The Mechanical Bride - Facsimile Paperback – June 30, 2008

This is McLuhan's first book, originally published in 1951 and has been long out of print. It precedes his second book and cult classic 'The Gutenberg Galaxy', by a decade and a half. This is also quite unique in that it has no relationship with McLuhan's more famous theoretical ramblings.

In this book, McLuhan takes on myth-making in US society by showing how film posters, comic strips, advertisements, magazine covers, newspaper layout and articles etc., try to persuade people into something, and yet a close observation of their inherent contradictions allows you to escape their machinations.

The book celebrates deliberate misreading of commonplace things like advertising to show how the persuasive trap of mass culture/consumer culture can be escaped.

All articles in the book follow the format of article/poster/ad, its analysis and some sharp witty aphoristic observations in a boxed area that serve as liberating repartees against the messages that these products of consumer culture intend to send.

The philosophy of the book is derived from McLuhan's premise (borrowed from Edgar Allan Poe's story 'The Maelstrom') that to escape a maelstrom you need to study things going down and things that resurface and align yourself with things that resurface.

In this respect, it can be considered a jargon-free precursor of latter-day deconstructive literary and cultural criticism. And it is much more liberating and enlightening to a lay reader than jargon ridden discussions or purely vehement denuciations of the power of mass culture which don't help laymen liberate themselves anyway, because of their highly inaccessible prose.

This, McLuhan's first book, serves as a good introduction to him, since he has not yet begun to formulate his theories about media that would later make him so famous. Consequently, it is easier to read than, say, The Gutenberg Galaxy or Understanding Media. It is also much more fun.

The reader should keep in mind that this is still premature McLuhan, for he had not yet read Harold Innis's 1950 classic--which represents the true birth of media studies--Empire and Communications. This book hit McLuhan like an atomic bomb, for it completely ruptured his thinking regarding media. In The Mechanical Bride, he is still analyzing the content of the media, deciphering what the subliminal messages are saying to us unconsciously; but after reading Innis, he realized that it was not the message that was important (at least not for him) but rather the type of medium through which the message was conveyed, for Innis's discussions of how particular kinds of media affected the nature and structure of ancient empires caused McLuhan to realize that it was actually the medium that was the important thing. Whether a culture used clay or papyrus as its means of communication, Innis asserted, determined much about the fate of that culture.

With that caveat in mind, then, the reader is free to roam through these pages, observing a McLuhan that would never exist in the same way again. He comments, sometimes hilariously, on one advertisement, movie poster or magazine after the next. He has interesting things to say about genres like the Western or the soap opera (for instance, he says that the Western is the masculine equivalent to the soap opera, for its values are the opposite of those of the domestic drama) and we also find here, for the first time, his speculations on Sherlock Holmes, a theme that will recur in many of his later writings.

McLuhan at this point had read and metabolized such key thinkers for him as Lewis Mumford and Siegfried Giedion, and they are referred to often in the body of the text. (There even occurs a reference to Joseph Campbell's The Hero With a Thousand Faces; apparently the only book he ever read by Campbell, his Irish intellectual colleague who was more concerned with deciphering the messages than the media themselves). McLuhan, in The Mechanical Bride, is still feeling his way, and he is not yet sure of himself. But it is a delight for the reader to watch this great American thinker--the equivalent, easily, of any of the great French postmodernists (this book bears certain similarities, for instance, to Barthes' Mythologies)--tentatively poking his way about in the middenheap of popular culture, looking for ways in which to organize it into something one can get a grasp on.

I hope that you enjoy this book as much as I did. But do let me know if you don't.

SEE ALSO MY YOUTUBE VIDEO "MARSHALL MCLUHAN CULTURE WITHOUT LITERACY DISCUSSION BY JOHN DAVID EBERT"

--John David Ebert, author of "The New Media Invasion: Digital Technologies and the World They Unmake" (McFarland Books, 2011)

If you are reading this review, you are doing exactly what Marshall feared most and predicted back in 1969 when laying his thoughts, joys and fears of electronic media and the de-evolution of arts and humanities. Yes HUMAN-ities are soon to be completely erased from whatever fast food culture is left in 2000 and beyond. Humans slowly have evolved over time from human beings to Humans doing. And Marshall McLuhan was an early genius well aware of the dangers of our lust for quick and immediate gratification and results from all life's pleasures, lessons, fate and present moment circumstances. Unfortunately our insane need for convenience (as McLuhan predicted) will further class struggle, unemployment, depression, progress to a "un-culture" with limited & empty human expression, creativity, emotion & feeling. .We think the internet would be the next doorway to Utopia? Wrong! As Marshall points out throughout this beautifull, yet dangerously close to g! od-like premenions this e-culture will erase physical interaction & contact to family, friends, and ultimately ourselves. We will be transscribed and altered by our 100% adaptation, manipulation and masterbation of the electrons McDonalds! McAmazon! McArt! McPeople! McNothing! McGoodbye! McAbsolute clear and correct predictions and thoughts fill the pages of Mechanical Bride regarding YOU, right here, right NOW! McLuhan!, baby. Buy it online today (while you still can!) This book will strengthen your coffee shop banter while the painted canvas, beat poet, and free form jazz players are gasp for life. I think Marshall would agree that Bill Gates should be respected and consulted ASAP on how to FIX this impeding doom, similar to Andrew Carnagie way back when his workers cried for freedom. (We don't know that were slaves yet) How strange that our culture's intellectual ellites throw crass judgement upon a Gates & his world we all celebrate and beneifit from (again right! here, right now) Marhsall McLuhan knew that this would ha! ppen. He just did not know his name would be Bill. Amazon indie bookstore killers, romans and countrymen lend me your modem! buy this book NOW.