Learn something: Deus ex machina

Riding the elevator up on the way to work today, one of our QA engineers mentioned to me that he had no idea how our team was going to hit a deliverable for Monday. Our devo site is in too much flux to be certain that we will stabilize it in time. Shrugging, I channeled Philip Henslowe (played by Geoffrey Rush), the hapless theatre owner from “Shakespeare in Love” and stated “it’s a mystery.” That’s when somebody else on the elevator chimed in and said, “what you need is deus ex machina.”

Boy do I work with some smart people.

“Deus ex machina” means “God from a machine” but it derives from the world of Greek tragedy (especially referring to the plays of Euripides) and refers to the use of a cheap plot device to resolve difficult situations in the drama. The Wikipedia article uses the 1978 “Superman” movie as a more modern day example. Remember when Lois Lane gets buried in her car and dies only to have Superman reverse time by flying around the globe so fast that time reversed? Superman had never previously unveiled this talent and I’m not so sure he ever used it again, it was just a bit too convenient. That’s deus ex machina.

Aristotle’s “Poetics” has this to say about the use of deus ex machina:

It is therefore evident that the unraveling of the plot, no less than the complication, must arise out of the plot itself, 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 - for antecedent or subsequent events, which lie beyond the range of human knowledge, and which require to be reported or foretold; for to the gods we ascribe the power of seeing all things. Within the action there must be nothing irrational. If the irrational cannot be excluded, it should be outside the scope of the tragedy. Such is the irrational element the Oedipus of Sophocles.