DEUS EX MACHINA

Still reading my former teacher’s excellent manual on Crafting the Character Arc. They discussed the deus ex machina that sometimes delivers characters from their dilemmas, and how unsatisfying that is for readers and viewers.

Well… I think mileage varies. 

She’s a writing teacher, so of course she’s going to encourage writers seeking her advice to push harder and not fall back on this ancient storytelling crutch. But if it’s such poor writing to let the hand of God deliver your characters from their scariest traumas (and she makes a great argument as to why that is), why has it survived this long?

People still pray for miracles. Winning the lottery would be some welcome real-life deus ex machina action. It may make for weak storytelling, but in real life it’s more welcome than Jesus himself, who said “It is a wicked and adulterous generation that asks for a sign.” That tells you how God feels about being asked to deliver us from the relatively minor evil of our own jaded skepticism.

I drove three hours south a couple days ago to visit my dad, who prays to a god he believes is all good, bless him. I told him I thought God is neither all powerful nor all good (quoting Neil deGrasse Tyson). “No,” my dad assured me, “He is all powerful, and we’re the source of evil.” 

Right, the whole “free will” excuse that abdicates God of responsibility and leaves him clean and pure while we filthy degenerates can’t stop hurting ourselves. Nah. “I have no respect for an entity with omnipotent power and zero responsibility,” I told Dad. 

With kind respect to my father and the billions of people who believe as he does: Men who made comic books have taught us better. I argue that if God has all that power, he can afford to take responsibility for the dumb shit we do while on autopilot, or when we don’t know any better and resemble The Fool from the Tarot, or when we’re in the zone writing crazed blog posts. God forbid I take responsibility for my ugliest thoughts and actions. Hymns say to “lay it at His feet.” Well, there you go, Lord.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, if God exists, he exists in all of us. “Be who you were meant to be,” was a refrain in The Matrix Reloaded. It’s the Holy Spirit that animates you. It was God that put female souls into male bodies as a challenging, hardest-difficulty-level-of-this-shitty-Earth-game way to reveal his transcendent glory and prove to small minded dipshits that he is not restricted to their stupid binaries. I believe, if God is real, that all is his will and he, like the flawed humans made in his image, wants it all to come out for the best in the end, despite our various cruel, interfering demons.

Oh, and Satan is just God’s shadow self, by the way – the part of himself that he rejects. He wanted us to see him as this perfect, irreproachable parental figure, or flawless lover. Never mind the part of him that he forced down into the void, the part of him that hates and resents us for our stupidity, is disgusted and disappointed with our (and his own) self-centeredness.

He has mixed feelings about us, much like our parents and partners sometimes do.

I’m about to move out of my mom’s house after living with her since 2016, and the most urgent reason – apart from not wanting to be a 40 year old who lives with Mom – is that we can barely stand each other more than half the time. We’re so alike! You know how that is. We’re reflections of each other, and being the judgmental, entitled, manipulative, one-upping perfectionists that we both are, what we can’t stand in each other is a lot of what we can’t stand in ourselves. It’s easier to see it and criticize it in the other, which makes things contentious. 

One of the reasons I’m finally trying to finish Jennie’s book – 13 years after being her student – is because I’m trying to make sense of the struggles in my life, as if I’m editing another writer’s (God’s) rough draft of my first hand experience. 

I’ve lived through something that changed me irrevocably, and not for the better. Or rather, I’m learning about the Dramatic Curve to summon the creativity to find a way through; to what was positive about it, or what positive changes I can aim for as a direct result of the pain I experienced (and caused).

A part of me senses that this is somewhat delusional, but I’ve also learned that a small degree of delusion is needed if one is to persevere day after day in what feels like their most meaningless and despairing stretch of life.

Lastly, I have this theory that what we think of God might just be a race of aliens (maybe closer to angels) that’s watching us for our stories. Sometimes they interfere to kick up the difficulty level, as if they are editing our stories to be more challenging and therefore, interesting. I can’t find it anymore but I once read somewhere on this deep rabbit hole of a site that the way to kind of manipulate the universe into showering you with power and other cool stuff is to “be interesting;” make oddball choices and take whacky risks. This was years before Everything Everywhere All At Once came out. 

Maybe this is why there’s not a lot of deus ex machina in real life, though it would totally hit different for us, the characters. There might be a faction of alien watcher angels that has awakened to how unethical it’s been to manipulate our fates for their entertainment over the last several thousand years, and they advocate for a new era of informed human consent – it’s not enough to sneak cryptic consent forms to us through magical thinking anymore.

Still with me? It’s okay if you’re not. I get it. I’m just another crazy person talking shit on the Internet.

One thing I got out of Chuck Palahniuk’s Invisible Monsters was what the most despicable character in that book suggested: God is just watching TV, flipping through the channels of our stories. He said something about how our free will renders God a helpless, passive consumer of our lives/stories.

Well, I’m asking God for his helping hand. I asked years ago for him to be a more proactive collaborator in my story, and the sense I got was a resounding YES PLEASE THANK YOU LET’S DO THIS, as if my God – my personal puppeteering alien or committee of angels or whatever – is among those storytellers advocating for informed human consent and was happy as shit to be invited. 

What followed was the most painful disappointing disaster of my adult life. Stupefying drama that I was totally unprepared for.

So now, I find that it’s up to me to pick up the pieces. My God, the writer, would hold me to at least the same standard as my former teacher: no deus ex machina shit like instantly shredding up a revenge bod, looking younger and accumulating wealth. That’s cheating, and as a discerning consumer of stories, my alien angel writer god wants to see me earn my resolution.

Anyway, I’ve started reading Paradise Lost because I’m pissed off about all of this and Milton’s heroic story about Satan is giving me life.