Deus Ex Machina
Does art imitate life or does art plot life?
We live in a world of illusion, truly. The monologue from William Shakespeare’s pastoral comedy “As You Like It” says it plainly:
All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts…
What makes us “players” in this sense? We are players because we follow the script written by others for our lives. Like monkeys in captivity we have been trained that, when things appear on the surface to be impossible, threatening our self-defined, self-desired well being we scurry after something or someone else to fix what has broken our peace. However, our lives are no longer even “self-defined.” Over time we have been told what a good, happy life looks like. Even now we are being instructed what future happiness looks like for humanity – ‘you will own nothing and you will like it.’
We have been programmed by the ‘program’ of ‘prop’aganda (prop-agenda) for many generations. Not the least of which has been television ‘programming’ through use of the contrived plot device called the “Deus Ex Machina,” or “God from the machine.” When everything looks hopeless, we have come to expect some unexpected force to swoop in and save the day that has not until the moment of crisis been part of the storyline.
Such plot devices originated in the ancient Greek theater. Using a pulley system (the ‘machine’), at the moment of doom, a character representing a god was lowered into the scene and removes in some god-like way the threat.
In the 1939 film “The Wizard of Oz” the Wicked Witch is defeated by the accidental splashing of water on her – an unexpected and sudden weakness we, much less the characters in the story that were saved, were not made privy of before the scene/event of her demise.
In “The Return Of The King”, Sam and Frodo are slated to fry atop the speeding flow of molten lava – a predicament they most certainly saw as the risk to save Middle Earth. Yet, in the nick of time, the giant Eagles swoop in and rescue the pair.
We of course go to the movies expecting a good, dare I say ‘happy’, ending. There are many (more and more myself included) who see the use of this plot device as evidence of weak writing. The storyteller gets his protagonist backed into a corner; the hour is late, the writer tired, but the story, the book, must get finished. But how shall she end the story? Ah! the good ‘ol Deus Ex Machina.
The list of modern movies (a lot of them classic science fiction e.g. “War of the Worlds” and these days regurgitated comic book stories) is a long one. But the point of this post is not the weak use of such ploys to end a hero story and save the day with overarching ease.
As I mentioned above we have been programmed how to view our world. I have another post started on the subject of the ‘fable convenue,’ or, ‘history is but a fable agreed upon.’
My wife and I have been watching the series “The Last Kingdom.” At the end of the third season, King Alfred, frail and at the end of his life, talks to Uthred (the primary protagonist) in private. The King, over the years, through countless battles against the heathen Danes, has chronicled (written down) the history of the making of a united England. As the story has been displayed on the screen, Uthred has been singularly instrumental in every achievement “the king” has made against the Danes. But Uthred, born a Saxon and yet raised a Dane, is an impossible part of England’s recorded history. King Alfred, therefore, tells Uthred point blank that he, Uthred, has been intentionally left out of that chronicle, his legacy, as far as posterity is concerned, will be absent, he will never have existed, despite his key role in the very making of that history.
This of course is a movie production based on the series by the same name by Bernard Cromwell, and how much dramatization was added by Cromwell to his otherwise historical accuracies of the time period is unknown (to me, anyway). But the above scene got me to thinking. I noticed one detail from that scene that I think applies here.
Through the years covered by the first three seasons, which were many, the King recorded events “as they happened,” or, more accurately, immediately afterward. He did not, years later, look back and try to remember events. In most cases he was present at the battles, he experienced the warfare. In that respect it made him an “expert” on the present battle or subject that he then set to the written word. But was it the truth? No. He confessed this himself to the man he purposely left out of his chronicle. So posterity would look back and read his “first hand account” and be left with the belief that what is written is the truth. But it is not.
We are living in a world right now (and, really always have been) where history is being written “as it happens.” How? On the television screen via maintream media, which, it has been confessed back in the 1960’s I believe, before a less-corrupt Congress, the government (via the CIA) manipulates i.e. writes the narrative i.e. writes history of current events.
And here we are, sitting in our living rooms far removed from the events being reported & recorded on the black-mirror screen and we, with little or no doubt, believe it all. We believe it because we have been duped into believing that our government has our best interest at heart. But do they? Ask yourself what president, or any politician for that matter, in your lifetime ever carried through with their campaign promises? Whatever happed to “the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help them God?”
We must stop believing – even wishing – that God, or some politician, or our sworn-to-protect-us military is going to swoop down from the rigging onto the stage of our lives and remove all of the evil corruption that threatens to destroy us.
To quote yet another show: “We’re all alone and no one is coming to save us.” Is that fatalistic thinking? No. It’s reality. Who, then, will save us if no one is coming? WE must save ourselves. WE must resist the changes that move against God and His divine plan for human evolution. It begins with us, not another – not a president, not a military force, not a court of law. WE must make the changes: First within ourselves, which will begin to make the changes we must see in our world if we are to survive.