Divine intervention in fiction, Part 1
The challenge of avoiding deus ex machina resolutions
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In the real world, many people have given testimony as to the reality of divine intervention—through answered prayers, for example, or the appearance of some kind of angel (guardian or otherwise) in a moment of great need. Not unexpectedly, then, divine intervention is a trope that appears in religious and/or spiritual fiction (even if it’s just a character’s hope for intervention as we saw in recent posts about Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret).
Incorporating actual (rather than hoped-for) intervention into a story demands a degree of sensitivity lest it becomes a mere deus ex machina. As you probably know, this Latin phrase means “a god out of the machine,” where “god” can be God or any other higher power appropriate to the fictional world. This device originated in Greek theater in a literal sense when actors playing gods were lowered by crane onto the stage to resolve a conflict “from above.”
In literary terms, a deus ex machina refers to any solution to a story problem—be it an object, event, or character—that conveniently appears out of nowhere and for no good reason. Such solutions bear no relationship to the action of the characters or even to the overall development of the plot, which often indicates a degree of authorial laziness. And without that connection to character action and without any explanation as to “why now?” those solutions effectively characterize God, divine agents, and any other higher power as merely whimsical.
In this series, then, we’ll take a look at the implications of divine intervention in stories and what is needed to make it work well, using a variety of examples of intervention that works well and intervention that doesn’t.
“God-mode” ruins the story
Video games sometimes have what’s called a “God mode” (or cheats) in which the player has complete control over everything that happens. One command is sufficient to completely heal one’s avatar (the in-game character), grant any special power or item, teleport anyone anywhere, and otherwise reset or manipulate the world however one wants. Such capabilities are usually created for the benefit of programmers, who need “backdoor” access to easily test every aspect of the game without having to slog their way through the challenges that players must face. For players, however, taking away the challenges takes away all the fun: playing in God mode makes the game too easy and it quickly becomes boring.**
Divine intervention in fiction offers a kind of “God mode” for authors. As creators of the story and the story world, authors always have God-like powers: they can make anything happen whenever they want. The trick is that readers shouldn’t ever be reminded of the author’s omnipotence. Readers should be immersed in the story world and engaged with the protagonist’s quest to achieve their story goals through trials and tribulations.
As Daniel Schwabauer teaches in the One Year Adventure Novel curriculum:
The value of your story goal is determined by the suffering your hero endures in order to attain it. … Suffering is the key to establishing value. It is the currency of your story world. Without it you cannot buy the respect of the reader. Without it, the story goal won’t matter. Even if the hero succeeds in his quest, we won’t care. The quest itself will have seemed too easy, and therefore not worth doing in the first place. (The One Year Adventure Novel: The Compass (textbook), Clear Water Press, 2014, page 60.)
Stories, in other words, are built upon things not being easy for the hero. Take away the struggle and you take away the story.
Pulling a deus ex machina, especially through divine intervention that bears no relationship to character actions, suggests that an author wrote him- or herself into a corner and can’t see any other way to resolve the situation without going back and making significant revisions earlier in the story. With deadlines looming, authors don’t always have the luxury of such a degree of editing. So, sometimes they do the literary equivalent of a football quarterback throwing a “Hail Mary” pass—toss a deus ex machina out there and hope that the rest of the story is strong enough to carry readers through without serious face-palming.
Tolkien’s eagles
An oft-cited example of deus ex machina is the timely intervention of the eagles in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Like the character of Tom Bombadil, the eagles come across as agents of some kind of higher power: they’re somewhat detached from the mundane concerns of Middle Earth, they seem immune to both Sauron’s and Sarumon’s magic, and when they do get involved they prove superior to Sauron’s Nazgul and their dreaded fell beasts. That makes them available to Tolkien as convenient problem-solvers.
In the whole of The Lord of the Rings, the eagles intervene not once but three times:
Gwaihir the Windlord, lord of the eagles, “came unlooked-for to Orthanc” to rescue Gandalf from his imprisonment at the hands of Saurumon (Chapter 2 of Book 2 in The Fellowship of the Ring, page 261 of the Kindle edition).
Gwaihir, again unbidden, rescues Gandalf from the mountain-top of Celebdil after his battle with the balrog (Chapter 5 of Book 3 in The Two Towers, page 502 of the Kindle edition).
Gwahir and all the other eagles just appear, without Gandalf or anyone else having called for their assistance, to turn the tide in the climactic battle before the Black Gates (Chapter 10 of Book 5 and Chapter 4 of Book 6 in The Return of the King, pages 893 and 948).
The first appearance is understandable. Gwahir, as a higher being, is perhaps in communion with other pseudo-omniscient beings (such as Galadriel) who alerted him to Gandalf’s predicament. Gwaihir, in fact, tells Gandalf, “I was sent to bear tidings, not burdens,” (261) without indicating by whom. And because his appearance is for Gandalf’s sake only, we can accept that there’s likely a special relationship at work here. (The 2001 movie version of this scene adds a moth through whom Gandalf calls for help, making his rescue a direct response to that appeal.)
The second appearance is also understandable as it’s again for Gandalf’s aid only. Gwaihir’s appearance is mentioned only briefly and doesn’t have any real bearing on the overall plot of the story. That’s perhaps why the 2002 movie version leaves this bit out entirely.
The third appearance is more problematic because nowhere in the story (or the movie) do we see Gandalf requesting aid during the battle, and given that the army of men had to march for several days to reach the Black Gates, the eagles had plenty of time to be there from the start had Gandalf contacted them. Perhaps again the eagles are in communion with some other power such that they just know when to make their appearance, but Tolkien doesn’t tell of such. The eagles just show up to save the situation.
This intervention leaves one with the impression that Tolkien wrote himself into a difficult place and realized that he was pitting a small army of men (from Gondor and Rohan) against overwhelmingly superior forces. He’d already decimated the former in the Battle of the Pelennor Fields, and although he also destroyed Mordor’s armies in that scene, he probably realized that Sauron still had a great many reserves available to him. So, unless Tolkien wanted to go back and rewrite other parts of the stories to suitably weaken Mordor’s host, the only other option remaining to him was to bring in some reinforcements on the side of the Gondor and Rohan.
And the eagles were about the only option where reinforcements were concerned. As Tolkien’s appendices reveal, the other allies of Gondor and Rohan—the Elves and the Dwarves—were already engaged in battles of their own. Nor was there sufficient time for them to make the journey from their lands to the Black Gates. The eagles, on the other hand, could move swiftly and, given their relationship with Gandalf, it’s not unreasonable that they’d offer aid. It’s just never explained.
Thus, Tolkien probably felt justified in pulling this particular deus ex machina,1 and given that the rest of The Lord of the Rings is so strong and engaging, I think readers easily grant Tolkien an allowance.
Picard’s God-like choice in Star Trek: Generations
A similar situation occurs in the movie Star Trek: Generations, which doesn’t concern divine intervention per se but does involve the character of Picard having a God-like power to intervene in the story world.
The main plot of the movie revolves around the efforts of the hero, Captain Picard (played by Patrick Steward), to foil the ambitions of the villain, Soran (superbly acted by Malcolm MacDowell). Soren is obsessed with getting back to the extra-dimensional reality called the “Nexus,” from which he was forcibly yanked at the beginning of the story. His obsession stems from what he experienced in the Nexus, which is explained by the character Guinan, who was also ripped away with Soren. The Nexus, she says:
…[is] like being inside joy, as if joy were something tangible and you could wrap yourself up in it like a blanket. And never in my whole life have I been so content.
Soran’s obsession echoes the real-life quest for Satchidananda, as explored in Everyone is seeking God but most don’t know it: he seeks everlasting joy like the rest of us, making him a deeply sympathetic villain (and one of my all-time favorites). As a villain, of course, he carries this relatable quality to the extreme, shedding all moral conscience in pursuit of his goal. His extremism is demonstrated about a third of the way into the movie when he destroys a star—and thus its entire stellar system and presumably all life inhabiting its planets—in order to steer the Nexus to a place from which he can reenter. When Picard discovers that Soran is planning to destroy another star—and in the process obliterate a planet that’s home to 230 million pre-industrial humanoids—he sets off to intercept and stop the villain from launching his second star-destroying missile.
Picard initially fails in this attempt but is swept into the Nexus along with Soran, where he delights in the opportunity to live out every joy he ever dreamed about, such as having a family. In the timelessness of the Nexus, too, he learns that he can go forward or backwards in time however he wishes. All joy, it seems, will be his, just as Guinan had said. That joy, however, is tainted by the memory of what it cost, which forces Picard to realize that he could never truly enjoy an eternal existence in the Nexus.
He then learns that he can leave the Nexus if he so chooses and that he can also choose to return to any place in the universe at any time, past, present, or future.
The screenwriters thus gave Picard a truly God-like power about when and where to intervene in the lives of others. And Picard has plenty of reasons why he should deliberate about this choice.
For one thing, he’s in a place where he literally has all the time in the universe to ponder his options. Second, when we consider the whole canon of Star Trek: The Next Generation that precedes this movie moment, Picard has surely witnessed a long stream of tragedy and suffering that he could have the power to alleviate (such as everything to do with the Borg and the meaningless death of Tasha Yar in the early episode, Skin of Evil, to name just a few). And even limiting ourselves to the context of Generations alone, consider what’s already happened:
The embattled Enterprise has crash-landed elsewhere on the planet, hurting if not killing people in the process.
Earlier, Picard watched his chief engineer, LaForge, get kidnapped by Soren and transported to the rogue Klingon warship.
Before that, Picard saw Soren destroy the first star and its entire stellar system, possibly destroying another civilization.
And only a day or two previously, Picard was utterly heartbroken to learn that his brother and his beloved nephew on Earth were killed in a fire.
But, when Picard is given this choice, we’re already about 80% through the movie’s allotted screen time and the writers knew they had to move quickly to the final showdown. Thus, they have Picard choose—with literally zero deliberation—to return to the planet maybe a half-hour before Soran launches his missile. He also learns that he can enlist the help of the legendary Captain Kirk, who was caught in the Nexus at the beginning of the film, thereby changing the outcome of his previously unsuccessful confrontation.
This choice is all well and good for bringing the movie to a heroic conclusion, which includes Kirk’s noble self-sacrifice and on-screen death. To do anything else—even to have Picard stop and think for a few seconds—would have killed the movie’s tension. And sending Picard back any earlier would leave no story to tell at all. So, the writers did about the only thing they could do, and the rest of the movie is engaging enough that most viewers—especially seeing the movie for the first time in a theater with all the sound, music, and effects—didn’t even notice Picard’s uncharacteristic squandering of his power in the moment. By the time they thought about it, the movie was over and they were ready to get on with the next activity.
Written stories must withstand tighter scrutiny
Such is the advantage of the medium of film over written stores. Although well-crafted stories are often very engaging, readers always have the ability to pause, ask questions, and go back and review pages they’ve already read. In the case of divine intervention, then, or even a choice like Picard’s, authors will do well to provide at least some reason why the intervention happens when it does and not at some other time that would seem better for all the characters involved. Authors must also preserve character agency in the process.
We’ll take up these matters in Part 2. Until then, as always, your comments are welcome.
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The Harvard Lampoon parodied this contrivance in Bored of the Rings, where the chief eagle (Gwahno) that appears to rescue Frito (Frodo) and Spam (Sam) at a most opportune moment is emblazoned with “Deus ex Machina Airlines.” Tolkien himself acknowledged the eagles as a problem and that used them sparingly, as explained on Wikipedia.