Have you ever been halfway through a compelling play or an engrossingly intense novel? You can't wait to find out how it's going to end. You can hardly imagine how the characters will resolve their insurmountable conflict.
Then all of a sudden, you experience the lamest ending in the world: "Deus Ex Machina." That's when something either very magical, very illogical, or very lucky happens, and all of the problems are quickly eliminated.
Loosely translated from Latin, "deus ex machina" means "God from the Machine." In dramas written in ancient Greece it was a common technique used to resolve the play's conflict. Oftentimes heroes such as Hercules would face overwhelming odds. Audiences might think, "The hero is sure to be slaughtered. There's no way he can possibly get out of this mess!" Then, Zeus would show up at the end, saving his son from certain doom. Sometimes "deus ex machina" was used to allow characters to escape their crimes. In the gruesome tragedy Medea, the title character murders her own children. However, before she can be punished, Helio's sun chariot swoops down and she flies off into the sky.
So, why is it called "deus ex machina"? During performances, actors would be lowered and raised on a crane-like device operated by a sophisticated pulley system. Hence, the term "God from the Machine" was coined because the god characters entered and exited via the large, mechanical prop.
Today, when a playwright, screenwriter, or storyteller ends with an all-too-convenient conclusion it is often frowned upon. "Deus ex machina" might be fine for a silly comedy. However, in serious works of drama, most critics and audience members want to see the protagonist succeed or fail based upon their own decisions.
Perhaps Aristotle, one of the world's earliest philosophers and theater critics, said it best:
The poet should always aim either at the necessary or the probable. Thus a person of a given character should speak or act in a given way, by the rule either of necessity or of probability; just as this event should follow that by necessary or probable sequence. It is therefore evident that the unraveling of the plot, no less than the complication, must arise out of the plot itself, [54b] it must not be brought about by the deus ex machina - as in the Medea, or in the return of the Greeks in the Iliad. The deus ex machina should be employed only for events external to the drama.
It seems I'm not the only one disappointed in the conclusion of Medea!
So remember when crafting your own story:
Do you know of a play, movie, or novel that ends with "deus ex machina"? Was it a suitable ending? Or an infuriating one? Share your thoughts in the Plays / Drama Forum.
