My Message is the Message

I’ve been reading Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media, in class, and I was asked to do a presentation on chapters 29 and 30, “Movies” and “Radio”.

In case you don’t know who McLuhan is, he’s the guy who came up with the often misunderstood phrase ”the medium is the message”, as well as the term “global village” as we know it today.

He’s a genius, perhaps even prescient at times (his meaning of “global village” envisioned the Internet before Al Gore had the chance to invent it), and he knows it. As such his writing is dense, sometimes circular, and oftentimes not easy to understand. But like with most theoretical works, if you can get even a nugget or two or knowledge from this piece, it is definitely worth it.

Here is my presentation, although not in transcript form. I guess I just felt I had some interesting things to say about these two chapters, and felt I needed to share them. Enjoy.

“Movies” and “Radio”

Movies are the merger of print culture and the electric age. They are in fact a continuation of print technology, and I will return to that further down.

First, though: There is a need to once again visit the argument of “hot” media and “cold” media. In chapter 2 of Understanding Media, McLuhan says:

“A hot medium is one that extends one single sense in “high definition.” High definition is the state of being well filled with data,” (22).

He goes on to say that “Hot media are [. . .] low in participation, and cool media are high in participation or completion by the audience,” (23).

Lastly, he ends the chapter by saying “the hotting up of one sense tends to effect hypnosis, and the cooling of all senses tends to result in hallucination,” (32) - one reason we can get “lost” in a movie, but not TV, or why there is now the debate in psychology circles concerning the idea of “internet addiction” (MCKenzie Funk, in the March 2007 Harper’s, has a great article about internet addiction entitled “I was a Chinese Internet Addict”).

One thing that’s important to understand is that McLuhan is writing at a time without THX surround sound – sight was clearly the majority sense-holder, so to speak. Yes, he does say that it is not a single medium, writing:

“A collective art form with different individuals directing color, lighting, sound, acting, speaking,” (292). But here he is talking about production, not viewing. The movies we watch is a single medium.

Although movies today involve sound much more prominently, it is still a primarily visual experience:

You “see” a movie: passive, singular sense (in a way, individualistic)
You “watch” TV: active, “observation,” multi-sensory to a larger extent.

[I’m “bolding” this because I feel this was the gem of my presentation. I felt this especially when my professor said he wanted to steal it. Cite me, suckahs!]

If for anything else, the very size of the theatre was visually stimulating – you are surrounded by darkness, with the giant screen capturing your attention. The movie theatre is predicated on tunnel vision: there is no periphery in the theatre.

You are alone (although there might be others around you), and you can’t interact with them (it is taboo), because you will miss something – this might seem true of television, except for one point that McLuhan points out about movies:

They provide your imagination for you - he notes this a couple of ways:

1) when he goes back to discussing the Photo on page 291 –

“It was pointed out how the press photo in particular had discouraged the really rich from the paths of conspicuous consumption. The life of display that the photo had taken from the rich, the movie gave to the poor with lavish hand.”

The movie became the production of dreams – you don’t have to imagine anything – it’s being done for you.

With the addition of sound, this is set even firmer, because now you don’t even have to come up with the soundtrack that you weren’t provided in silent films.

2) On page 285, he points out:

“The business of the writer or the film-maker is to transfer the reader or viewer from one world, his own, to another, the world created by typography and film.”

Film is about unreality, a suspension of disbelief. “Movie magic” today refers to special effects, but movies themselves have a sense of “magic” about them that we still subconsciously adhere to:

Think about this: Why is dinner and a movie such a popular and clichéd first date?

The movie is even more magic to the non-literate - McLuhan points out, unabashedly (McLuhan is writing before the PC revolution, so to speak, so he doesn’t feel constrained by cultural sensitivity), that Africans watching movies would be surprised when a character on screen suddenly “disappears off the side of the film.” They want to know “what happened to him” (285). He goes on to point out that oral cultures tended to not have a concept of visual perspective, so that when the camera panned, it appeared to the non-literates that objects moved (287).

He points out oral cultures such as Russians needed to interact with the film. It makes us wonder then what sort of culture we live in today when the teenage heckler is common-place, with shows like Mystery Science Theater 3000, or with the stereo-type (the stand-up comedic trope) of the African-American in a theatre (I couldn’t find any references for this, so if you have any, please let me know. I know I’ve heard comedians talk about this, I just don’t know exactly where) – are we to consider these products of a non-literate culture, or are we now part of a new designation of informational society? I’d lean towards the latter (and I think McLuhan would agree with that).

This leads us to why McLuhan says film is the next evolutionary step in print: In order to understand movies, you need to be able to think sequentiality is rational – book culture allows us to do this. When we read, we are able to make sense of the symbols because they are ordered and linear – we require that kind of thinking to transcend the magic of movies.

“A literate audience [. . .] accustomed to following printed imagery line by line without questioning the logic of lineality, will accept film sequence without protest,” (285 – 286).

Further down the page, he notes “the close relation, then, between the reel world of film and the private fantasy experience of the printed word is indispensable to our Western acceptance of the film form,” (286).

I was thinking this may be one reason why Hollywood is so leery of the “original screen-play.” Adaptations of novels are automatically situated in the comfort level of the literate man. Also, look at all the remakes Hollywood uses: Psycho, The Italian Job, Ocean’s Eleven, Shaft, and even this year’s Best Picture, The Departed, which is a remake of the Chinese film, Infernal Affairs - obviously there is marketing involved here, but that marketing is directed at producing movies that people are known to like – we like the fantasy, but we also like a connection to that fantasy (so that it is, in part, our dream – at least before and afterwards). Also, remember, that it is not the content here that is important, but the medium – we praise “clever” movies, but the big box offices go to the tried and true “formulaic movies.”

The last point I wanted to mention about this correlation between film and book is this: “The film viewer sits in psychological solitude like the silent book reader,” (292).

Part of the problem with this chapter is clearly the fact that it was written almost 50 years ago. McLuhan was able to see the birth, or at least the adolescent stages of movies, but he is limited in his view of how the movie could evolve. For example, I’ve mentioned surround sound. His was the age of Technicolor, and not actual, “realistic,” color film.

He talks about “the film medium as a monster ad for consumer goods,” but then says “In America this major aspect of film is merely subliminal” (294). Anyone who has seen Wayne’s World and the scene about product placement will realize that films are overtly superliminal (to steal a Simpson’s quote):



Think of the new James Bonds movies, and what kind of phone he uses, what kind of car he drives, and so on.

But of course he has his Nostradamus moment as well, when he starts talking about film as means of information-storage:

“At the present time, film is still in its manuscript phase, as it were; shortly it will, under TV pressure, go into its portable, accessible, printed-book phase. Soon everyone will be able to have a small, inexpensive film projector that plays an 8-mm sound cartridge as if on a TV screen.” (291)

I give you the portable dvd player, the PSP and of course, the iPod.

Which leads us to Radio.

It is odd that radio is “hot,” because there is the paradoxical unifying effect of radio: it is a retribalizing media (it creates communities, or at least the sense of community).

However, it is hot in the same way that movies are: Although you can listen with other people, you must listen individually - you can’t interact with others because you would mask the sound, and prevent access to the information (radio is almost more hot than movies in this regard – it is truly a singular sensory experience).

One issue that bothers me is how he says radio rejects cool personalities, by positioning it against that of TV, saying: “TV is a cool medium. It rejects hot figures and hot issues and people from the hot press media,” (299).

He uses Hitler as an example, saying that “Had TV come first there would have been no Hitler at all,” (299). I find that hard to believe, because Hitler was having success orating (a cool medium), before he turned to the radio for mass dissemination. Hitler was strangely charismatic, and that might have worked even better on television. On the flip-side, McLuhan might be saying that since radio didn’t allow for interaction and participation, that people were willing to take him at “face-value” (an oddly visual term for this auditory medium) without questioning him.

This idea is perhaps backed-up when McLuhan writes “That is the immediate aspect of radio. A private experience,” (299). Combine that with the ability to retribalize, and maybe that adds to Hitler (and others like him), gaining a following. You can also consider the aspect of sound we’ve talked about: evanescence and dying immediately:

The message is no longer primary, but rather tone and force become what’s important. You remember catchy phrases, not the entire content.

This is much like a pop-song – to most, it is not the lyrics that make people enjoy the song, it is the melody, the harmony, the hook. That’s what makes us dance, what catches our attention. Radio is pop music in mechanical form.

“That Hitler came into political existence at all is directly owning to radio and public-address systems. This is not to say that these media relayed his thoughts effectively to the German people. His thoughts were of little consequence,” (300).

Replace “Hitler” with “Britney Spears,” and “German people” with “anyone,” and you get an idea of what I’m getting at (I would like to note that I do not think that Britney is a genocidal maniac. I also need to confess that I enjoy perhaps too much Britney Spears music, especially her “earlier” work).

Some interesting aspects that I see with radio:

He notes that “One of the many effects of television on radio has been tom shift radio from an entertaining medium into a kind of nervous information system. News bulletins, time signals, traffic data, and above all, weather reports now serve to enhance the native power of radio to involve people in one another. Weather is that medium that involves all people equally,” (298).

Here he seems to be saying that it creates unity by providing universal information. In this case he’s referring to news, but today you can see the same thing with the way Clear Channel and other companies own radio stations across the country. Every major city now has their Z100, filled with cookie-cutter music, and morning shows. Radio, if anything, has become even more homogenized, creating a singular national experience.

I would suggest that satellite radio might reverse this trend, but a combination of smaller subscription holders and the fact that the two companies, XM and Sirius, are merging seem to be pointing to the decline of spontaneous radio.

Also, think of this: If we didn’t have private cars, would radio survive? Is radio now simply filler, and occasional provider of traffic and weather, on the eights? As cars added 8 tracks, cassette decks, then cd players, multi-disk cd players, mp3 cd players, mp3 input jacks, and Bluetooth mp3 connection, is it merely being “called” a radio now for traditions sake?

The “single” is an iTunes download, not a song a radio DJ plays. No longer do people listen for long periods of time, knowing that eventually the DJ will play their favorite song. Indeed, radio has even recognized this, eliminating the DJ with stations like Jack FM (which in New York tellingly took over the “oldies” station), a station without DJ, without “genre” (although it’s basically just rock in a variety of formats and some 90s party-rap).

That’s pretty much it. Hope you enjoyed it. Although I might worry about those of you who did enjoy it.

Peace.