Which means “the god from the machine,” better known and easier to pronounce in the ancient Latin, “deus ex machina,” i.e., the same thing. I mean, the same thing as apò mēkhanes theós.
In any case.
Greek dramatists came up with this annoying device. Here’s how I envision it happened. A Greek dramatist whose name I can’t recall was winding up a play full of conflict and love and incest and hate when he realized he didn’t have a decent big closer. He thought about it for weeks but nothing came into his head.
One day, his producer sent a courier carrying a papyrus scroll. The writing on the papyrus said (in rough translation): “What the fuck is going on with you! We have a deadline, remember? If you don’t make the deadline, you don’t get paid. Finish the damn thing and get it to me pronto. We’re putting it on next week.”
The writer took a nap, and dreamed that a bunch of gods lined up in a (Greek) chorus which sang or intoned or chanted, “We can do this job for you!” (It was sort of like a TV ad for clog-free gutter installations.) (It was probably more melodic in Greek.)
The writer woke up and said, “Eureka!” (FYI, that’s Greek.) And wrote a thing at the end of his play where a god decends from the proscenium (one of, if not the first SFX in history), on a platform lowered by ropes, wobbles around, says some stuff, shoots his arms out and bam! our conflicted hero and an antagonist (balance was required in early Greek drama) die right in front of us, and there you have it.
Aside from having a lot of fun writing this ⇑ , I have a personal point to make. I don’t like dei ex machina. I see them as a sign of storytelling laziness. If a writer can’t resolve a plot using his own imagination, he shouldn’t be dragging gods into it.
So I don’t appreciate horror stories, or gothics, or plots using interplanetary aliens to resolve plot conflicts. (“You must believe me! Can’t you see it was an alien who killed everybody in that small town?!”)
I watched one episode of The X-Files and never watched another one.
Don’t push supernature at me. I want nature, complex nature. I want human beings doing human things, even if outrageous human things. If you give me a plot with one good guy who is dragged into a situation with multiple really bad guys, I will not tolerate a super-hero or whatever you call them flying in to take all of the rotters out with a ray gun or whatever.
Nowadays, what I want is vengeance. And vengeance can’t be delivered by cheap magic tricks.
All this is to explain, in part, why the other night I screened The Equalizer 3. And man did it satisfy my craving to see human monsters killed off right in front of me. (Also, I’ll watch anything Denzel Washington is in — except when he’s the bad guy.)
I loved the first two Equalizers. Robert McCall is aa perfected character I started to develope many years ago, when I thought I’d be writing thrillers or screenplays. My guy wasn’t as warmly loveable as McCall, though, so I never settled into him. McCall is much better.
Equalizer 3 doesn’t have the mysterious plot weavings of the first two but that’s OK, because it has villains (the Camorra) who are so violently repulsive, you can stomach their vicious doings (they have no patience at all) only because you look forward to McCall taking them all out in the end. And he does. Of course he does. He has to. For me.
I’ve probably always liked violent films as long as they’re well plotted and acted. (How many times have I re-watched the Bourne films?) But right now, my need to watch human monsters being totally wiped out — I don’t know why, maybe you can explain it to me — would consume me if it weren’t for Denzel Washington.
Thank you, Denzel. You’re my champion.