E. C. Koch's Reviews > The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man

A slow-moving, gnomic version of Barthes’ Mythologies, The Mechanical Bride is an early attempt by McLuhan to reckon with postwar America’s totalizing consumer culture. Here, McLuhan pairs cultural artifacts – mostly ads, some comics – with mini-essays that sort-of analyze and sort-of philosophize whatever it is that’s under scrutiny. If there’s a single takeaway from this, it’s that advertisements, the spear-tip of consumerism, promise individualism while effecting homogeneity, promise freedom (often literally) while effecting enslavement to an ideology of perpetual consumption. However sympathetic I am to that idea, this is nevertheless, for want of a clear thesis, tough going. It is also – seventy years after publication – a victim of its own success, by which I mean that the revelatory, shocking truths of 1951 are, today, well-understood. McLuhan’s ideas are, in other words, wholly dissolved into the culture, making him both worth reading and a pain to read.