The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man

I was very impressed by the quality of this product. I wasn't sure what to expect with "Facsimile" in the product description - I guess I expected something like a course packet from undergrad. This is a very high quality book with more of a coffee table book feel. I definitely recommend for someone having trouble getting their hands on a clean print of McLuhan's book at a reasonable price.

This book is a most excellent and of the highest quality replication of the original and I for one am grateful that it has been republished in the style and care that it has. The content is historical now but it is chilling and accurate in what it is pointing to and it is relevant to now as a marker of a historical precursor to what is happening daily in the "global village".

It takes time to read...you're wrestling with a poetic probe of the present that references an historical-construct-encyclopedia of Western thought at every step.

Delivered as described and on time. Thank you.

The premise of The Mechanical Bride is that the American dream is shot through with pathological wish fulfillment in the form of trashy delusions perpetuated by the film colony, manipulative advertising, the false promise of mechanistic technologies (popular science, modern know-how, and market research) to hoodwink unsophisticated consumers. He describes a number of corrupting influences, e.g. "the notion of distinction and culture as being a matter of consumption rather than the possession of discriminating perception and judgment," "the automatic leveling process exercised by applied science" that has equated the sexes, "the supremacy of technique at the expense of nutriment," the belief that success is measured by purchasing power, that the ultimate happiness consists in the acquisition of material goods, that culture is conferred upon those who purchase expensive and refined products, that the race to the top is so dehumanizing that the winners "arrive in a nude and starving condition." For McLuhan, popular culture is an open book of all the unconscious or accidental motivations of the American people. They are unconscious because they are environmental, i.e. they are the unchallenged a priori principles and assumption that drive the American lifestyle. But all is not lost. If we stand back and contemplate this phantasmagoria with rational detachment rather than participate in mindless conduct, we will derive solutions to bring it under control. McLuhan's genius and originality consist in applying the techniques of Freudian dream analysis to the social, cultural and economic spheres insofar as they evoke exhibits of the "American dream," and he did so with a consummate command of language, satirical wit, and the authority of unimpeachable scholarship.

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.

The "modern gal" knows that "getting ahead" means being the first on her block to articulate the ways her body and cultural practices are transformed into parts and routines -- she reads The Mechanical Bride to "stay in the know" regarding the ways that reflection on the discourse of her body can be used to advance her academic career! And "guys on their way to the top", in academic circles ranging from media history to cultural studies, tune into The Mechanical Bride to find out the latest "swinging styles" in everything from discourse analysis to popular tropes for identity production. Keep it in mind, all you Sirens and Sages of the Academy: When it "comes to success" there is "deep consolation" in knowing that the "cream of the crop" always "rises to the top" because it never "falls out of step" with the latest critical styles -- in a liberal era and place, such as our own, this really is Freedom "American Style"!

This is, of course, an icon of the fifties and most people interested in adverts and the great consumer culture thing will be interested. The only problem I have is understanding quite what the author, McLuhan, is getting at. I am not sure if he was criticising the fifties culture , or promoting it. And it is, sometimes, difficult to quite follow what he is actually saying. T'is a problem I have with many American pundits!

A must for the student of media and the lover of experimental writing - theory meets poetry meets vision.