The Mechanical Bride's Maid

Although it was written in 1951, Marshall McLuhan's The Mechanical Bride yields numerous points and observations that are still relevant--perhaps even more relevant today. This essay intends (as The Mechanical Bride did) to fill a void that, even long after the McLuhan era, is still present in today's society. In its introduction, McLuhan's book alludes to this void as "the relatively puny offerings sponsored by schools and colleges" to counteract the devious ploys of the ever-expanding advertisement and entertainment industry (McLuhan and Zingrone 21). Though some institutions have made the attempt to educate people on these issues [a] society generally has little or no protection from the tyrant which is mass media.

Central to the attraction to, and effectiveness of the entertainment / advertisement industry is its "generation of heat not light" (21). In other words, when an erotic image is presented to an audience--either for advertisement or entertainment purposes--it is intended to produce "heat," or appeal to the all-encompassing lustful tendencies of society, as opposed to shedding "light," or educating society in order to attract and sustain an audience. [b & c] McLuhan suggests that the constant flooding of modern mass media with these presentations of the human body as sexual objects causes a widely-held perception of the human body as "a love machine capable of specific thrills" [d] (26). Furthermore, his observation that women's legs might be considered as "display objects like the grill work on a car" is not only true in its implication of the media's segmentation of the female body [e], but has also fostered an association of women with material possessions (such as the grill work on cars).[f] (24)

The mass media's bombardment of society has led to various sociological effects. In the female (and by extension the male), McLuhan believes there occurs an indoctrination or even programming of the belief that "a long-legged girl can go places"(24). It follows that, to the modern woman, the various parts of her anatomy , having been "tailored," possess real power in today's sex-oriented society.

However, in the male (but not exclusively in males), the sex bombardment yields "sex weariness." And as sexual sensation and stimulation becomes "mechanical," a further, greater, and more intense thrill is sought. [g] In what McLuhan aptly refers to as "armchair sadism," the masses (more pre-dominantly male in this instance) develop a penchant for violence, torture and destruction. [h & i] (14,27) Before stating that sexual sensation and sadism are "near twins," McLuhan refers to twentieth century psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich for proof of this armchair sadism. Reich, an advocate of regular orgasm for the mental health of men and women, believed sadism acted as a "substitute for sex" (26).

Finally, I'd like to identify the link between our society's rampant sadism to McLuhan's "armchair sadism" model, and to link our hunger for sensation to mass media sensationalism. It is an observation McLuhan makes in another work, "American Advertising," that seems to tie media into our sexual and sadistic hungers. McLuhan believes we enjoy the thrills of modern media because they act out our hidden desires for us, producing a "megalomaniac thrill" (14). As a result, a blossoming, if not explosion, of pulp "stories" are created and distributed through various media.[j & k] The popular media of television and motion pictures produce actual visual images of ideas for their audiences--an aspect not characteristic of books and literature. Ultimately, our hunger for sensation yields to sensationalism, or what McLuhan calls "ghoulishness."

A ghoul is a "legendary evil being that feeds on corpses." The use of the word "legendary" should not imply that such beings are mythical or non-existant--at least not in a discussion of mass media sensationalism. McLuhan stipulates that our all-encompassing attraction to sensation and sadism is what "draws people to the death shows of the speedways and fills the press, magazines [and television] with close-ups of executions, suicides and smashed bodies." [h & i & n & o] (29) Society feeds off these "corpses." The result of this trend toward "ghoulishness" is the large-scale production of that hybrid form of entertainment exemplified best by the tabloid media.[p]

Albeit brief in my attempt, I hope in having re-examined some of Marshall McLuhan's earlier work to have generated more "light" to combat the various forms of oppressive "heat" in today's advertisement and entertainment industry. If McLuhan, having died on New Years Eve 1980, had lived another twenty years, he would have had, no doubt, much to say about the state of mass media as we enter the new millennium. However, he did not have such longevity. Thus, it is our responsibility to make the effort to understand the new (and old) media ourselves.