The Hero’s Journey + Deus Ex Machina
How Disney is killing stories for a whole generation to come
I have recently been caught up in a sort of Disney Fever by the launch in my home country of Disney+, the giant company’s online streaming service that has shaken the streaming market to the core since its launch.
Much of said fever had to do with The Mandalorian, the new(ish) Star Wars-based live-action that took the world by storm late last year by means of introducing the world to one of the cutest and scariest puppets of all time: Grogu (commonly known as Baby Yoda).
Bear with me if you’re not a Star Wars aficionado or even a Disney fan like myself. What I’m talking about here has bigger stakes than merely the future of a multibillion-dollar franchise from a hundred-billion dollar company; it might actually have to do with how we — as humans — have changed the way we convey stories that may very well shape entire generations to come, fundamentally transforming the way we think and act, as a society.
I’m going to start by showing you I’m not blowing this out of proportion.
Stories have been the best way humans discovered to pass on knowledge: from the cave drawings that date 30,000 years back to oral tradition to the written norm to the new era of multimedia, storytelling is the bulk of all there is. Literally everything — from tribal traditions or societal norms to science — has mainly been transmitted through the means of stories. From a person’s character to the whole culture of a nation, the stories people hear have the power to shape their entire existence, whether it be consciously or not.
Just think about how many people’s lives throughout history have been affected by the Dialogues of Plato or the Bible, or — to get to the point we’re heading — Disney’s children’s movies.
Now — for the uninitiated — The Hero’s Journey is one of the main tropes used in storytelling. It talks about an individual (the hero) who is led from his known world into a journey and returns transformed. In the words of Joseph Campbell, a literature academic whose work The Hero with a Thousand Faces has popularized the expression, The Hero’s Journey may be summarized as follows:
A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.
Does it ring a bell?
It should, because every other story on books, comic books, movies, television series, or any other storytelling media either is or begins with the playbook Hero’s Journey.
The Odyssey? Check!
Batman? Check!
Luke Skywalker? Check!
One might say The Hero’s Journey has defined the way the entertainment industry has entertained us, from the Greek tragedies to Christopher Nolan’s mind-bending blockbusters.
And I’m not here to say we’re done. The Hero’s Journey will probably be entertaining mankind for as long as we exist and — even if it might not be some people’s favorite technique, including myself — it has done a great job at doing so.
What I am here to say is that another kind of trope, one that’s been plaguing our stories for far too long, has come to be the go-to motto of the new generation of storytelling and has been ruining most of the Hero’s Journeys we have been so accustomed to enjoying: the dreaded Deus Ex Machina.
Being a Latin calque from an ancient Greek expression, roughly translating to “God from the Machine”, Deus Ex Machina is a plot device whereby a seemingly unsolvable problem in a story is suddenly and abruptly resolved by an unexpected and unlikely occurrence.*
The Deus Ex Machina has been widely spread out through the old Greek tragedies, where Gods would suddenly descend from the Heavens and meddle with human affairs. But its criticism has been almost as old as the device itself, labeling it too convenient and overly simplistic and finding strong detractors in the likes of Aristotle, Horace, and Friedrich Nietzsche.
In modern times, in a world where Gods no longer seem to share the same terrestrial worries as men, the use of such a tool has been increasingly vilified and ofttimes mocked by audiences and writers, such as in an instance when Batman rids himself of a shark attached to his leg by asking Robin for his Shark Repellent Bat Spray!
What does Disney have to do with it?, you might ask.
Well, it’s no news that Disney has gathered under its belt most of the world’s greatest sources of entertainment in what we generally regard as pop culture. From the Brothers Grimm’s fairy tales to George Lucas’ Star Wars and Marvel Comics to the highly controversial Lion King, the company’s productions are amongst the most-watched films in the world since the beloved Mickey Mouse made its debut in 1928. It is fair to say that many children — and adults alike — have grown to love Disney’s characters and stories and that these stories have influenced and molded them into the people they are.
To me, the frequent use of the Deus Ex Machina plot twist route in its productions is a true disservice in the sense that it shows people — and children, most of all — that the “God in the Machine” is the rule and that acting upon things, working hard and persevering are not really worth it since fate, chance, luck, talent and yes, even gods are the real forces that drive stories.
Well, ok, but how is Disney’s using it?
This is where it gets tricky.
Many defendants of the Deus Ex Machina gadget say it can’t really be called out if had been foreshadowed or predicted in any way. I would argue that foreshadowing and predicting potential twists is not really the place of the audience — especially a young one –, even though it could make for a fun pastime.
To illustrate, I’ll set up a couple of examples starting with the latest iteration of a Disney classic turned to live-action and finishing up with the season 2 finale of the series The Mandalorian.
[SPOILER ALERT]
EXAMPLE 1: Warrior or Witch?
In the new live-action from the Disney classic Mulan, we see a young woman standing up to the norm by secretly enlisting to the Chinese imperial army disguised as a man and, in the end, saving the emperor and restoring her family’s honor.
Though a beautifully executed coming-of-age and a true Hero’s Journey story, the live-action Mulan has in its protagonist’s seemingly unabashed powers its own demise. Once the only threat to Mulan is removed by the witch giving her life to save her, the movie is just as good as done. And it doesn’t matter that her powers were shown since the beginning of the movie.
EXAMPLE 2: The Jedi Trick
The Mandalorian and crew invade Moff Gideon’s ship to rescue The Child. They plan to neutralize the new all-powerful dark troopers, rescue the kid and seize control of the vessel. They do a pretty good job at that except the dark troopers are impervious to the freezing cold temperatures of space (sort of like Leia) and come back to tear down the double-paned blast doors and kill them. All is lost… but wait: an X-Wing arrives. It’s a Jedi and he is cutting through the dark troopers like a knife through butter. The day is saved.
In this example, we see both the Deus Ex Machina in play but also the complete waste of a great threat for the Hero to explore, one that had been hyped up for most of the season just to be reduced, in the end, to a small showing of how powerful a Jedi can truly be.
…
To sum it up, what the Deus Ex Machina does is to empty our Hero’s Journey stories, by making said journey appear less important than it would otherwise be should our heroes had taken control of the situation from what they’ve learned and experienced from it. By giving our heroes unlimited strengths or getting them safe by the means of a godly, otherworldly power, we’re robbing our readers/viewers of a truly inspiring ending, even if watching women warriors beating up tyrants and Jedi knights slashing through droids make up for great action sequences that the average spectator really want to see.
