So. I saw a movie a couple of weeks ago called Paycheck, and I wanted to know what you guys thought: How the heck can someone write a whole movie that is based entirely on a deus ex machina device?
It was kinda cute that the main character was his own "deus", but beyond that, I was really frustrated. I kept on expecting that something was going to happen that he didn't forsee, or that he was going to wrongly use one of the objects he sent himself at the wrong time, leaving him having to improvise and save the day through his own non-precognizant ingenuity...
But that never happened. He had forseen every problem he ran into over the course of the movie, and solved it for himself before he ran into it.
...so where's the story?
(Random rant:
PS: the construction "apostrophe s" is NOT valid for pluralizing nouns. I saw it on TV tonight, used incorrectly, and it just drove me NUTS. It didn't help that the girl I was hanging out with tried to explain to me that it was becoming an acceptable usage. AARGH!!!
quote:PS: the construction "apostrophe s" is NOT valid for pluralizing nouns. I saw it on TV tonight, used incorrectly, and it just drove me NUTS. It didn't help that the girl I was hanging out with tried to explain to me that it was becoming an acceptable usage. AARGH!!!
well... it IS... not that i agree with it being so...
anyways, about the actual topic at hand... can't say i've watched it, and i probably never will... i'm not much of a movie person, for this very reason.
i find that far too many movies either have no story, or have a cliched story, or have a story that is frustrating as all heck because the character never has to struggle.
why they get away with it? because the general public, the sub-human people they market to, eat it up. they do not recognize it as the garbage it is, because they don't know anything that ISN'T garbage.
books generally can't get away with it because we market to a more sophisticated sort that actually do think.
posted
Paycheck is based on a Philip K. Dick short story, so you can't blame its plot on the screenplay writer or lack of sophistication among the movie-viewing public.
I enjoyed the movie. I thought it was fun to see how the objects he sent himself ended up helping.
Incidentally, deus ex machina isn't a problem if the deus shows up at the beginning and is involved in the plot from then on. The story then becomes about how the characters react to the deus. The problem with the deus ex machina ending is that it involves something from outside the story stepping in to fix things at the end.
posted
I haven't seen it. But from the writer's perspective . . . sometimes I want deus ex machina, and I know it's a letdown, so I need a fix.
Christianity is deus ex machina. I don't evaluate it as story, so it doesn't matter. But retelling that Greatest Story Ever Told means telling a story in which God fixes the problem while the rest of us can only react.
I was recently reading the book Collapse, about social collapse. People on Easter Island, Pitcairn (pre-Bounty), Norse Greenland, Iceland, Japan, and other places, faced disaster, mostly based on deforestation or loss of resources. When they survived, they survived by careful land management, which is not exactly edge-of-the-seat plotting. When they didn't, they didn't. It's easy enough to imagine them being saved by being reconnected to trade routes, which would have been deus ex machina.
Finally, I have a time travel story in mind. The most sensible way to fix the problem of cross-time invasion: send some of your people to another time and place where they can develop better technology undisturbed, and then come back with apparently magic gizmos that win the war. It would look like deus ex machina. Tough problem.
posted
Interesting. I didn't see it that way. I saw Paycheck as an exercise in problem solving. He kept saying "work backwards" for a reason. His whole motivation was to figure out why he decided to not take any money for the job, and instead sent himself a strange packet of items. He was motivated through the story solely to solve the problem.
The way I understand it, a DEM is an unexpected solution that comes out of no where and is never even mentioned elsewhere in the story. Normally it is a cheat because the writer could not think of a valid solution for the character's problem. In my opinion, in the case of Paycheck, the time-viewing machine was the only solution that could make sense, given the information provided in the story.
Christianity may be a literal DEM, but not a literary DEM. The saving event (atonement/crucifiction/resurrection) was preceded by Messianic prophecy and sackloads of Jewish writings and musings, and is integral to an on-going story. Literary DEM is generally an unexpected, unheralded, often fantasitic saving factor in the story -- at least that is the way I have always understood it.
posted
So if I hint to the reader in advance that the characters will succeed, not through any effort of their own but because of some other powerful force, will that work?
I have done a story in which the characters survive because of such a force, but _their_ struggle was to understand the events, not to control them -- so their success was their own.
posted
Hmm, ok. I thought DeM was any force external to a story that swoops in and solves problems. I guess it could be argued that his previous (precognizant) self was not an external force, but it just seemed like one to me.
I didn't mean to imply that I didn't thoroughly enjoy the flick. I love mindless action flicks as much as snobby elitist films, and the whole range in between. It was a fun idea, but I was just hoping that at least one of the problems would require some extra ingenuity on the part of the main character, beyond figuring out what to use when. (Example: Oops! I picked the wrong object, and not only am I still in this jam, I also will later have to figure out a way to reobtain or subsitute for the object I just used... Or something similar, but better written/conceived)
Thanks for the clarification of what DeM entails.
[This message has been edited by Jeraliey (edited June 06, 2005).]
While not D.E.M., I do agree that Paycheck is a little unsatisfying and unbelievable in places. I mean really, How does he know to grab the glasses off the table when the room starts to fill with smoke? The fact that I'm not a huge Afleck fan doesn't help this movie. It was okay to watch once, but I probably wouldn't watch it again.
posted
***This whole Thread is a Spoiler, so if you haven't figured it out yet, it's too late for you***
It was basically like a James Bond type story where instead of all the flawlessness being chalked up to trained instinct, it was him foreseeing everything... although they did keep leading you on to think that he might have missed the chance to stop his death, that was cliff-hang-able...
It was basically just the usual story of a hero that comes out completely unscathed... it's not done as often anymore, but it still gets done quite a bit because people like the invulnerable hero types still...
[This message has been edited by RavenStarr (edited June 06, 2005).]
posted
Jeraliey - I agree. That would have been a nice twist in the story. "Oh no, I lost the paperclip!"
The only thing they had that came close to that suggestion was that he was almost fooled by the imposter Uma. He did have to use instincts on that one.
posted
By the by, Christianity isn't a literal Deus ex Machina either, because in Christianity God comes out of a woman rather than by means of a machine.
The term "Deus ex Machina" refers to the very early stagecraft element of using a system of ropes, pulleys, and perhaps a small crane to allow one of the actors to descend from "the sky" in order to represent a divine personage. Because the special effect was often used in place of any coherent narrative reason for such a thing to happen, it became a term of disapprobation, much like the later term "melodrama" (meaning a play in which stock musical themes are used to evoke the audience's response rather than relying on characterization, conflict, plot, etc.). Both terms refer to something that was not, of itself, bad (the original technique of Deus ex Machina is now called "stagecraft" or "special effects", and music used to evoke audience response is now called "theme track" or simply "scoreing") and the techniques themselves have survived and prospered even as the original terms for them have drifted away to mean other things.
On the subject of "perfect" precog, I assign it to the same class as "controlled" time travel. But then, I've never really liked James Bond movies either.
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