses me off)
South Park: Bigger longer etc, Kenny wishes it all away
One thing I liked about Green Mile is it’s the ultimate anti DEX
