The Terminator is a God: ‘Ex Machina’ and the Tragic Hero

Ex Machina

Ex Machina and the Tragic Hero

By Z.K. Parker

When Aristotle denounced the tendency of some storytellers to resolve their plots via divine intervention in the final act, he wasn’t referring to comedies or stories about the conflict between men of virtue and vice.

J.R.R. Tolkien apparently bristled at criticisms he had sometimes used the storytelling device Deus ex Machina (“god from the machine”), a phrase coined by Aristotle re: the Greek theater’s practice of mechanically lowering a god from heaven onto the stage to resolve the matters of man. But Aristotle’s denunciation of the Deus ex Machina device doesn’t really apply to the band of pretty people holed up at Helms Deep who are rescued when the dawn breaks and a bearded white god on a horse descends from heaven to crush a bunch of uglies.

A close reading of Poetics indicates Aristotle decried the use of Deus ex Machina as part of his defense of Tragedy, a story type aimed at arousing our fear and pity by showing us how a certain figure’s particular flaw complicates his life (and the plot), often to the point of utter desolation. “It is therefore evident that the unravelling 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,’” Aristotle wrote.

Orson Welles’ 1958 motion picture, Touch of Evil, is an exemplary model of Aristotle’s Tragedy, though it doesn’t correspond to the most basic template of “tragedy” dramas. That’s mostly because the movie’s top billed star, Charlton Heston, isn’t the drama’s hero. As the federal prosecutor Miguel Vargas, Heston is not the hero but a foil to the tragic hero, perhaps even the embodiment of a Greek chorus, passively watching the drama unfold and commenting on it.

As we might expect from Welles, the movie studio star was sidelined in the drama so he himself could emerge as the tragic hero: a bent, swollen police inspector named Hank Quinlan, a man whose machinations and sins increasingly close him in.

In the movie’s last half, Vargas disappears from the movie and it’s Quinlan who provokes the compassion of Tanya and the assistant DA watching and delivering a final commentary on the tragedy. Quinlan’s sorting of people as crooks and cops turned out to be right, after all. He was “some kind of a man,” Tanya says as Quinlan’s body drifts down the Styx. 

Complaints about Touch of Evil often have to do with some viewers’ patience (or lack thereof) in following the movie’s plot. And Deus ex Machina was often deployed in a tragedy precisely because the storytellers lost control of an overly complicated plot and could not find a way to otherwise resolve it. 

Writer-director Rian Johnson has a penchant for convoluting his movies’ plotlines like string figures that, when pulled tight, resemble a simple shape, a jumble of lines and loops that ultimately appear to be a tea cup or cat’s cradle. That’s what happens in The Brothers Bloom as that 2008 movie finally twists its plot-twisty finish. Yet, in self-conscious keeping with Aristotle’s defense of tragedy, there is no Deus ex Machina in Johnson’s movie. Dying alone on the stage, Stephen Bloom is the Aristotelian tragic hero, the creator and victim of the perfect story.

In the 2007 movie, Sunshine, a traveling spaceship full of obviously flawed people are cornered one-by-one and discover what it means to face the end with no way out. Like some tragedies (or at least the Shakespearean variety), Sunshine ends and everyone is dead. But Sunshine isn’t a tragedy. And yet, the most frequent criticism of the movie pertains to its supposed Deus ex Machina: the last-act introduction of a Russian religious zealot zombie named Pinbacker who arrives from the heavens to stop the spaceship’s crew from meeting the Sun (the Son, too) with their nuclear payload.

Alex Garland, the movie’s screenwriter, took the brunt of critics’ flak for inserting Pinbacker into the narrative as a cop out. I was one of those when I first saw it. After subsequent viewings, I’ve come to see more purpose in Pinbacker, as written by Garland, a novelist and screenwriter (and now director) whose work is preoccupied with meeting God and the paradoxes of the Christian faith.

Pinbacker, after all, believes he is God, and yet he refuses to meet, or become one with, the Son. Thus at the end of Sunshine a false god descends to stop a group of people who want to kill and resurrect the Son to save the world. There’s even a disorienting finale where this deus ex machina chases crew across the surface of a cubed machine when gravity changes – up is down and down is up – and this god can’t help but fall into the Sun’s embrace.

Garland’s recent movie, Ex Machina, which he wrote (it’s also his directorial debut), is openly inspired and oriented around a reversal of the same plot device that prompted so much backlash when Sunshine was released.

In fact, Ex Machina feels belligerently determined to disrupt its own story with a Deus ex Machina, middle finger waving. The eccentric, Alpha-male inventor Nathan (Oscar Isaac) invites employee of the month, Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson), to visit his secluded compound and judge – a god-like vocation, seeing and saying, “It is good” – the creation of a new Eve (named Ava and played by Alicia Vikander).

And Caleb – a name recalling that of the Israelite spy sent into Canaan – draws Nathan’s suspicion, and the competition for dominion between the two men escalates. After several plot twists (as prescribed for a tragedy by Aristotle), Caleb learns that Nathan has brought him, a new man, into his creation to worship him (Nathan) as the creator, sustainer and destroyer of Eve. “That other line you came up with, about how if I’ve created a conscious machine, I’m not man, I’m God,” Nathan says, twisting the new man’s words.

We’ve watched enough movies to recognize Victor Frankenstein and the trouble that usually follows when he announces of his creature, “It’s alive!” And in Garland’s story, God (or his prophet, Nathan) is wrathful and a murderer who only wants a creature that can be controlled, someone to listen to his stories, someone to reflect his God-image.

Garland, the filmmaker, directs our sympathies toward Caleb, who, being neither a model of virtue or an outright villain, imagines himself as Ava’s savior, engaging in fantasies where he leads Eve out of slavery in Egypt and into the Promised Land. This is a narrative we’re accustomed to, and the audience expects it to play out just as Caleb sees it.

Enter Deus ex Machina (and spoilers). Instead of a god descending to resolve the matters of man, Garland’s humanoid creature ruins everything and ascends to Earth. Ex Machina baits the audience to think the movie will conclude happily with Adam & Eve escaping, but its literal Deus ex Machina disrupts that pattern. It’s a deliberate violation of the Hollywood screenwriting rule as well as a rejoinder to critics of Pinbacker’s entrance in Sunshine

Nathan, the only sexually active character in the movie, is—thanks Freud—stabbed by his lover in a murder scene that plays—thanks Hitchcock, disciple of Freud—like a love scene. So, Ava rises to slay her creator and entomb her savior, abandoning Eden alone, a first woman recast without reproductive organs or a father/brother/husband companion beset by what Garland depicts as the perverted and specifically male god-complex. And as in Euripides’ Medea before her, Garland’s Deus ex Machina boards a machine—a helicopter—in her exit from the story’s stage to join the gods.

If Garland’s Ex Machina expects too much of the viewer, it’s because of the expectation an audience would transfer their sympathy from Caleb, a tragic hero whose role is largely diminished in the denouement, to Ava. Though cleverly playful with the use of a Deus ex Machina in his tragedy, Garland might still be held at fault by Aristotle for the hamartia that makes his handling of the story resemble his own caricature of God: a creator who imposes his will a bit too forcefully.