The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man

Marshall McLuhan – 1951

"Ours is the first age in which many thousands of the best-trained individual minds have made it a full-time business to get inside the collective public mind.”

The Mechanical Bride is often looked over in Marshall McLuhan’s bibliography because it doesn’t incorporate the fully developed media theory that he would present in the two books that made him famous, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) and Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964), but in many ways it is even more significant for being one of the first studies of what would eventually come to be called ‘pop culture;’ hence laying the groundwork for the ironic, self-aware tone of the 1960s.  McLuhan examines advertisements, comics and newspaper/magazine articles by treating them as artifacts of the present; not only in terms of what they say about their creators and their target audience but how they work to produce the desired impulse in the beholder.  As in his later books, McLuhan’s tone is bemused and dispassionate, unlike Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders (1957), which takes more umbrage about our manipulation at the hands of corporate advertisers.  McLuhan’s signature “mosaic” style is already present in The Mechanical Bride; not a chronological progression but isolated essays that can be read in any order.  McLuhan acknowledges in the book that he is certainly conscious of producing an immediately obsolete work; a book about print in an age about to be dominated by television.  The book was known but not a success, with McLuhan suspecting that his hard and lucid style was too disturbing to the genteel or effete publishing world of the day.  He ended up buying a thousand copies himself and selling them on campuses and in book shops.  After McLuhan’s later fame, of course, it became a much sought-after collector’s item.  Something that particularly interested me about McLuhan’s philosophy is his attitude about activism.  He says that indignation and anger are not productive responses to oppressive cultural influences as much as derisive humor because the former elevates the enemy to a power status he/it/they may not deserve.