McLuhan's Wake

"We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us." Canadian communications and technology theorist Marshall McLuhan (Understanding Media [1964], The Medium is the Massage [1967]) recognized long before his academic peers that technological change automatically brought (often unforeseen) consequences: in McLuhan's eyes the famous axiom "nothing ventured, nothing gained" became "something ventured, something lost" and he spent the better part of his life sounding a clarion call to intellectual arms while at the same time trying to uncover the governing principles and laws of the brave new amorphous world of television, computers, and global communications (he coined the phrase "global village"). Of course, few people actually understood what McLuhan was saying during the '60s and early '70s (during the late '70s his thinking became increasingly muddled and cryptic until he was silenced by a stroke in 1979 and died the following year), but looking around us with the benefit of hindsight, it's not only obvious that McLuhan was a prophetic genius decades ahead of his time, but that we all--or at least all of us who dabble in cultural criticism relating to media--swim in McLuhan's wake. Interweaving the story of McLuhan's life with a detailed examination of his four deceptively simple questions regarding technology (built around the concepts of enhancement, retrieval, obsolescence, and reversal), Kevin McMahon's documentary is a thought-provoking introduction to the man and his ideas (and, for those unfamiliar with McLuhan, this will be downright mind-blowing). However, in a bittersweet twist of irony that I'm sure McLuhan would have appreciated, the way the medium is used here often distracts from the message in two ways: 1) performance artist Laurie Anderson's singsong voiceover narration (full of pregnant pauses dictated by rhythm rather than sense) is constantly fighting McLuhan's thought for attention, and 2) the decision to have commentators--including cultural critics such as Neil Postman and Harper's magazine editor Lewis Lapham, among several others--appearing on the soundtrack as disembodied voices until their faces are shown during the last few minutes is annoying (especially when someone says something demonstrably wrong--such as that McLuhan studied the Greek trivium [true] "which hadn't been done before" [false]--and you've no idea who's speaking). Still, even if McLuhan's Wake sometimes feels like a McLuhanism in the cinematic flesh--a veritable triumph of style over substance--the core of the film offers a solid (even, at times, inspired) introduction to one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century. Recommended. Aud: H, C, P. (R. Pitman)