Mcluhan's Wake by newfuturesmedia

MCLUHAN -- SHOOTING SCRIPT – DRAFT ONE – MAY, 2001

SHOOTING SCRIPT NOTES The biographical sections will be told mainly by a “chorus” a group of people who knew McLuhan. They will be recorded in audio interviews and laid over the various images that make up the sequences. Since we can’t be sure until production exactly what they will say, the narrative in these sections has been told, here, by the narrator… with a few bits of chorus thrown in to give a flavor for how the device is to work. SECTION SECTION 1: MCLUHAN’S TRUNK. STORMY SEA

1.1 • The opening production credits run over black. Thunder and wave sounds are heard. 1.2 SEA -- • Lightning illuminates an expanse of sea, backed by high cliffs. Though it is day, the scene is dark; the sun blotted out by heavy storm clouds. 1.3 A steamer trunk bobs in the waves, surrounded by bits of debris from the wreck of a small ship. The trunk is the old fashioned, upright kind, held shut with leather straps. It is covered with stickers from many ports of call, ranging from London to Hawaii to Venezuela. It is being pulled along on a strong current. 1.4 • A lightning flash leaves an image appears super-imposed on the water -- an after-burn – an African baby cradled in its mothers arms; a standard Oxfam-type image. Another flash and an another image appears: a gleaming prestige auto draped with an attractive woman; a standard advertising image. Sounds appropriate to each image – the baby crying, the voice of the auto advert – can be discerned beneath the sea’s roar. NARRATORN: Do you ever feel overwhelmed by the contradictions around you?

MCLUHAN -- SHOOTING SCRIPT – DRAFT ONE – MAY, 2001

The images on the sea spread to the horizon, like an oil slick of stock shots, , patterned to heighten the sense of contradiction we get from television – and, by extension, from the modern world: political leaders and masked guerillas; starlets and serial killers; advertisements and wars; computer games, cities ablaze, hip hop, refugees, wholesome moms, streetwalkers and so on… 1.5 As the images appear, the sea water dimples and swirls – a whirlpool of contradictions taking shape and slowly deepingdeepening. SquirellingSquirreling across the surface other little streams and counter currents appear, made up of streams of information: text, data bits, bar codes, strings of corporate logos, random numbers and symbols – all of it adding up to an unmistakeableunmistakable metaphor for the “information age”. 1.6 Meanwhile, the sturdy little steamer trunk is pulled toward the edge of the vortex… while the music implies impending doom… NARRATOR N: Helplessly swept up in the tide of events? Drowning in an ocean of relentless change? 1.7 Close on the bobbing trunk, we can read the scrawled identification tag: “Marshall McLuhan, Centre for Culture and Technology, Toronto, Canada”

MCLUHAN -- SHOOTING SCRIPT – DRAFT ONE – MAY, 2001

NARRATOR Marshall McLuhan felt that way. But he always believed there must be some secret, hidden order to the chaos of change. 1.8 The trunk is bumped and spun by unseen obstacles as it is pulled further into the deepening vortex of channel-hopping imagery that is constantly more frenetic, violent, absurd… NARRATOR He dedicated his life to discovering that secret. And when he finally succeeded, it was too late. 1.9 The trunk suddenly smashes against a rock with such force that it flies up and… 1.10

……

UNDERWATER … crashes underwater; breaking open and spilling a small library’s worth of books, papers and photos… 1.11 Tumbling and swirling in the ghostly deep, the contents of the steamer trunk give a portrait of a man who was obviously a famous scholar: There are books of literature and texts on every conceivable topic: psychology, ornithology, neurology, economics, politics, history and technologies of all sorts. There are type-written manuscripts, napkins scrawled with old notes, obscure formulas and indexes, lists of page numbers and of key phrases, train schedule, airplane tickets. There are dozens of articles by McLuhan and twice as many clippings about him, including the cover of Newsweek magazine; and there are many photographs of McLuhan with famous people: John Lennon, Pierre Trudeau, Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe, Henry Luce, Timothy Leary, Ezra Pound, Woody Allen… NARRATOR: On the eve of his death, McLuhan believed he had discovered the basic formula fundamental laws that that governs everything human beings create -- every machine, every society, every idea, every word -all of science, all of art, all of technology. He saw it as If he was right, the key to solvinghis discovery would countless problems and quelling endless violence, be the key to understandinging the past and and predictinging the future. . McLuhan called his discovery the Laws of Media McLuhan called it the Laws of Media and fully fully believed it would transform Western society.

MCLUHAN -- SHOOTING SCRIPT – DRAFT ONE – MAY, 2001

But the breakthrough came to a broken man. McLuhan's quest had already been ridiculed and dismissed by other scholars. A stroke had destroyed his ability to speak. His university laboratory was shut down and his notes were scattered. McLuhan drowned in silence before he finally died -- hoping, as he was a hopeful man, thatleaving future generations to would some day salvage his discovery and see if he was right; if it truly was a magic compass to show us and navigate their the way to calmer seas. One paper drifts and swirls down from the west. It is contains a formula, decorated with four-fold motifs. MAIN CREDITS Over which is the title -- ìMcLuhanís Wakeî ñ 1.12 TThe title – McLuhan’s Wake – and main production credits run over the sinkingslowly descending cosmos of books and papers , which has now begun to gently swirlswirling in the whirling undersea currents. The production credits notably include “ìMarshall McLuhan’sís writing read by Eric McLuhan”î and a “ìChorus” î which notably includes, among others, Corinne McLuhan, Edward Carpenter, Neil Postman, Norman MailerTom Wolfe and Walter Ong. 1.13 ï As the credits end, we focus on one the travelling case itself tumbles downward, spinning end over endÖ In its wake comes again a solitary paper that is swirling over and over. It contains with a hand-written formula on it -- with a cross in the middle separating the four main words. It prettily falls amid bits of debris through the blue deep... : Enhance ~~ Reverse ~~~~~~~~ Retrieve ~~ Obsolesce NARRATOR The formula contains four laws. Each law can be expressed in one word. The words are all verbs, action words. They describe what every human artifact does: Enhance ñ Reverse Retrieve ñ Obsolesce.

MCLUHAN -- SHOOTING SCRIPT – DRAFT ONE – MAY, 2001

He called it a tetrad These four effects, and only these four, are caused by every thing human beings make: Iit enhances somethingthing, it obsolesces something, it retrieves something from the past and it eventually reverses, turning upon itself. McLuhan called this a tetrad. He said its power becomes obvious when you understand it as McLuhan's laws say all four effects, each a sea change, will happen and they will happen simultaneously. He said the power of knowing this becomes obvious when you use the tetrad as a set of questions. Dissolve to… SECTION 2: ENHANCEMENT 2.1

NORTHERN ONTARIO -- A dawn sky. Mist rising on a lake.

2.2

A Mohawk hunter walks through the bush, rifle at the ready. NARRATOR The first question is: What human sense or power does an artifact enhance or extend or enlarge?

2.3 As we follow him, we establish the relationship between the hunter’s senses and the forest that envelopes him. His eyes dart from ground to bush to tree, taking in small bits of his environment in close up. His ears are attuned to the whole 360degree panorama simultaneously. He stops at an animal track, picks up a piece of scat, feels it, smells it… moves on. 2.4

Nearby, a deer is doing the same things: looking, smelling, tasting, listening… MCLUHAN V/O Technology is our human spirit’s way of creating a second nature. It recreates our first nature in new forms…

McLuhan’s voice-over is distant and slightly scratchy, at first, like an old record, but gradually grows stronger and clearer… 2.5 The hunter stops… he mutters to an unseen companion: “look, over there, by that ridge…” The paper drifts down through what have become swirling clouds and disappears...

MCLUHAN -- SHOOTING SCRIPT – DRAFT ONE – MAY, 2001

MAIN CREDITS The title -- “McLuhan’s Wake” – and the main production credits are supered over what the slowly descending cosmos of books and papers, which has now begun to gently swirl in the whirling undersea currents. The production credits notably include “Marshall McLuhan’s writing read by Eric McLuhan” and a “Chorus” which includes Corinne McLuhan and several others. As the last credit fades

– under bubbles rising, continuing the feeling of descent As papers rain down, swirling away from camera and then back toward it, under main production credits – music, dop, writer, producers, director – credits also include narrator, chorus and readings of mcluhan (by eric) • As the credits end, the travelling case itself tumbles downward, spinning end over end… In its wake comes a solitary paper with a hand-written formula on it, with a cross in the middle separating the four main words: Enhancement – Reversal + Retrieval – Obsolescence. N: McLuhan captured the laws of media in a simple formula called a tetrad. McL V/O: The first question is: what human sense or power does any artifact enhance or extend or enlarge... -- do the tetrad of a mirror to introduce the idea The paper is identical on both sides – it spins and dances, in slow motion, close enough to the camera that it can be read over and over again... it is decorated with four-corner motifs from various eras, that ilustrate the ideas… Q/McL: (GV3) “Technology stresses and emphacizes some one function of man’s senses; at the same time, other senses are dimmed down or temporarily obsolesced. The process retrieves man’s propensity to worship extensions of himself as a form of divinity. Carried far enough man, man thus becomes a creature of his own machine…

MCLUHAN -- SHOOTING SCRIPT – DRAFT ONE – MAY, 2001

The paper swims very close to the camera, then spirals off and upward… Q/McL: (GV4): Tetrads do not rest on a theory , but a set of questions… The blue of the water gives way to the blue of sky… N: The first question is: what human sense or power does any artifact enhance or enlarge… STYLE: at first very flowing, and surround “acoustic space”, with insert cuts for things seen; then go to very lineal, symetrical shots of “visual space” • NORTHERN ONTARIO (3) They quietly banter about the possibility of hitting the deer from this distance. We observe their facial expressions closely, looking at how each reacts to his own words and to the other’s… MCLUHAN V/O mcluhan v/o Spoken words enhance our self awareness, our consciousness. … The first humanoid uttering his first intelligible grunt, or word, outered himself and set up a dynamic relationship with himself, other creatures and the world outside his skin… The hunter takes aim. 2.6 CN/Mc: the word is the first enhancement, it outers us, it connects us to others, it extends the consciousness just as a weapon extends the hand • he shoots: Close-up U on his trigger-hand as the side of the rifle “dissolves” away to show the connection between his finger, the hammer hitting and the bullet exploding out of the barrel. 2.7 The hunters run to the animal. The first hunter puts down his gun, takes off his jacket, pulls out his knife – all in slightly slowed motion. MCLUHAN V/O Clothing extends our skin... the knife extends our nails and teeth. 2.8 The hunter slices the deer’s neck and blood spurts up. Close up on his bloody nails and his bloody knife. MCLUHAN V/O The things we make mimic us… 2.9

CHINESE RESTAURANT --

MCLUHAN -- SHOOTING SCRIPT – DRAFT ONE – MAY, 2001

Cheat cut from the skinned animal in the forest to one hanging in a meat locker. MCLUHAN V/O The refrigerator extends our stomach and enhances the availability of a wide range of foods. 2.10 The fruit racks of refrigerator easily illustrate the point; none of its contents -strawberries, bananas, kiwi, pumpkin, avacadoavocado – come from the same place. 2.11 The kitchen is a madhouse. We focus on the chopping, dicing and slicing – the implications obvious. 2.12 The restaurant itself is crowded, the patrons noisy. We move fluidly about the room, taking note of the innumerable extensions, from forks extending fingers, child leashes extending a mother’s grasp to fancy hats extending hair. MCLUHAN V/O ... a chair -- with its legs, its seat, its back and arms – extends the body… A waiter bustles by carrying an over-loaded tray. He tries to make a tight turn and almost ends up on the floor. MCLUHAN V/O Every technology is a medium amplifying some human trait. But, in so doing, every medium also throws us off balance. So, in an effort to maintain balance, we are constantly impelled to new inventions. A waitress comes by in the other direction, carrying much more food – on a push cart. At the bar, a waiter holds up a beer bottle to show the bartender what he wants, then holds up three fingers. The bartender enters it in his tab: “3”. MCLUHAN V/O Our fingers are extended in numbers… A child picks up food with gooey fingers, while his mother daintily spears morsels with her fork. MCLUHAN V/O All media… translate experience into new forms. 2.13 The Maitre’d writes out a sign for the day’s specials, which include the word “mountain” in pictogram. He sets the sign on the counter to attend to some other business… The sign dissolves away – except for the pictogram “mountain” – which 8

MCLUHAN -- SHOOTING SCRIPT – DRAFT ONE – MAY, 2001

remains, superimposed on a photo of a mountain in a calendercalendar– making the connection between the word and the thing. 2.14

GRADE ONE CLASSROOM, CHINATOWN --

A class of in which most of Asian the students, are Asian, are learning to read. The teacher walks them through a word on the blackboard, phonetically. The children sit perfectly still but for the odd nervously drumming foot and the constantly tracking eyes. Overhead is an alphabet – the kind with big letters and animal pictures; we track it, one letter at a time, in sync with the children’s eyes. MCLUHAN V/O <<The alphabet extends the eye>… If you think of every human sense as creating its own space, then the eye creates a space where there can only be one thing at a time… As children, when perspective… arrives – when we learn to focus an inch or two in front of the page – we learn to read and write. The phonetic alphabet gives us a point of view since it promotes the illusion of removing oneself from the object. The teacher leads the group through the phonetic pronunciation of the ABCs: “aah” or “eh”, “buh”, “cee” or “cah”… MCLUHAN V/O The phonetic alphabet is a unique technology… (It) is made up of bits -- called Phonemes -- that are in themselves meaningless. In Arabic, in Irdu, in Hebrew, in Chinese, these smallest bits, these Phonemes, have meaning, but not in the Phonetic alphabet. 2.15 Individual children take turns standing up holding phonetic cards, with large letters and pictures on them, which emphacizeemphasize McLuhan’s point. “D is for dog”, says one. “E is for chicken,” says another. “It’s an emu,” the teacher says. MCLUHAN V/O The unique separation of sight and sound from… meaning… makes the alphabet a most radical technology for the translation … of cultures A child reads aloud to herself, sounding out each letter, building each word phonetically, constructing a sentence. Close up on the little finger tracing under each letter, emphacizingemphasizing the linear quality of phonetic writing. MCLUHAN V/O <It can only be understood through a linear sequence. 2.16 On the blackboard: various pictures of things and their odd written names… like a bird and a machine called “crane”.

MCLUHAN -- SHOOTING SCRIPT – DRAFT ONE – MAY, 2001

MCLUHAN O/CMCLUHAN V/O But it can translate any language, describe any experience.> 2.17

A child labours to write a logical sentence: “I like dogs because…”

2.18

PRINT SHOP --

An old printing press hammers away, churning out a run of pamphlets. 2.19

On the wall is a framed print of a medieval scribe. MCLUHAN V/O The alphabet extends the eyes. The printing press extends the alphabet… The mechanical printing press created a reading public.

2.20 Close on the several versions of the text rolling off the press: all identical of course. 2.21 The printer looks over a freshly printed page, its perfectly homogenous text reflected in his eyes. MCLUHAN V/O Phonetic writing is linear and highly sequential… Print people arrange their lives accordingly. 2.22

GRAND LIBRARY --

A perfectly symetricalsymmetrical pull back through oak columns, emphacizingemphasizing the linear nature of the space (as opposed to the earlier swishing through the forest). 2.23 Matching push-ins on the eyes of people of all races reading… the shots long; stressing the immobility of their bodies. 2.24 Tracking through the stacks, we highlight the vast diversity of subjects; we cross over some books showing Da Vinci’s extensions of man surrounded by text in various languages, from various times… MCLUHAN V/O Civilization is built on literacy because literacy is a uniform processing of a culture … (through) space and time… 2.25 Seen from within cubicles, people are surrounded by texts specializing in various things: philosophy, cooking, romance, bicycles… MCLUHAN V/O Only alphabetic cultures have ever mastered connected lineal sequences as pervasive forms of social and psychic organization

MCLUHAN -- SHOOTING SCRIPT – DRAFT ONE – MAY, 2001

2.26 Close on a reader studying pathology… munching a chocolate bar while pouring over gory photos of partially dissected bodies… MCLUHAN V/O The breaking up of every kind of experience into uniform units… has been the secret of Western power over man and nature alike. To act without reacting, without involvement, is the peculiar advantage of …literate man. 2.27 A wide-shot, forcing the perspective, emphacizingemphasizing the vanishing point… 2.28

FACTORY ASSEMBLY LINE --

Match cut to an assembly line – framed to emphacizeemphasize the linear – producing identical car parts. MCLUHAN V/O <Repeatability was the subliminal message of the printing press… Continuity and competition in homogenous space…> (are) the root of Western power and efficiency.” 2.29

MONTAGE OF LINEAR SPACE --

From collonadescolonnades to railway lines… to rigid, classical formal gardens… to soldiers on parade… to little girls in school uniforms… to Gropius-style glass box office buildings… to depressing apartment complexes… to a suburban street, lined with identical faux-Georgian homes… We riff on the linear, the homogenous, the repetitive, taking particular note of how people move through the boxes that make up our cities without paying them any particular notice. There is a triumphalist, awe-struck quality to the shots and accompanying music. MCLUHAN V/O (Yet) in five centuries explicit comment and awareness of the effects of print on human sensibility are very scarce. But the same observation can be made about all the extensions of man… 2.30

JAGUAR DEALERSHIP --

An handsome young couple browses along a row of identical, shineyshiny cars, is on display, followed at some distance by an unctiousunctuous salesman. Their admiration of the cars is sensuous; they stroke the leather, pat the tires, smile into the lacquered paint, seeing themselves reflected there.

MCLUHAN -- SHOOTING SCRIPT – DRAFT ONE – MAY, 2001

MCLUHAN V/O <We gaze at extensions ourselves as if they were minor dietiesdeities… The myth of Narcissus is helpful in this regard. It is typically represented as a parable about vanity. We think of Narcissus as having fallen in love with himself, but Narcissus did not know he was looking at himself. Just as we often don’t realize that the image reflected in the mirror of media is our own. Just as it is sometimes said that some men fall in love with the spouse who gives back their own image.> The lady smiles at the salesman -- “May we?” 2.31

ROLLING CAR MATTE SHOT --

As in an advertisement, the car rolls past gleaming buildings and through ripening corn fields. The car whizzes past walkers and people on bikes. MCLUHAN V/O Technology stresses and emphacizesemphasizes some one one function of man’s senses; at the same time, other senses are dimmed down… obsolesced. 2.32 Tilt up from the wheels with their gleaming hubs to rest on the side of rolling car – as the side-panels dissolve away to show the handsome couple sitting as still as manequinsmannequins. Quite satisfied with themselves. MCLUHAN V/O <The car extends the feet and also paralyzes them. This effect is subliminal…> Extensions… appear to inspire the central nervous system to a self protective gesture of numbing of the extended area, at least so far as … awareness is concerned…Tetrads focus awareness on these hidden qualities. 2.33 Rain begins to fall. A lone, sodden figure bends into the wind at the side of the road. The Jag swishes past, throwing up a wall of water and we return… 2.34

SECTION 3: UNDERWATER

-- his own love of puns (we would groan) -- based on language love (narr) -- etymology (chorus takes over) -- trivium – the first split -- modern trivium in practice -- McLuhan on trivium/advertising/education -- a great scholar who in branching out would reach his greatest audience and suffer his worst attacks

MCLUHAN -- SHOOTING SCRIPT – DRAFT ONE – MAY, 2001

-- all is metaphor -- mariner intro …to the swirling cosmos of underwater papers, notes and books. NARRATOR The Oxford English Dictionary quotes McLuhan 348 times and credits him with four original entries. Three are words he invented and the fourth was coined by others: “McLuhanism”. It means a revelation that comes from connecting two seemingly unrelated ideas. It was the skill that led McLuhan to the Laws of Media. He developed it by studying literature. 2.35 An old black and white photo is caught in a contrary current and swirlsing upward. 2.36 The photo bears the inscription “July, 1928”, it shows a small, smudgy image of a teen boy in a straw bowler reading a book in a sailboat that is crossing a prarieprairie of windblown wheat, gliding along an unseen river. SECTION 3: THE LITERARY MCLUHAN We close in on the photo and enter its world. MCLUHAN V/O Truth is something we make in the encounter with the world that is making us. 3.1 Various photo aAngles on the boat. T – the boy is barely visible behind a large hard-bound volume of Milton. Other books litter the boat: Tom Brown’s Schooldays, Shakespeare, Thomas Babbington Macauly, Tennyson. NARRATOR V/O By the time he was a teenager, he had read the classics of English literature and the philosophy and criticism of the Victorians, and he had meticulously indexed everything he wished to remember. 3.2 Close on the books in the photos to reveal their margins covered in notes and bits of paper sticking out at odd angles. Pan to an illustrated page from Chaucer’s CanteburryCanterbury tales showing the piligrimspilgrims leaving the city’s walls behind. Here begins the chorus of voices of people who knew McLuhan: CHORUS 1

MCLUHAN -- SHOOTING SCRIPT – DRAFT ONE – MAY, 2001

You could never borrow a book from Marshall because, like a lot of people, he wrote in them. But he didn’t just write in them, he meticulously annotated, analysedanalyzed and indexed them. He told me once that he’d started doing that when he was a teenager. CHORUS 2 Marshall loved literature more than anything else. It was his first love… of course his mother would have had a big influence on that, without a doubt. 3.3 Close on Tennyson’s Idyll, depicting young King Arthur just before pulling the sword from the stone. The page suddenly flips – briefly animated – to reveal Arthur pulling the sword free. 3.4 mcluhan VIDEOMCLUHAN VIDEO Our words abridge time and space by recording and storing the multitudinous matters of private and corporate impressions. Bridges are metaphors. The word metaphor itself comes from the Greek metaferein , meaning to carry across. Consider all human artifacts as bridges between areas of experience.

Here begins video clips of McLuhan, who we have only heard until now. The clips punctuate the biographical story with the McLuhanesque insights to which his journey eventually led him. 3.5 Photographs, cut sequentially, portray young McLuhan’s environment: The boat tied up at a small dock, 1920’s WinnepegWinnipeg in the background, the boy on the road, walking toward town. A church hall on a quiet street advertises Elsie McLuhan’s reading Chaucer. NARRATOR V/O McLuhan’s mother, Elsie, was an elocutionist. She traveled from town to town reciting English poetry and scenes from plays. Their Winnipeg suburban house, with the muffled sound of high pitched Chaucer. NARRATOR V/O At home, she hones her craft by reciting Chaucer, Milton, Shakespeare, while washing dishes and scrubbing floors. 3.6

Inside the house, Herbert and Elsie’s McLuhan’s wedding photo

MCLUHAN -- SHOOTING SCRIPT – DRAFT ONE – MAY, 2001

CHORUS She was a tremendously ambitious woman, whereas Herbert was easy going, he lacked ambition. That was a problem for them. Herbert McLuhan with his two boys, Marshall and Maurice. NARRATOR What Herbert McLuhan really loved was studying philosophy, hiking with his two sons, Marshall and Maurice, and playing word games. As an adolescent McLuhan began learning three new words a day. It became a life-long habit, extended to other languages. 3.7 Tiny figures of hikers in a big forest, leading to close ups of tree bark, flowers and the veins of leaves. Boyish laughter in the distance. MCLUHAN V/O (teenaged, distant) Micturate -- a frequent desire to urinate. Sesquipedalian -- a manysyllabled word, from the Latin, sesquipedalis, meaning one and a half feet long, cumbrous and pedantic. CHORUS Really, Winnipeg was the middle of nowhere for somebody like McLuhan. 3.8

The sail boat drifting down the river becomes…

3.9

…a huge ocean steamer approaching London bridge. NARRATOR V/O McLuhan won a scholarship to Cambridge, England and finally saw the landscape he had been reading about.

3.10 A cyclist -- dressed in 1930s style -- is riding through the pastoral English countryside. He passes Tintern Abbey, thatch-covered cottages, flocks of sheep and roadside pubs. Cambridge: young men in crisp 1930s dress are crossing the Cam-bridge. Scullers zip beneath it and along the river. MCLUHAN VIDEO We, humans, we do not have language. We are language. Each language instills in the user the bias of a particular culture and its particular way of knowing. Metaphors are bridges. The word metaphor itself comes from the Greek metaferein, meaning to carry across.

MCLUHAN -- SHOOTING SCRIPT – DRAFT ONE – MAY, 2001

3.11 The Cambridge library reading room, heads are bent over large books or sprawled behind newspapers. NARRATOR McLuhan accepted the 19th Century literary tradition that searches literature for the beautiful expression of bygone times. But times were changing. 3.12

Close on a newspaper reader, then the front page photo…

3.13 … then a montage of photos depicting the Great Depression, Fascism vs. Marxism, Christianity vs. Darwinism as well as advertisements trumpeting the wonders of electric light, talking pictures and a technological future. NARRATOR V/O At Cambridge, the revolution was in literary criticism. Revolutionaries I.A. Richards and his wife, Queenie, were interested not in eternal truths, but in how literature works. 3.14 In the reading room, the students puzzle over strange new lit titles: I.A. Richards’ The Meaning of Meaning; T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock and other Observations, Wyndam Lewis’ The Art of Being Ruled, Ezra Pound’s Cantos; Eistenstein’s The Film Sense, James Joyce’s Ulysses: 3.15

The students’ faces resonate with Richards’ four skills, outlined below. NARRATOR V/O I.A. Richards, who influenced McLuhan most, taught students that criticism was a practical skill that simply required analyzing four aspects of writing: it’s tone, it’s meaning, it’s intent and its overall effect. He taught that language was a living, growing, organism that had to be constantly translated. T.S. Eliot was writing that the story or images in a poem were there to divert the reader while its structure worked him over.

3.16 A student reads The Wasteland, while the student beside him reads a newspaper. Close on the front page photo… 3.17 … it becomes a montage of surreal photographic images depicting a few lines of The Wasteland. ELIOT V/O (the recording of him reading from The Wasteland)

MCLUHAN -- SHOOTING SCRIPT – DRAFT ONE – MAY, 2001

… “The crowd flowed over London Bridge/I did not think death had undone so many…”

MCLUHAN -- SHOOTING SCRIPT – DRAFT ONE – MAY, 2001

3.18

MCLUHAN VIDEO The discovery that all languages are forms of perception has been a tremendous revolution.

3.19

A sea of heads bent over books inside the old Cambridge library.

3.20 text.

High angle on one anonymous student, pouring over a huge, ancient looking NARRATOR V/O Working on his PhD, McLuhan learned that history is filled with patterns of transformation influenced by language.

3.21 Push in on the book in the photo; an old, illustrated copy of Thomas Nashe’s Unfortunate Traveler. 3.22 As we continue pushing in, the book becomes three-dimensional, even as it gives way to… 3.23 … a flowing montage of text and imagery illustrating the layers of literature in McLuhan’s PhD research, which began with the Elizabethans and went backward through the writing of the Romans and the Greeks. NARRATOR V/O McLuhan was writing about the Elizabethan Thomas Nashe. He began researching the intellectual debates Nashe was involved in and learned that they stretched back a thousand years. Reading in Latin, Greek, English, French and German, McLuhan traced them back to the beginning of literacy in the West, and the original three schools of knowledge, known as the Trivium. 3.24 Close on a photo, in a book of Greek history, of an urn decorated with banner depictions of scholars in various poses… 3.25 … who now begin moving through pixalation. The first banner depicts two scholars, wagging their fingers at each other in argument. NARRATOR V/O Dialecticians, like Socrates, believe wisdom is found by testing ideas in dialogue, through questions and answers. They lay the foundation for logic and philosophy.

MCLUHAN -- SHOOTING SCRIPT – DRAFT ONE – MAY, 2001

The next banner shows a single scholar speaking to an audience and waving his arms about in extravagant oration. NARRATOR V/O Rhetoricians believe wisdom is achieved through the development of speech and reason. They teach their students to read, and speak eloquently about an encyclopedic array of subjects. For them eloquence is the best possible training for a practical life. They lay the foundation for the art of persuasion. Both banners -- depicting the dialecticians and rhetoricians -- are seen in their isolated worlds. NARRATOR V/O McLuhan learned that these two schools of thought, with their different ideas of truth had been competing through the ages. A third banner shows a scholar writing notes while he listens to the dialecticians and rhetorician. NARRATOR V/O But McLuhan identified with the third school, the grammarians. Grammarians believe that wisdom is found in language itself. They study the roots of words to understand how human perception changes. They believe words tell the story of human experience. They strive for a glimpse of the mysterious origin of language. The warring scholars disappear, leaving the lone grammarian with his writing tablet, looking up at a starry sky. NARRATOR V/O Ancient Greek grammarians called the universe itself “the Logos”, the divine language.

The stars dissolve away and the warring scholars return. NARRATOR V/O For generations, the warring camps argued over how to determine truth. 3.26 The original montage through texts begins to reverse, now concentrating on images and text – supported by music -- that emphasize the argument between rhetoric – depicted as “art” – and dialectics – depicted here as “science” and “law”.

MCLUHAN -- SHOOTING SCRIPT – DRAFT ONE – MAY, 2001

NARRATOR V/O McLuhan learned that dialectics – with its question and answer, yes or no, logic -- won the Western heart with the weapon of the unavoidably linear logic of the alphabet. The montage ends on Renaissance imagery of alphabetic-inspired geometry, machinery and linear perspective. NARRATOR V/O What was lost, in McLuhan’s view, was half of humanity’s ability to understand life. He understood how important it was to retrieve that ability when he took his first teaching job in the United States. 3.27 Archive footage of the U.S, circa 1940: fresh, young, optimistic, jazzy, electric. Students bop about the University of St. Louis campus; kids dancing to the radio, reading fan magazines and comic books. There is a whirligig feel to the images. CHORUS 1 McLuhan, 25, found his students preoccupied with pop culture. For him, it was a strange, disorienting language – that he felt compelled to learn. 3.28 Photo of young McLuhan in a classroom, in front of a slide projection of a “Lil Abner” comic. MCLUHAN V/O Today we are beginning to realize that the new media are not just gimmicks for creating worlds of illusion, but new languages with new and unique powers of expression. 3.29 A montage of slides of advertisements, each containing a silhouette of McLuhan. The first is an ad for International Sterling’s cutlery. CHORUS 2 McLuhan knew that rhetoric hadn’t gone away when dialectics triumphed. People had just stopped taking it seriously. So they were easy prey to its modern forms. The next slide: the cover of Crime magazine, issue #63, announcing that crime does not pay. CHORUS 3 McLuhan taught his students to read modern rhetoric by forcing them to ask what law abiding citizens got out of pulp fiction…

MCLUHAN -- SHOOTING SCRIPT – DRAFT ONE – MAY, 2001

An ad for Quaker State Motor Oil, showing a family at picnic beside their car and a headline screaming -- Freedom...American Style. CHORUS 3 And what happens to poetry when advertisers take over all the popular myths… A few frames of Blondie in which Dagwood Bumstead is shown bewildered and Blondie is bossing him around. CHORUS 3 Or what an emasculated Dagwood Bumstead reveals about the American dream and its mechanical reality. The last slide is the cover of The Mechanical Bride by McLuhan. CHORUS (Corinne) He wrote it as a pot boiler, for fun and to make some money. For the rest of his career, McLuhan was scorned by other academics for studying trite culture. But what fascinated him was how the new language of mass media was overwhelming and transforming the world. 3.30

MCLUHAN VIDEO I liken our situation to a story by Edgar Allen Poe called Descent into the Maelstrom. It’s told by an old mariner, recalling a terrible storm…

Dissolve to: SECTION 4: THE MARINER’S TALE (ANIMATION) 4.1 Dark and dreamy watercolor animation, in a style reminiscent of J.M.Turner: Two figures climb to the edge of a cliff overlooking a windswept fjord: an old man with long flowing white hair, and a gangly young man, holding a note pad, who looks like the photos we have seen of McLuhan in his youth. He is Poe’s Narrator, and his voice is that of a teen. MCLUHAN (teenaged, reading, overlapping)

MCLUHAN -- SHOOTING SCRIPT – DRAFT ONE – MAY, 2001

Finally we reached the summit of the cliff. For some minutes the old man seemed much too exhausted to speak. “I’ve brought you here that you might have the best possible view…” OLD MARINER V/O I’ve brought you here that you might have the best possible view of the scene of the event I mentioned – and to tell you the whole story with the spot just under your eye… 4.2 A schooner bobs at anchor in choppy water. The Mariner, with black hair and looking 20 years younger, helps his two brothers haul up a net brimming with cod. They’re a cocky looking bunch. OLD MARINER V/O In all violent eddies at sea there is good fishing, at proper opportunities if one has only the courage to attempt it. But of all the Lofoten fishermen, only we three regularly fished out there, between the Maelstrom and the rocks. We caught in a day what others, down the coast, would catch in a week. 4.3

The Mariner checks his pocket watch. It reads 6 o’clock.

4.4 A wide shot reveals that the boat is anchored just beyond the funnel like mouth of the fjord. To reach that spot we had to cross the mouth of the Moskoe fjord, a voyage only possible twice in a day, during the 15 minutes of slack tide. On this day we knew the tide would be quiet at eight… 4.5 They dump their catch into an overflowing hold. They wipe their hands and share a drink of water. The Mariner pockets his watch and waves the all clear. 4.6

The three set the net again.

4.7 Violent eddies begin to swirl around the schooner’s gunwales. The sails of the ship, hit by contrary winds, billow and buckle. 4.8 Brother #2, looking worried, gestures for the time. The Mariner shrugs off his concern, but checks the watch anyway. And his jaw drops. 4.9

It still reads 6 o’clock -- the watch has stopped. OLD MARINER V/O That one error set in motion an event such as no mortal man ever survived to tell...

MCLUHAN -- SHOOTING SCRIPT – DRAFT ONE – MAY, 2001

4.10 The boat now begins to rock. The sailors turn to the horizon to see the bright day falling beneath a huge copper-colored cloud bearing down on them. 4.11 Thunder and lightning crack through the hurricane descending from the sky. A violent wind whips up. 4.12

The crew struggle to pull their fishing gear in and weigh anchor. OLD MARINER V/O In less than a minute a storm was upon us like of which no seaman in Norway had ever seen.

4.13 As he works to set their sail, a hand grasps the Mariner’s arm: his elder brother points toward the mouth of the fjord. OLD MARINER V/O No one will know what my feelings were at that moment. I knew what my brother meant well enough! With the wind now driving us on, we were bound for the whirl of the Maelstrom, and nothing could save us! 4.14 From above, we see the schooner tossing and turning in the wind, inching its way towards the whirlpool. 4.15 A wave twice the size of the ship crashes over the deck. The Mariner smashes against the mast. 4.16

His watch skids across the deck and flips over the gunwale…

MCLUHAN -- SHOOTING SCRIPT – DRAFT ONE – MAY, 2001

CH: when he was a child in winnepeg, this would have been, oh, 1927 or 8, just before the depression set in, he built a sailboat, the lark, and he used to spend his days sailing with a boat load of books -- mainly reading romantics like Tennyson (use graphic plates) -- as a small boy he began collecting words and studying their etymology -- mother a professional elocutionist, father a great talker McL Clip: the importance of linguistics in his life; I’m just a print man, everything come for me originally from literature Metaphor – a word, a bridge, between the thing and the name Cambridge: stills and stocks -- at cambridge he discovered eliot and the idea that the meaning in literature was not as important as its form -- meaning is not content but an active relationship -- the other big influence was joyce; in joyce a kindred spirit, somebody who recognized the roots of human experience in language and tried to express it through finnegans wake, which contains some 47? separate languages… McL on Joyce: Cambridge library stills seque to graphics (some with three dimensionality) -- but the core of his theory came from his study of the roots of language… -- for his PhD he settled in the library and began researching Nashe – particularly the period where Nashe was involved in an intellectual squabble with another writer -was an ongoing debate that had stretched from the Greeks – trace the trivium from the Greeks to Descartes: to the point when dialectics took over: -- graphics roll back from Nashe’s time to the Greeks, tracing the lines of the trivium this is essentially a debate about how we know things, about what is the accepted mode of learning, the accepted method of getting at the truth -- how the trivium shapes relationships of knowledge, what can be seen as truth, what qualifies something as truth McL: these literary debates are still with us… and they are influenced by the technologies we use… N: dialectics is what we would call linear thought US stills of McLuhan In the US, he saw that rhetoric was on the rise in advertising and started reading that as he would literature, producing the Mechanical Bride… he did it at first, for a bit of fun and to make some money, but people responded to it.

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adverts of the time: stills and stocks McL: commenting on their rhetoric U of T -- reading the bible every day in a different language -- finally seeing that all structures were words and metaphors – McL clip: giving a reading of television on television -- the very thing serious scholars were jealous about… wanted him to prove what he knew instinctually to be right -- brought about his demise in the end…. -- had invented the tetrads; but before he could promulgate he fell ill, was attacked and his observations dimissed -- but he always hung onto the literary love for finding lessons for life in literature – most important being the mariner story ################################ McL Clip – telling the mariner story B+W CU book in the sailboat: the title picture morphs to take us into the story • MARINER • Mariner (boy & Actor) – was his favorite; they went fishing, got in trouble, because his clock didn’t work – he angrily throws watch overboard end on: the sailors get in trouble for watching one part of the picture, the figure, while ignoring the ground, the approaching bad weather. Because the invention of the clock (see tide charts and clock) had enhanced their precision, but in doing so, one of the things that had been lost, or obsolesced, was their native skill to read natural rhythms… UNDERWATER -- OBSOLESCENCE -- watch streaks under real water, falls past spinning tetrad diagram… -- diagram comes closer and we can read “obsolescence: Mcl/Narr: every new tech obs something… SECTION 5: OBSOLESCENCE

MCLUHAN -- SHOOTING SCRIPT – DRAFT ONE – MAY, 2001

5.1 UNDERWATER -- A real watch drops, in a stream of bubbles, past the swirling tetrad diagram. 5.2

Close on the tetrad, we read: “obsolescence”. NARRATOR The question of the second law is: what human sense or existing enhancement does any new artifact obsolesce?

From here on, the film works musically, with each of the sections, and most of the examples repeating. Cinematically, the shots are structured to emphasize the contrast that McLuhan’s ideas – and the film so far -- has set up: between viewing the world through a “visual”, linear lens – shown here with rigid symmetry and a stark vanishing point – or through an “acoustic”, non-linear lens – shown here with moving, canted and flowing imagery designed to stress the dynamic and textural. From underwater, we dissolve to: 5.3

NORTHERN FOREST -- HUNTERS/SPEECH

We replay the earlier hunting scene, but start it from an earlier point. The Mohawk hunters sit-- replay scene of hunters, from an earlier point: see them around the campfire in the morning, planning their hunt. They talk about where they are most likely to find deer, how they will work in the forest. The scene is built of moving shots, stressing the dynamic between the men and that between them and the forest around them. attack ; stalking… (N: Its thought that neaderthals and cro-magnon lived side by side by neanderthal were wiped out: the difference is that they didn’t have language) MCLUHAN V/O Spoken words enhance our self awareness, our consciousness… When speech became our primary instrument of thought and imagination… speech obsolesced the subhuman. NARR: speech enhanced ability to construct plans, to change the environment, made people more powerful 5.4 In the forest, the first hunter spies a deer, alerts his companion and takes aim. Superimpose a photo of an 18th Century Indian taking aim with a bow and arrow. MCLUHAN V/O As the gun obsolesces the bow and arrow. 5.5 The hunter fires. This time we see the deer hit, hobbling in a desperate effort to get away, thrashing about and dying.

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5.6

HUNTER’S -- deer hit and falling and skinned

NARR: it obsolesced the subhuman – gave man dominion over animals and possibly other people… (Gun) … just as gun powder obsolsced the need for personal combat, obsolesced the need to be physically strong to win) -- B+W of indians with bow and arrow ++

FOLLOWING -- REAL NOW IMAGE OVERLAID ON B=W -- ghost images -- interwoven locations, eras -- framed to accentuate buildup of linear space, to undercut with radio sequence, a reprise of the earlier acoustic space in oral section (opening) HOUSE -- Outside his house, one of the hunters unloads deer meat from his pickup. A ghostly photo of a wigwam is overlaid on the house. MCLUHAN V/O As the house obsolesces the earthen hut and wigwam. 5.7

-- obsolesces the tent -- hunters at their place == old indians in tent… SMALL TOWN, 1920 & 2001 -- A typical little place which has gone from a thriving farm town to a sleepy and tattered little outpost. 5.8 Overlay black and white footage of the town in its heyday; bustling with activity. The horse cart still dominates cars on the streets. A big steam locomotive pulls into the train station. Close on a horse cart parked outside the Post Office. Dissolve to: 5.9 A car pulling into the same spot outside what has now become a computer store. MCLUHAN V/O <The automobile obsolesced horses and all the implements and crafts associated with them.> 5.10 A quick tour around the town, with accompanying overlays, riffs on the theme of obsolescence: A parking meter where once there was a hitching post; a gas station where once there was a watering trough; an auto mechanic where once there was a blacksmith; and, outside town, an oil refinery where once there was a field of hay. The train station has been closed altogether: weeds smother the old tracks and the rusting hulk of an engine sits in a field.

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5.11

At the bus station, a young person is being seen off by tearful parents. MCLUHAN V/O <The countryside is obsolesced by the city.>

5.12 The bus pulls onto what has now become a four-lane expressway out of town toward a modern city gleaming in the distance. 5.13 DOWNTOWN TORONTO -- All clogged expressways, tall buildings, streets teeming with a multicultural stew of folks, most of whom, clearly, have come from somewhere else. MCLUHAN V/O As the city is obsolesced by suburbs. 5.14

On an expressway out of town, a Jaguar breaks from the pack…

5.16 SUBURB -- The Jag pulls off a trunk road and heads down a very quiet street of identical suburban houses. Overlaid on the suburb is an old photo of a bustling farm. CITY – -- obsolesces the countryside (vibrant small towns… now dead bed room communities -- city at night, bus approaching, teens on bus, old people left behind at dreary bus station in small town ++ CAR -- on the road: showing enhancement -- GV p 22 – we only perceive a hidden ground when it becomes a figure against a new ground -- photo/or old film of same road with horses and buggies (possibly shoot this at black creek) and locomotive -- obsolesces them and everything associated with them, starts a chain reaction of obs…. -- Obsolesces all the stuff associated with the coach and horses and locomotives – -- see this stuff replaced by new stuff: blacksmiths for automechanics shops/ keys for whips/ tires for horse shoeing / parking meters for hitching posts/ gas stations for watering troughs payoff: Narr: new technologies don’t only obsolesce thing they replace, but ways of life and assumptions…

MCLUHAN -- SHOOTING SCRIPT – DRAFT ONE – MAY, 2001

-- city obsolesced by the car for suburb -- more countryside/wilderness obsolecd and replaced by a new ground – the auto strip, oil refinery, motels – which embraces us totally and we don’t even notice. Narr: seeing enhancement and obsolescence at the same time gives us a new perspective MEDIA CHANGES OBSOLESCING OUR NOTION OF SPACE 5.17

BASEBALL DIAMOND -- It is just after sunset and the park is dark. MCLUHAN V/O ...every new technology has its own ground rules. We rearrange our experience according to the technology we use...

5.18 The only light comes from the burning cigarettes of small clutches of teens huddling here and there in the bleachers – yakking or smooching. In the semidarkness, their figures, silhouetted against a magic hour sky, have a feeling of mystery and give the assumption of naughtiness. MCLUHAN V/O Electric light obsolesces the enveloping darkness. 5.19 Halogen lights spark up. The diamond, the bleachers and the surrounding parking lot and fields are all, suddenly, lit up. The teens are revealed to be, simply, pimply-faced kids avoiding their parents. They sit up a little straighter and try to look a little more respectable as baseball players appear on the field and fans arrive in the stands. MCLUHAN V/O And it obsolesces the mystery of the non-visual…The more outer light there is, the further outwards into space we travel, the more we are pushed to seek an inner light. 5.20 ELECTRIC LIGHT -- baseball diamond, in the dark, lit by the cigarettes and lighters of kids talking, romantic, mysterious lighting -- the diamond lit up and that space is obsolesced, with the mystery of darkness -- the kids behaviour becomes reserved; MCL: they are “innered” by the electric light, they go inside themselves. A high angle view of the lit diamond; then an aerial view, highlighting circles of light all over the dark landscape; then…

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5.21 SATELLITE IN OUTER SPACE -- A satellite-eye’s view of part of the Earth, showing clusters of dots of light.

MCLUHAN -- SHOOTING SCRIPT – DRAFT ONE – MAY, 2001

MCLUHAN V/O With the launch of Sputnik, the first satellite, man obsolesced nature… It created a new environment -- Spaceship Earth… After the Apollo assembled a television camera and focused it on the Earth … all of us who were watching were… “outered” and “innered” at the same time. We were on the Earth and the moon simultaneously. And it was our individual recognition of that event which gave it meaning. We had become aware of the separate physical foundations of these two different worlds and were willing, after some initial shock, to accept both as an environment for man… The day Sputnik was launched ...nature ended and ecology was born. 5.22 We slowly move 360-degrees around to see a belt of satellites in various orbits and then back to the little blue planet, third from the sun. SATELLITE -- obs nature, showed all of earth to be in a man made environment (pull out nd 180 from earth showing sat matrix as new sphere) -- the above below des cription from Glob vill MCL: techn can also obscel. mindsets… 5.23

PRINT AND ELECTRIC /ACOUSTIC & VISUAL SPACEHIGH SCHOOL --

P(-- pull back from a earth poster of the earth on the wall of a high school classroom. MCLUHAN V/O Similarly, with electric media, we obsolesce the segmented visual, the connected and the logical… In the class, the students are reviewing civics in preparation for an exam. The teacher is patiently explaining the hierarchy of governments in a federal system to the students. MCLUHAN V/O The alphabet extended the eye. The printing press extended the alphabet and enhanced linear, visually connected space… They are the hidden ground… of quantitative measurement and precision… of science and rational endeavor. 5.24 A montage of the classroom, and then the school, focusing on the rigidity of the space -- all sharp corners and clear vanishing points. Everywhere there are small details that point toward the other, related factors that shape classical institutions: history categorized by dates or leadership; animals organized by classification; taxonomies in every area of science and so on. The montage also notably features

MCLUHAN -- SHOOTING SCRIPT – DRAFT ONE – MAY, 2001

another glimpse of two or the alphabet and a diagram illustrating linear, visual perspective, to remind us of what we have picked up earlier. The montage is suitably tailored to the voice-over, to illuminate McLuhan’s point. MCLUHAN V/O … Today it is easy for us to perceive … that hidden ground, because that ground itself has become a figure starkly portrayed against the new ground of the electronic information environment… 5.25 A speaker crackles to life in one of the classrooms: the vice-principal with an announcement to be heeded by all. In a dozen classrooms, all activity ceases as the students listen to him. 5.26 Then comes the bell. The hard lines and white noise of the school are obliterated by an explosion of colorful activity animated by hip-hop, rock, techno and a half-dozen other musical genres that the kids plug into their heads. The camera style also shifts abruptly, from “visual” rigidity to “acoustic” fluidity as the kids blade, bike and scoot from the school a.s.a.p., heading for the mall… 5.27 THE MALL -- Following some colorfully dressed teens, we do a fast-paced tour of this ultimate electric environment; the ultimate embodiment of interaction between electricity, information, advertising and consumption. As they move through, the kids are bombarded from all sides by electric imagery and sound: the video monitors, positioned at every angle to catch the shoppers’ eyes, flash utterly contrary images -- saccharine ads featuring sweet-faced children, pornographic music videos, World War 2 battle footage, bland instructive cooking features, a computerized rendering of Cleopatra – while another layer of contradiction pours from loud speakers: music, news, adverts, discount specials. The overall effect is an absolute surround; what McLuhan calls an “acoustic” environment. MCLUHAN V/O Electric information comes at us from all directions at once, it creates an acoustic world… acoustic space is a sphere of simultaneous relations. Electric media… return the senses to a unified seamless web. As the montage heats up, we slide effortlessly in and out of monitors, and thus through space and time – from Disneyland to Eritrea to Medieval Venice, where a model is strutting the latest swimsuit, back to the mall where that very same suit hangs on the rack. MCLUHAN V/O Instant electric communications restore all things to an inclusive present.

MCLUHAN -- SHOOTING SCRIPT – DRAFT ONE – MAY, 2001

5.28 We return to our hip and hopped-up highschoolers, watching and listening to them glide through this environment -- enchanted by this, repulsed by that, often aware of the dichotomies -- as cool and confident in their psychic surfing as they are on their skateboards. to school…) -- not books, only, but also the literate mindset… -- school as a literate environment where information is structured logically and lineally; (kids reading books, being taught books, sitting in rows MCL: definition of a literate environment) McL: GV 21-22 – space is ordered by phonetics… that ground was invisible but now revealed as an exotic figure… only because of a new ground… which structures all of our choices, preferences etc -- visuals nod back to earlier segment, refs to architecture, history dates, progressions: classification of animals, periodic table, etc; structure of parliamentary system -- obsolesced by electric media, say, first, p.a. – containing the “content” of the literate environment, but effecting everyone at once, in the classrooms, in the schoolyard McL: electric media are acoustic… content is not the point radio: (kids listening together, kids listening at the mall to a barrage, kids moving non-lineally through space, skateboarding as surfing) -- radio: same message in many places, but different messages banging up against one another McL: elaboration on electric media//acoustic space MCLUHAN V/O The new media are not ways of relating us to the old “real” world; they are the real world and they reshape what remains of the old world at will. 5.29 Outside, the skateboarding students glide and spin through the sea of shiny metal grid locked in the mall parking lot. 5.30 They spin past a row of newspaper boxes filled with headlines that fairly scream about the demise of the rational mind – complaining about falling literacy rates, smokestack industries shutting down, 15 year-old millionaires and so on. The kids spin out onto the rush-hour road leading home to the suburbs. They weave and bob through traffic as if it didn’t exist MCLUHAN V/O We live in difficult times. A cataclysmic clash between the world of print and the electric world is happening under our nose.

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When the environment of instant electronic information becomes the hidden ground of all perception, choice and preference, the ground which underlays the world of precise and quantifiable scientific study is pushed aside or dissolved… T he Phonetic alphabet… is the origin of Western civilization and rationality… and we are coming to the end of its road. -- environment: a mall where we are bombarded with many and conflicting sounds at once: strange combination of music, announcements, news, overall shopper messages, often clashing against each other + television sets flashing contrary images, some childish, some pornographic, some blandly instructive -- riff off people in the mall; a whole, global society like these kids… -- montage of stocks/our shots riffing off monitors in the mall and in the streets, and off the satellite, to give quick around the world tour: everywhere at once… McL: electric media as the new ground -- a sickening whirl of images overlaid in depth… hinting at the retrieval process with fashions etc, and of co-existance of both all spaces and all times, past and present (quoting earlier B=W overlays) -- off hand …. images of literary world being overwhelmed—graffitti in schools, factory workers laid off, literacy rates a joke, 15 year old millionaires 5.31

Close on a skateboard as it flies off a wheel-chair ramp and becomes…

5.32

MARINER ANIMATION

… the storm-tossed fishing boat, smashing down off the crest of a wave… the Mariner and his brothers desperately cling to the stubs of broken masts… A wave crashes over the deck, returning us… -- a single beat of the whirlpool, crossed with the video images, the boat and men small… then a wave crash and… 5.33 UNDERWATER -A set of instructions for building a model sailboat spin in the weightless depths. They and the papers and books around them are all now moving, slowly, upward, toward the surface. NARRATOR If McLuhan hadn’t studied literature, he would have been an engineer. He was always fascinated with structures. 5.34

A close-up of the drawing of the sailboat in the instructions takes us to…

SECTION 6: THE STRUCTURAL MCLUHAN

MCLUHAN -- SHOOTING SCRIPT – DRAFT ONE – MAY, 2001

6.1 …a photo of model sailboats on a city lake watched by a couple of little boys, formally dressed in jackets and short pants. 6.2 A montage of mechanical sketches and old how-to-manuals – for a crystal radio, various model ships and a full scale sail boat. NARRATOR As a boy he loved to build things, especially sailboats. He began with models and worked his way up to the full scale boat that he sailed on the Red River amid wheat fields, reading and writing. 6.3 The boat, as seen previously, on the river, passing a grove of trees. Low angle pans of trees and leaves. NARRATOR As a teenager, he began wondering about larger structures hidden in life. MCLUHAN V/O (teenage) Diary, it seems to me that all of life -- mental, spiritual and physical -- is governed by laws still largely unknown to human beings... 6.4 Photos: an engineering class at the University of Manitoba studying a blackboard laden with images of wheels and gears; a greasy road crew on an outback highway; young McLuhan posing in front of the university. NARRATOR He entered engineering at the university of Manitoba, but switched to literature, because he found the structures of language more engaging. • McL: Student/of viewpoints (figure vs. ground // left vs right brain) -- interested in engineering in the beginning – he built the lark, crystal radio before that (drafting plans… to atomic structures… 3-D graphics) N: if he hadn’t become a professor of English, McLuhan would have been an engineer. He began university studying engineering, but grew bored with it. He was always fascinated with structures. -- McL: something on commonality of structure -- understood einstein and then quantum mechanics --– he always balked at traditional categories of knowledge -- McL: “like to get the general feel of about 20 disciplines” -- started explorations and began studying all sorts of languages, disciplines 35

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laid the foundation for interdisciplinary studies… -- the influences: Seyle, Fuller, Jung, -- carpenter -- he had many collaborators -- drew from art: figure and ground McL: explaining it -- drew from brain research in the end -- criticized as a dilletante -- McL: was just probing, trying to understand -- Corinne: “he couldn’t help it” N? – went back a long way; the geeky prof surrounded by the 60s, the geeky kid prof in jazz america, the romantic youth in hard-bitten england, the young son of dysfunctional parents, overawed with the beauty of life, trying to reconcile the contradictions… “understanding is my only method for survival” 6.6 MCLUHAN VIDEO Our words are things and the things we make are words…Words are the house in which we dwell, they echo us. They are us; they put us in echo land. 6.7 Archive footage of Cambridge University, circa 1939. Rowers on the river, students strolling, a lecture hall – all looking very ordered. NARRATOR V/O By the time he got to Cambridge, McLuhan was reading science, as well as literature, and beginning to understand Einstein’s theory of relativity. 6.8 Archive footage of a Cambridge-like professor explaining Einstein – making the little-understood point that energy and mass are the same thing. 6.9 Shots of electricity arcing in war-time America: in electric signs, generators, welding and old-fashioned animation of radio towers sending out electrical waves, as in the RKO logo. NARRATOR In America, McLuhan saw the nation quickly being electrified. His interest in the physics of electricity grew. 6.10 An old American instructional film with crude graphics showing the electrical activity in neurons – and comparing their workings to a machine. NARRATOR It taught him that there are no absolutes in the material world.

MCLUHAN -- SHOOTING SCRIPT – DRAFT ONE – MAY, 2001

6.11

Stocks of Einstein welcomed in America.

6.12

The Los Alamos atomic explosion.

6.13

MCLUHAN VIDEO Electricity has no known boundaries… The whole Electro-Magnetic world is the extension of our human nervous system -- it brings about the age of the circuit and the feed back loop.

6.14

Kitschy imagery of Toronto in the 1940’s, looking very rigid and provincial.

6.15

Still of a young McLuhan with The Mechanical Bride.

6.16 A montage of shots identifying the university’s departments: Psychology, Anthropology, Philosophy, Economics, Political Science, Medieval Studies… NARRATOR V/O The structures of universities in the 1940s were still built on absolutely rigid categories. McLuhan always argued that this was the problem with modern scholarship. When he joined the University of Toronto in 1946, he had plans to master the basic tenets of a dozen other disciplines.

6.17

MCLUHAN VIDEO The most valuable resource in an information environment is recognition of the specialists’ ignorance.

6.18 Black and white imagery of the Royal Ontario Museum exterior and gilded dome in the lobby. NARRATOR That was an attitude that guaranteed McLuhan enemies in every department in the university. But it didn’t deter him. To encourage discussion, he organized interdepartmental tea parties in the lobby of the Royal Ontario Museum.

6.19 Over the ROM dome, superimpose a montage of the covers of Explorations and some its more famous by-lines (the poet Robert Graves, behaviouralist Jean Piaget, Northrop Frye, psychiatrist Hans Selye, architect Sigfried Gideon, philosopher Jacques Maritain), which gives way to… 6.20 …pixilated imagery from ROM exhibits illustrating the topics, ending with a superimposition of Harold Innis’ photo and by-line on an ancient Roman artifact.

MCLUHAN -- SHOOTING SCRIPT – DRAFT ONE – MAY, 2001

NARRATOR With his first major grant, he launched a journal called Explorations, in partnership with anthropologist Edmund Carpenter, that featured articles on everything from the effects of psychological stress to the language of birds to the principles of architecture (?) and Inuit sculpture. But the biggest influence on McLuhan at the time was economics professor Harold Innis. 6.21

MCLUHAN VIDEO <Harold Innis is the real freak. How did that hick Baptist hick ever come up with this amazing method of studying the effects if technology.>

6.22 Clean, 1950s-style black and white macro imagery of ROM exhibits from Egypt and Ancient Rome – as if from the POV of a visitor – illustrate Innis’ theory… NARRATOR V/O Innis believed that societies were enormously influenced by the type of communication they used. He said people who wrote on stone, like the Egyptians, tended to be concerned with eternal truths. People who wrote in perishable media like papyrus had a more bureaucratic view of the world. Innis explained why Egypt had endured, but Rome had spread. McLuhan called Gutenberg Galaxy, his prize winning history of printing “a footnote to Innis”. 6.23

… the sequence ends with a museum display of an ancient printing press.

6.24 Then a photo of McLuhan with The Gutenberg Galaxy and one of him being awarded the Governor General’s prize. Dissolve to an international montage of reviews of Understanding Media, and various photos of McLuhan. CHORUS Before Gutenberg was published McLuhan was already writing Understanding Media, in which he looked at the structural impact of more than two dozen technologies. 6.25 Beatles-inspired music kicks off a quick sequence of television advertisements from the 1960s for some of the technologies covered by Understanding Media – clock, camera, games, typewriter, telephone, phonograph – intercut with: 6.26 McLuhan comments on them and ending with him trying to explain “the medium is the message” to an uncomprehending interviewer.

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MCLUHAN VIDEO When I say ‘the medium is the message,’ I’m saying the car is not a medium. The medium is the highway, the car factories, and oil companies. The medium of the car is the effects of the car. 6.27 We end with vintage car advertisements woven with gung-ho imagery of motels, car factories churning, oil wells ‘apumping and refineries glowing. 6.28 Cut back to see a typical 1960s living room, the centre of which is one of the first commercially available colour televisions. MCLUHAN V/O All media tend to be subliminal in their structures, and this is what I have been trying to say in the phrase ‘the medium is the message.’ 6.29

On the screen is the famous wife/mother-in-law figure-ground illusion. MCLUHAN V/O All cultural situations are composed of an area of attention, the figure, and a much larger area of inattention, the ground…

6.30 Highlight young woman’s face. The Announcer is styled after an old fashioned instructional film about art. ANNOUNCER This is what artists call the figure. Highlight old woman’s face. ANNOUNCER And this is what artists call the ground. Switch back and forth between the two faces. 6.31

MCLUHAN VIDEO But the interplay, you see, is where the action is.

Within the archive shot, the image of McLuhan gets wobbly, then fuzzy, then breaks up in a fit of static electricity, dropping to a white dot… NARRATOR McLuhan got yet another perspective on information interplay in 1969, when he collapsed with a brain tumor.

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6.32

The white dot opens back up on a photo of McLuhan convalescing. NARRATOR He lost several years of reading and had to work on retrieving it...

6.33 A series of long tracks of U of T hallways. We hear a growing, echoing series of whispers. NARRATOR Around the same time, a backlash toward McLuhan’s work was growing. CHORUS #1 People said he thought he knew everything, but that he was a dilettante, even a charlatan. CHORUS #2 Specialists picked out factual errors, or what they considered misrepresentations in his examples. CHORUS #3 They said he lacked scientific rigor... 6.34

Exterior of McLuhan’s coach house.

6.35 Push in on a small and messy office. The desk is covered with images of brains: diagrams, schematics, blow ups, x-rays, phrenology heads. NARRATOR McLuhan was now learning about neurology, where the latest research had discovered apparent differences between the left and right sides of the brain. Yet another, overlapping gap to be reconciled. CHORUS The Left Hemisphere is predominantly the area of speech and verbal skills and writing; it seems to control logic, naming and complex motor sequences… The right hemisphere is predominantly spatial and musical; it seems to be the home of the intuition, emotion and understanding of complex patterns. 6.36 A Renaissance painting and a march of text is overlaid on the left hemisphere; a Cubist painting and a swirl of light is overlaid on the right. NARRATOR McLuhan saw patterns that he’d seen before: between the alphabet and electrics. 40

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6.37 Now one image from the Grecian urn -- of arguing dialecticians -- is overlaid on the left hemisphere; on the right hemisphere, we overlay the orating rhetoriticians and star-gazing grammarians… NARRATOR … between dialectics and rhetoric… 6.38 Now a wash of symbols representing scientific endeavors since the Enlightenment are overlaid on the left hemisphere; while dancers, iconic paintings, and musical symbols are overlaid on the right. NARRATOR … between science and art. 6.39 The brain lifts off the two-dimensional plane to become a 3-D image which comes to focus on the corpus collasum, which connects the two halfs. 6.40

Overlay the underwater image of the tetrad formula, swirling upward. NARRATOR And he began to see the possibility of bridging age-old gaps…

Crash cut to: 6.41

McLuhan talking to kitschy 1970’s talk show host Tom Snyder: SNYDER O/C Why are you so hard to understand? MCLUHAN V/O I talk about the all-at-once world of the Right Hemisphere, which makes the Left Hemisphere world look foolish.

Which, of course, the uncomprehending Snyder does. McLuhan looks at him in all seriousness, assuming his point an obvious one. SECTION 7: MARINER’S TALE 7.1 MARINER • Mariner – pulled toward disaster; one brother drowned -- reconciled to drowning became detached and simply observed -- paradoxically wowed by gods power, sad wouldn’t live to tell about it

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-- then I saw the order … A giant wave smashes the deck of the schooner and one of the Mariner’s brothers is washed overboard. 7.2

The Mariner and his other brother cling to rigging.

7.3

A gigantic wave lifts the schooner up at a 45-degree angle…

7.4 While the bow is facing the sky like an arrow, the Mariner looks ahead -- he sees the whirlpool and the belt of surf that surrounds it. OLD MARINER V/O I would not have believed that any wave could rise so high. But while we were up I threw a quick glance and spied the mouth of the whirling abyss. 7.5 The schooner comes down the wave, makes a sharp half turn and begins circling the whirlpool, like a child’s toy over a drain. OLD MARINER. By God’s grace, I discovered that our boat was not sinking but turning -- her starboard side was facing the whirl... 7.6 Close on the Mariner staring at the deepening emptiness, flecked with sharp rocks, on the starboard side of the ship. OLD MARINER V/O It may appear strange to you, but now, while we were in the very jaws of the Maelstrom, I began to feel more composed. The revolutions of the boat around the whirlpool may have rendered me light-headed, but I began to reflect how magnificent a thing it is to die in such a manner. 7.7 The schooner does not sink, but remains glued to the spinning wall of water. OLD MARINER V/O Having made up my mind to hope no more, I got rid of a great deal of terror and felt how wonderful a manifestation of God’s power was found inside the whirl itself. 7.8 The schooner is inside the whirl, turning. The hurricane can no longer reach the schooner; it is protected by its position below the surface of the ocean, inside the Maelstrom:

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OLD MARINER V/O I became possessed with the keenest curiosity about the whirl itself. I positively felt a wish to explore its depths, even at the sacrifice of my own life; and my principal grief was that I should never be able to tell my old companions on shore about the mysteries I should see. 7.9 The whirl’s watery wall towers above as the schooner slips deeper into the vortex. The watery wall dissolves into:

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SECTION 8: RETRIEVAL 8.1

-- end on shot of the water, close, becomes our water seamlessly

UNDERWATER -Books and papers, among them the tetrad formula, swirling upward-- tetrad formula flows through MCcLUHAN V/O : (GV4): The tetrad, taken as a whole, is a manifestation of human thinking processes… There are four rules, no more and no less… 8.2

Close on the formula, and especially the word “retrieval”. NARRATOR The question of the third law is: what old archetype or myth or ancient way of doing things is retrieved by an artifact?

RETRIEVAL 8.3 NORTHERN ONTARIO -- -- the vision, aura, narrative, myth, psychic structure the thing has -- shot as romantic, surreal: the scenes and archetypes referred to become backdrops that overwhelm (become the figure) or infuse the dreaming object… GV 18: definition of cliches and archetypes, movement, and jung HUNTING PARTY/LANGUAGE A(-- intro these scenes, wider and wider, establishing space all around them: now we see establishing of environment, them inside) small town coffee shop in a strip mall. The hunters, seen previously, are regaling some friends with their tales of hunting. Outside the big plate glass windows, people and cars come and go, but as the hunters talk, and their friends listen… 8.4 …the scene outside slowly transforms into the forest, complete with running deer. MCLUHAN V/O Speech retrieves thought and also the experience of the past.

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8.5 Someone approaches the table, interrupting; the story stops and the vision vanishes.-- in Tim Hortons, regaling others with hunting tales: nature appears outside the windows of the place McL: speech retrieves past experience RETRIEVAL CRUSHES TIME; QUOTING OF OUR PSYCHE DOWN THROUGH THE METAPHORS OF THE AGES, TOWARD LOGOS… -- progress of the sequence generally backward in time – pioneer to medieval to tribal-electronic…

8.6 GASOLINE ALLEY -- CAR LOTThe Jaguar cruises a typical gas alley heading into every city – a street of fast food joints, furniture retailers and so on. It’s a fine day and the handsome Jag couple is listening to music, looking self satisfied. MCLUHAN V/O The process of retrieval is much more subtle than other aspects of the tetrad… 8.7 Images of “free men” on horseback appear on the side of the car: an Indian brave racing his steed across the chaparral, a knight in shining armor galloping to the joust… MCLUHAN V/O The archetype is an old cliché brought back… 8.8 A medley of car logos, shows most to be primordial symbols of quests or freedom: Mustangs, Pontiacs, Blazers, Windstars… and so on. MCLUHAN V/O As a new artifact pervades the host culture… old clichés are retrieved, both as principles of the new ground and as … nostalgic figures… 8.9

NOSTALGIC CAFÉ -- The Jag pulls into an “old-tyme” themed café.

8.10 The walls are adorned with fragments from the horse and buggy days: a team harness, whips, paintings of cowboys on the trail and so on… MCLUHAN V/O An archetype is a quote of a… a technology or an environment… A new twist on an old tune… Retrievals and revivals are conspicuous in culture and the arts, but they also occur in science and technology.

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8.11 Lockoff: as the handsome couple chat, we dissolve through several images of the woman, in each she is wearing fashions from recent years – a power suit, the Annie Hall look, military garb, a “peasant” dress – which are nostalgic versions of previous eras in woman’s clothing – the 1950s, the war years, the 1920s and pioneer days. 8.12 BASEBALL DIAMOND -- The teens, seen earlier, are long gone and the game is in full swing. MCLUHAN V/O Electric light retrieves daytime activities. It’s an “old timer’s” game and there is no denying a certain limp and wheeze among these particular boys of summer. The suggestion is that the game is also retrieving their childhood. 8.13

UNIVERSITY -- Gliding through the colonnades of a university … MCLUHAN V/O Print culture retrieves elitism, the old notion of a charmed circle.

8.14

We move past a row of busts of famous writers….

8.15 …to a graduation ceremony, presided over by the be-gowned academics on stage. 8.17

On stage a speaker is holding forth in impenetrable scholarly language. MCLUHAN V/O <Specialized language is snobbism for the in-group>

8.18 We watch the ceremony as young people, in their lesser gowns, are admitted to this elite. 8.19

SATELLITE -- A satellite arcs over the blue-green ocean. MCLUHAN V/O The satellite retrieves the ancient notion of ecology and the view of the earth as an art form.

8.20 A satellite dish, decorated with stickers depicting petroglyphs, sits atop a downtown building. It swivels and we follow to see… 8.21 -- car: being admired, the surfaces of the car glittering with all the cliches of car ads: running horses, open countryside, a knight in shining armour…a sense of quest, adventure, aerial shots of cars on open roads

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-- medley of car logos: mustang, jag, pontiac… all those that invoke old, heroic myths, especially “westerns” McL: these are old archetypes, old myths, old cliches, to help us cope, to put things in perspective – ref to Jung -PIONEER VILLAGE /THEN AND NOW -- car environment (we don’t notice as a ground reprise) (trick track from one to the other and back) – former ground becomes a tourist attraction McL: we only notice the ground when it is irrelevant: then artifacts become art -- also steam locomotive fun rides – old railway station PIONEER VILLAGE FASHIONS -- a lockoff of tourist watching woman knit -- parade of fashions quoting back to 1900 McL: retrieval is a series of quotes telescoping backward; compressing time, transforming our perception and us… easy to see in culture… but also happens in technology… CITY PANORAMA -- A wide shot of a glittering, bustling city: vehicles buzzing around, through and over it. MCLUHAN V/O The city retrieves the homeostasis of the body. 8.22 We move down to closer shots, riffing off the idea that the city works like a body -- musically illustrating what it means… 8.23 As with the section on extensions, we dissolve away parts of the city, to show what lies within and beneath: a “gap” opens in a road to show the river of sewage and the water pipes beneath; the sides of buildings open to show the trunk wires that connect them and so on… 8.24 Using lock-offs, dissolves and time lapse, we show the strange dynamic relationship between the people and the place – the people are like so many ghosts flowing through the system, appearing and disappearing, but always with their place taken by someone else; the system works organically and the people are but fluid to the larger thing. -- see glittering city, all surface, (aerial swoops) -- with the homeostasis of the body

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-- swoop in look around with x-ray vision– roads opened to reveal sewers etc -things flowing underground; electricity cracking through the place) -- retrieval of a vast system of organismic life filled with individuals constantly disappearing… (floria idea of bodies appearing and disappearing endlessly,) -- people moving through in hyper speed… From high speed, wide shots, we go to… 8.25 … regular, street level shots of downtown crowds framed by glass buildings. The spaces are washed by musac and studded with TV monitors. 8.26

The monitors show PRINTimages from many places, times and themes.

8.27 The passersby are themselves loaded with imagery – slogans, actual pictures of people and places and pervasive corporate logos. 8.28 We note, too, the constant exchange of information – credit cards swiped, bank cards used, surveillance cameras ever vigilant. 8.29 Passersby stop to view the imagery – in TV store windows, outside broadcasters, in shopping arcades – and the sense is of a crazy mirror: they are seeing reflections of people much like themselves – but in Africa, Serbia, China. MCLUHAN V/O Electric media retrieves the village. Broadcast satellites create an immediate participation in all places around the world…our bodies are in one place but our minds are everywhere and no where… -- retrieves the notion of charmed priests: academics at a graduation; lawyers at the supreme court; busts of writers in the hallways; grounds (fictional, fantastic grounds via trick tracks) (including mcluhan) – very visual space – emphacize identity associated with major figures, minor figures… -- backdrop of cultish ancient ritual? (graphics?) DRUGS -- foetal security – retrieves childhood -- (junkie curled up in a small room in the city) ELECTRIC LIGHT -- retrieves daytime activity – polo? lawn bowling with old people (also reliving their childhood) SATELLITE

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-- retrieves ancient notion of connectedness and ecology: retrieves the earth as an art form (the earth which had disappeared as irrelevant under mechanization) -- satellite dish receiving petroglyphs showing animals and people etc v/o of indian talk and environmental protest… NETWORKED ELECTRIC MEDIA – future city/GLOBAL CITY-retrieves the village, with all its nastiness – visually inspired by ghost ship…

8.30 Gradually, the televisual images appear on glass walls, then sidewalks, whole buildings and even people’s clothes… giving the sense of the city as a liquid landscape of imagery. MCLUHAN V/O In the electric age we wear all mankind as our skin. The effect of TV is retribalization -- a collective, tactile, iconic, participation in the globalvillage. The feeling is of a modern-day Metropolis, but it is imagery, rather than machinery, which overwhelms the inhabitants. The imagery is the standard TV fare: triumphs and agonies, starlets and toothy politicians. Many of the shots are the same or similar to ones seen earlier in the mall sequence, but here they are slowed down and given an ominous quality – as opposed to the electro-surfing vitality of the earlier sequence. MCLUHAN VIDEO INSERT TV watching is not like scuba-diving. TV watching is scuba-diving. TV is a tactile medium. It’s greatest impact? …Ritualistic events Around the clip of McLuhan swirl other overlaid images of events like: the Olympics, JFK shot, Di’s wedding, Reagan shot, Di’s funeral… 8.31

Meanwhile, people go about their business amid this wash of imagery…

8.32 … but now we see the streams of information – thin, half-toned strips of 1s and 0s -- leaving their credit cards and… 8.33 … thin, half-toned strips of imagery disappearing along the lines from surveillance cameras.

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MCLUHAN V/O (Old) frontiers were hardware societies which allowed men and women to define themselves by transforming the land. The electronic society does not do so; it does not have solid goals, objectives, or private identity. In it, man does not transform the land, he metamorphosizes himself into abstract information for the convenience of others. 8.34 The wash of corporate and private imagery begins to merge – in the same way as do news, entertainment, “reality television” and amateur video. 8.35 The real, vibrant life is in the imagery superimposed on the glass boxes, while the people moving in slow motion on the ground are so many drones. MCLUHAN V/O When ordinary people don’t know who they are they get anxious and violent… -- by making us perpetually experience everywhere, all time, acoustic space and electric media take us out of a world which can be related to through efficient cause, and puts in a world where we have nothing to rely on but pleasure and primordial intuition -- overwhelming sense of people struggling to maintain their identity in a distorted landscape; a surrel place in which all the world has become one Escher-like city (opposite of earlier sequence in which the mall and its people were seeing other places through the screens in their ground) -- overall: an image of the rising dark of the sacral night -- electric city payoff: start with images on tv inside rooms, then images mapped on buildings, then on city blocks, then the land surrounding -- the world of images literally forms the backdrop for people coming and going in the glass, futuristic city – literally wearing others as their skin: images of people and places on their clothing (start with logos and then go to people wearing actual imagery, first still and then moving…) -- the walls, the floors (done with blue screens and perspective tricks) – constantly changing, washing over one to the next: of many peoples triumphs and agonies, of whole shifting people and little children down wells POV from within city, of all the tides of the world pressing down upon one (metropolis and matrix combined) -- everybody involved with everybody, all humanity as skin, individual identity lost, no privacy, -- true in suburbs, countryside, to lesser extent the third world – people everywhere framed by imagery -- no community but a world of yearning demands, complaints, ultimatums

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McL: GV 97 – our bodies are in one place but our minds are everywhere and no where – we were not meant to move at the speed of light “groiund moves too fast, only figure left, we are forced to go inside ourselves looking to be grounded, for identity… 98-9 “constant change for its own sake threatens everybody… ordinary people who don’t know who they are get anxious and violent… people in the old west provded themselves transforming the land, we cant do that; electronic society has no goals, objectives, all moving too fast… we cant transform the world so we transform ourselves into abstract information for the convenience of others… (people changing costume/people providing different identity cards/people literally morphing from one visage to another “without restraint he can become boundless directionless, falling easily into the dark of the mind and the world of primordial intuition. loss of individualism invites once again the comfort of tribal loyalties.” -- show: people involved with Laphams list of nomadic principles: new age religion news as entertainment legend as history magic as real identity as fluid Politicians as actors apocalyptic imagery violence everywhere pleasure as paramount Without restraint (people) can become boundless, directionless, falling easily into the dark of the mind and the world of primordial intuition… 8.36 The video imagery becomes increasingly real and violent in particularly modern ways: serial killers, Columbine-type massacres, random vandalism. MCLUHAN V/O This meaningless slaying around our streets is the work of people who have lost all identity and who have to kill in order to find out if they are real or the other guy’s real… 8.37 Against these images, close-ups of people who are trying to reassert their individualism through fashions that show their affinity with groups, traditional or modern: Muslim women; tattooed hippies; extravagant fashions; gay style; national costumes; anarchists dressed for battle. There is an overall preponderance of primitive symbolism. MCLUHAN V/O

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Loss of individualism invites once again the comfort of tribal loyalties… In the 1990s there will be revivalist, reactionary and fundamentalist movements… as people strive for identity. 8.38

A series of extreme McL: paradoxically, western technology is creating the conditions of the east and the third world… GV 101 -- end on? – (stock) scenes of violence -- people yearning for fame; yearning to be on the screen themselves – maybe set up a mike at young and dundas?? -- series of very human close-ups of the youngest tribes people – reminding us of their vulnerable humanity – against the wash of electronic mayhem. 8.39 Their slow motion stupor gives way to a release of rage against that bland and invading and overwashing imagery and its soporific messages: suddenly they are digging up the pavement and hurling it against the glass, as they did in Seattle and Quebec. 8.40 Through a series of dissolves: the sides of the glass boxes, covered with televisual faces, give way to grim battalions of Robocops, who step through the glass, as it were, and start blasting volleys of tear gas and rubber bullets. 8.41

General mayhem ensues.

8.42 Somewhere in the melee, perhaps in a broken store front, there is a small monitor playing: MCLUHAN VIDEO INSERT Nothing is inevitable if there is a willingness to understand what is going on.asserting their identity: wild fashion; tatoos; military uniform; extravagant wealth; muslim women; anarchists; gays – the sense of people going to outlandish efforts to reclaim identity, using primitive tropes McL: in the 1990s there will be revivalist, reactionary and fundamentalist movements… as people strive for identity

SECTION 9: THE MYSTIC MCLUHANMcL: GV 101: governments need to understand that this is the end of representative government… TV ends rep at a distance… the successful image will be charismatic.. there can be no relevance in parties or policies but only a war of images

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McL: The problem is not only that the visual and acoustic systems are constantly smashing into one another, but that we don’t understand what is happening, literally do not get that there is a new ground… we are trying to cope with the new environment using the old method of analysis, which is like trying to tap dance in chains… GV 133: herculean task of trying to process this through the left brain GV 102 but before this happens computers and companies will destroy the old system, creating massive unemployment and dislocation… since natural law unavailable to the TV generation, its only recourse is to supernatural law for coherence and meaning… -- eventually there will be a reversal… MCLUHAN MYSTIC 9.1 UNDERWATER -- The briefest of wisps of the maelstrom bridges a second dissolve into: 9.2 Archive of the same sort of scene at the Chicago Democratic Convention in 1968 (?) Sixties pop music: “there’s somethin’ happening here, what it is ain’t exactly clear…” 9.3 Segue into the flower power generation. The images are exhilarating and naïve. Television is small, in the background. 9.4

MCLUHAN VIDEO <It’s the sons and daughters of this “flower generation” who will transform the world. They will find words to translate what is ineffable to their parents.>

9.5

Sixties generation dreamers in a flowery field, from an advertisement. NARRATOR Mcluhan had no doubt that all would be well, because his first principles came not from the intellect, but from faith.

9.6 Dissolve to: the photo of the sailboat, on a river through a field under a vast panoramic western sky. As before it is a still photo, though now it is slightly animated from within. The boy is writing. • McL: Mystic/hereditary and practical (matter vs form// body vs soul); -- True Religionist Vs. Pop Oracle N: mcluhan had no doubt that all would be well, because his first principles came not from the intellect, but from faith

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-- repeat the patterns comment from the first scene, but this time add “christs precepts” -- parents came from crackerbarrel mystics, shopped religions, believed in phrenology -- chesterton and the social agenda -- southerners against mechanization?? -- and Aquinas -- studying spiritual texts from I Ching to Old Testmanet -- an interest in black arts, fear of secret societies -- viewed and consulted as an oracle -- oracle to the sixties generation -- belief in electric pentacostal logos -- tetrads are rooted in ancient beliefs – in the beginning there was the word, but before that there was the logos, the ineffable, the thought, the perception, the apprehension, that which sat on the tip of the caveman’s tongue -- part of the ancient attempt to make visible the logos, which is truly god’s will -- he had pure and ultimate faith so that when his voice was robbed he maintained his optimism, even as he was drowning…MCLUHAN (teenaged) All of life -- mental, spiritual and physical -- is governed by laws still largely unknown to human beings... Death, sickness and sin might well disappear if these laws -- based on an understanding of Christ’s precepts -- were elucidated. 9.7

Photos: The congregation leaves Nassau Baptist Church in Winnipeg. NARRATOR McLuhan’s parents were bible-reading Protestants, who moved from church to church.

9.8

Sign advertising Herbert McLuhan giving a talk “The Higher Plane” CHORUS His father was generally interested in mysticism, in probing the mysterious.

9.9 Three tiny figures hike in a big forest, representing Herbert and his two boys. Close ups of tree bark, flowers and the veins of leaves. CHORUS Herbert loved nothing better than long religious conversations with Marshall and his brother Maurice, who became a minister. 9.10 Theatre exterior advertising Elsie McLuhan’s reading of Chaucer… some of which we hear.

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9.11

The McLuhan home.

9.12 Interior of the home. On a table, Herbert and Elsie’s wedding photo, a phrenology head and a bible. CHORUS Both Elsie and Herbert dabbled in phrenology, but Elsie was generally pragmatic and ambitious, and Herbert rooted his life with the bible. Their different temperaments led to many fights and eventual separation. 9.13

The boy on the sailboat. MCLUHAN V/O (teenaged) The situation at home is such that I can hardly bear to write about it...

9.14

A great steamship passes under London Bridge.

9.15 Rowers on the Cam River, going underneath the bridge. Cambridge university in the background. 9.16 Alternating shots of brooding young intellectuals and crisp young chaps lounging about the campus. NARRATOR McLuhan’s views were conservative for Cambridge. He privately criticized the campus influence of Communists and homosexuals, believing the former retrograde and the latter unnatural. 9.17

Cambridge library: in the reading room, heads are bent over large books. NARRATOR But McLuhan studied his religion as assiduously as he did anything else.

9.18

Push in on a photo of a book, and further in on a plate of Blake’s God…

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MCLUHAN V/O Dear Mother,...my hunger for truth is sensuous in origin. I want a material satisfaction for the beauty the mind can perceive. There is a true and eternal pattern to human life which the progress mongers wot not of. Blessed are they that find and follow that pattern. All art is an attempt to realize it. It emanates from God himself. 9.19

Young McLuhan with a priest in front of a Catholic church.

NARRATOR • MariThrough his study, McLuhan was drawn to Catholicism. 9.20

G.K. Chesterton, portly and jovial, at a meeting of 1930s social reformers. CHORUS He was influenced by G.K. Chesterton, who had converted Catholicism. Chesterton was known for rallying people to give aid to the underclasses and who writing Catholic theology.

9.21

Chesterton at the radio mike. CHESTERTON AUDIO V/O People say that one can’t turn back the clock. Of course you can. A clock is a piece of construction that can be moved by the human finger to any minute or any hour. In the same way, society, being a human construction, can be reconstructed upon any plan that has ever existed. NARRATOR McLuhan’s first published paper was on Chesterton, whom he called “a practical mystic”.

9.22

Cambridge library.

9.23 Close up on the stacks, panning close over ancient-looking volumes with names like Ante-Nicene Fathers and The Sermons of Lancelot Andrewes. NARRATOR For his PhD, McLuhan read Catholic theology right back to its roots.

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9.24 Push in on a book open to an early Medieval painting. It shows a sheep dog guarding its flock under God’s heavenly light. CHORUS He always came back to Chesterton’s pure Catholic argument that all things of this earth are analogies for God. 9.25 A series of paintings, progressively more modern, illustrating the relationships described below, and how they relate to each other. CHORUS What the sheepdog is to the flock, the priest is to the parish and Christ is to humanity. Each an individual expression of faithfulness. Altogether an expression of God’s faithfulness. Catholicism rests on this sort of analogy or metaphor: “as is this, so is that”. As on earth; so in heaven. 9.26 Black and white footage pushing into an American Catholic church during mass. The congregation repeating the refrain: “As on earth, so in heaven”. A montage of details of the mass and the church moves us to a montage of stained glass windows. Sharp rays of light pour through the windows, and the glare and blurring this creates, leads us into a sequence of gentle, dissolve-driven, animation. We begin with an image of St. Thomas Aquinas. NARRATOR St. Thomas Aquinas was the other big influence on McLuhan. Aquinas also expressed his faith as an analogy: 9.27 Stained glass peasants in the field. Through washes of light we move from wheat, water and wood to their beautiful human forms. NARRATOR What matter is to the human body Animated dissolves show the peasant workers shaping their materials into food, buildings, cities. We move from these creations to, say, the Virgin Mary with bright light pouring in all around her head. NARRATOR Form is to the human soul. A stained-glass window with the same spirit as Michelangelo’s Man reaching for the finger of God -- shifting, sparkling light plays in the space between the two.

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NARRATOR Aquinas’ name for the gap between matter and form, human and divine, was “the medium”. He said the medium exists in everything we are, do and say. For people like Aquinas and Chesterton there was no conflict between reason and faith. They were different ways of saying the same thing. 9.28 Cut back to the mass: “As on earth, so in heaven.” A young man, vaguely resembling McLuhan, kneels to communion. MCLUHAN V/O It was a long time before I finally … could believe that religion was as great and joyful as these things which it creates -- or destroys. 9.29

Tilt up from a hand holding a rosary to the crucifix above the altar. NARRATOR McLuhan remained a devout Catholic for the rest of his life.

9.30 Montage of photos of McLuhan at church ending with he and Corinne outside the church on their wedding day. He believed in Catholic family values. CHORUS When he asked Corinne Lewis to marry him, he insisted first that she promise to convert to Catholicism. McLuhan with his six children and Corinne. Series of shots of the children’s baptisms and other family and religious occasions; ending with a shot of Corinne, looking tired. CHORUS Corinne held up the family as a model Catholic wife for the rest of his life, as he pursued his fascination with mysticisms. McLuhan with the priests who were his friends and employers. CHORUS He always worked for Catholic universities, which were always less prestigious. He always chaffed in them, because of their intellectual conservatism. Meanwhile, he studied… 9.31 Montage of symbolism from the religions McLuhan studied, including the earliest Zodiacs, the Medieval astrologers, the I Ching, the Old Testament.

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CHORUS McLuhan was also fascinated by the black arts. Imagery from primitive cults, satanic rituals, and Protestant cabals, like the Masons. 9.32

MCLUHAN VIDEO <McLuhan on the relationship between religion and control in societies; on how they build and coerce societies.>

9.33 The lone figure of McLuhan at the altar of St. Michael’s (?) cathedral at the University of Toronto. NARRATOR At the university of Toronto, he visited the cathedral daily, but he rarely wrote about his Catholicism. He lived in an Orange city and worked among intellectuals who no longer discussed god. 9.34 Stained glass showing the Pentecost, with tongues of fire over the heads of the apostles, their light rising and gathering in one great Godly sun NARRATOR In public he talked about how everything humans made was a reaching out, a reaching up, an extension of their bodies that had culminated in humanity collectively extending its brain into computer networks, which connected many brains into one. 9.35

The light through the window intensifies and pours into the cathedral. NARRATOR He called it the electronic Pentecost.

9.36

A 1960’s pop-art view of McLuhan as a swami. NARRATOR Which rang a bell in 1964.

9.37 A music montage of the Global Village, circa 1964-70, showing the connections suddenly being realized: the Beatles crossing the Atlantic, TV in Vietnam, kids in front of a set, American sitcoms in other countries, Expo 67, a variety of political movements… and so on. 9.38 Intercut with: a quick cut series of McLuhan clips of him talking to young audiences about connectedness, interplay, resonance, identity and, in general, the whole revolution of relationships – and they are spell bound.

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CHORUS He was embraced as a prophet. When the University of Toronto gave him the old coach house as the centre for culture and technology and people came from far and wide to hear him speak. 9.39 Montage of photos of McLuhan posing with visitors to the centre, including the foreign and the famous: Trudeau, Lennon, Rowan and Martin, Swedish royalty. 9.40 Intercut with a series of video clips of 1960’s people commenting on McLuhan; the oft-repeated phrase that “getting” McLuhan is nearly a religious experience. 9.41 Hard cut to: blockish shots of U of T colonnades and oak framed passage ways. 9.42 Busts and paintings all through these halls praise and elevate men who championed reason. Faint whispers can be heard. NARRATOR This grated his university colleagues. They didn’t accept McLuhan’s theory. They didn’t like his popularity. 9.43

A 1960’s television in an office showing:

9.44

Stocks of protests against Vietnam, abortion, and for women’s rights. NARRATOR And they didn’t like his politics – or lack of them. He always refused to take a political, or even a moral, stand.

9.45

MCLUHAN VIDEO The most valuable resource in an information environment is recognition of the specialists’ ignorance… Value judgments destroy dialogue, which demands the sharing of ignorance.

9.46

A photo of McLuhan at work at his desk in the centre.

9.47

Close up of books on his desk.

9.48 Close up: a painting of the Pentecost. A further series of close-ups focus on the gap between the apostle and the divine light – a gap bridged by the tongue of fire.

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CHORUS McLuhan accepted the mystery that lay between humanity and the divine. He accepted the mystery of consciousness, of the divine Logos, the form that exists before it is shaped into the first word. He accepted, on faith, the mystery of the gap. 9.49 Close on the head of the apostle and dissolve through to a faint tracing in light of the outline of the two halves of the brain, and a faint retracing of the symbolism for the structures -- alphabet and electrics, dialectics and rhetoric, science and art – that McLuhan broadly attributes to each hemisphere. CHORUS But he believed there must be understandable rules underlying everything we create to fill that gap – beginning with the first word 9.50 The paper bearing the formula for the tetrad appears and swirls in the gap between the sets of symbols. Close on the tetrad swirling, mingling with revolving sets of symbols from various systems, that express polarized, yin-yang values. The only connection between them is the lines on the cross of the tetrad. NARRATOR He assumed it must be found in the gaps between those things, in the pattern of their relationships. Over this densely-layered tetrad washes… SECTION 10: THE MARINER’S TALE 10.1 … the animated whirlpool, seen from above. ner – saw the pattern and understood it -- somethings fell & others, depending on their shape, rose – saw that we could be saved, I tried to tell brother, but his response was to fight for a position on the doom boat: so there was nothing I could do -- I lashed myself to a barrel; he drowned but I didn’t The schooner is held to the whirl’s side by centrifugal force. A bright rainbow hangs over the bottom of the funnel, like a bridge between its sides. OLD MARINER V/O Never shall I forget the sensations of awe and horror. I tell you, the ways of God in Nature, as in Providence, are not as our ways. The rainbow’s splendor and hue reminded me of that narrow and tottering bridge which devout Muslims say is the only path between Time and Eternity. 10.2 The young Mariner, clings to a barrel that is lashed to the ship. His brother hangs from a ring-bolt.

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10.3 The schooner spins around the whirl and slips down one notch, as if on a giant screw. 10.4 The Mariner focuses his eyes on the distance between the bottom of the whirl and where the boat is hanging and notices: 10.5 Hanging in the surf are fragments of previous ship wrecks, debris from shore, driftwood trees. The current pulls some objects down; drives others up. OLD MARINER V/O By now I must have been delirious -- for I even sought amusement in speculating upon the relative velocities of the objects descending toward the foam below. A fir tree seems to be slipping down, but is suddenly overtaken by a large fragment of a ship. OLD MARINER V/O This fir tree, I thought, shall be the next thing to go. But then I was disappointed to find the wreck of a Dutch merchant ship overtaking it. 10.6

He focuses on a barrel, circulating downwards...

10.7

It is overtaken by an ungainly chunk of a ship’s deck. OLD MARINER V/O It was the dawn of an exciting hope. I conceived it possible that some objects might be whirled up again to the level of the ocean -- without undergoing the fate of those objects which had been torn asunder. At every revolution, we passed something like a barrel, or the mast of a vessel, which were on our level when I first opened my eyes and were now high above us...

The descending barrel reaches the narrow misty area above the eye of the vortex. Instead of crashing, the barrel’s cylindrical shape pushes it across the rainbow bridge and on to the ascending side of the whirl... 10.8

In awe, the Mariner watches the barrel ascending... OLD MARINER V/O I knew what I had to do.

He begins to unwind the rope holding the barrel to the deck. He sees his brother desperately holding on to the ring-bolt and attracts his attention. He points to an upwards floating barrel and acts out the actions he is about to take as he ties himself to the barrel. The brother shakes his head despairingly and tightens his grip of the ring bolt. 62

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OLD MARINER V/O It was impossible to force him, and I was overcome by a sense of urgency telling me not to delay... 10.9 The Mariner, attached to the barrel, hurls himself off the deck...and disappears underwater. OLD MARINER V/O ...and so, I resigned him to his fate. 10.10 High on the whirlpool as the schooner’s bow juts out and it tumbles to the rocks below.

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SECTION 11: REVERSAL 11.1 UNDERWATER -- The tetrad formula spins underwater, showing the last corner: “reversal”.OF THE OVERHEATED MEDIUM NARRATOR The fourth law of the tetrad is that any artifact overheated or extended too far will reverse upon itself; will do or become the opposite of its original intention. The formula dissolves to: 11.2 NORTHERN ONTARIO BAR -- an overhead shot of the Mohawk hunters around a table in a bar, talking. Through a series of dissolves, the bar gets crowded and they are joined by more people, talking ever louder, all competing for attention. – a series of aerials that fold/morph into one another, showing systems as bio organisms that generally follow a process of expansion and then fall into collapse… -- from expansion to contraction

GV 19: any process pushed to its limit reverses it characteristics… N: like all aspects of the tetrad, this is a question to be asked and the answers will differ depending on where and when one is -- all shot close, personal and over time, using dissolve over lays, lock-offs and time lapses, to show the increase in a state over time -- overhead/aerial shots, emphacizing growth of a state, in a “scientific” way -- overhead shots emphacize also the pattern/the mandala form of the tetrad MCLUHAN V/O HUNTERS -- hunters, now in a bar -- start off conversing but over time the conversation grows (people join it) and it becomes louder and more passionate, eventually devolving into argument -- so much that it is indistinguishable, it is just noiseS N speech pushed to its limit is no longer longer about connection, mmunication but competition.

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11.3

, is no longer individual speech but just a wash of noise

(maybe our indians are watching people at the next table argue – true members of an acoustic culture are not really capable of argument themselves) HIGHWAY-- CARSeen from a high angle: a car zips along, gradually slows and comes to a dead stop in a traffic jam. 11.4 Up ahead, two cars lie askew on the road, crumpled and smoking from a crash. MCLUHAN V/O The speed and freedom of the automobile, pushed too far, becomes stasis. 11.5

Within the traffic jam, a stopped driver twiddles his thumbs. MCLUHAN V/O Individual privacy becomes corporate privacy.

11.6 Out the window, as in the opening scenes of Fellini’s “8 1/2”, the drivers stare balefully at each other. 11.7 -- goes from privacy, freedom and speed to gridlock, trapped with others and static (thunder storm comes over, aka global warming; (nature’s hostage) McL: see UM, people have always known this: quote Pope… {the greatest power is interaction of media, like car and city} CITY -Several shots of streets seen from above. The streets are teeming with activity, dust and noise. There is a seedy, overwrought feel to the scenes. MCLUHAN V/O -- vibrant streets, choatic (china town) – streets barely with room for another person - pushed to its limits, and aided by the car. produces suburbs (an environment where cars rule and walking is retrieved as an art form) The principle that during stages of their development all things appear in forms opposite to those they finally present is an ancient doctrine… Alexander Pope wrote:

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POPE V/O Vice is a monster of such frightful mein/As to be hated needs but to be seen/But seen too oft, familiar with its face/We first endure, then pity, then embrace…. 11.8 High angle shots of streets further and further from the core are progressively calmer until, beyond the arterial highway, the streets become sleepy. MCLUHAN V/O The city extended too far becomes the suburbs. A suburban street, seen from above. The only noise is the swishing of water sprinklers. 11.9 DRUGS -- see suburban environment as souless – mall as hell – and people shooting up out back of the mall: drugs enhance tolerance of pain but reverse into pains of addiction PRINT -- (Close on a lounger beside a suburban swimming pool. A book lies open nearby. 11.10 Close on the book and dissolve to: 11.11 A series of high angles on heavy, blockish institutional buildings, the pillars of Western society: a courthouse, university, parliament buildings, hospital, army base, prison. MCLUHAN V/O The print culture that enables individual identity reverses into the grand narrative of institutional and national history. 11.12 possibly done as computer graphic) -- a road that you cant get off of: history, the monolithic story -- start on a book, perhaps a philosophy which morphs into a wholr began as emnabler of ambitious, curious individual -- reversed into rigid, hierarchical institutions: the judiciary, medicine, the academy, parliament, -- ? see them as rigid ballets, as mechanical dances, as structures of uniformity (as opposed to the originating structure of individual thought)

ELECTRIC Seen from overhead: a violent conflict is played out in front of one of the institutions. Widen to reveal that it is a scene being shot for a movie or TV show or commercial.

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11.13 As we watch the actors play to the camera, a ghost-like image of the final scene – as if through the camera’s view finder – emerges through the cameraman and floats upward. MCLUHAN V/O Electric media amplifies the scope of our information environment and reverses into the sender being sent into the ether. 11.14 A higher angle on the scene shows the ghost-like superimposition rising to join a stream of similar dramatic images flowing over the landscape. MCLUHAN V/O Television enhances our access to everywhere, yet reverses into the creation of a global theatre, in which all are actors. 11.15 Seen from higher still, other streams of imagery – from fiction or news -- flow in parallel. Each is filled with like imagery – men fighting, women seducing, people starving, politicians announcing, whatever. MCLUHAN V/O The satellite enlarges the global information exchange and reverses into a world of iconic fantasies 11.16 Still higher, the streams of imagery begin to curve and spiral, forming themselves into patterns similar to the lines in a Mandela or the veins of a leaf. At their edges are borders of binary code, numbers, fragments of information, like those last seen on the glass buildings in the “Retrieval” sequence. Altogether, the point is to give an impression of large patterns of imagery and information running through the global media. MCLUHAN V/O The global media network enhances the diversity of transmissions, and reverses into a recognizable pattern… The bad news is that, at the speed of light, everybody is a nobody. 11.17 The city that forms the background image dissolves into swirling blue water -with these currents of imagery moving over it; essentially the same image as in the opening scene of the film. MCLUHAN V/O (teenaged) All of life -- mental, spiritual and physical -- is governed by laws still largely unknown to human beings... Death, sickness and sin might well disappear if these laws -- based on an understanding of Christ’s precepts -- were elucidated.

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The images disappear, the water color changes to black and white and slowly freezes… -- extend the rational brain and reverse into non rational vast patterns -- the enhancement is that you can see and hear everywhere at once, but the reversal is that you lose your body as you too are etherized, you gain infinite spirit -- pattern recognition: the flip; you can see the logic in it -- the bad news is accepting that you yourself are nothing: we are all transported upward… it’s as if the streets are empty but for ghosts SECTION 12: MCLUHAN THE TEACHER TV shoot – overhead (repeated two or three times) -- sender is sent: people performing for the cameras; a demonstration, say – or fashion or television or movie shoot -- the image sort of balloons out of the location, the image as a sort of gaseous release and spurt, like a thought, (like a neuron firing) McL: sender is sent into global theatre -- these baloons, seen higher over the city, joins a circuit of like images: say of demonstrations, popular uprising, democratic revolt -- these wrap around similar streams, that are shaped like branches, or like the veins in leaves, which also show similar things, going on in different places, joined together to into generalized patterns of roles, patterns of violence, creativity and stupidity, patterns of peace, patterns of pollution and patterns of ecology… -- examples all heavily weighted to technological impacts and reactions McL: as we recognize patterns we can program things; the computer is not to expedite, but to coordinate… -- close to ground high angle: lock off time lapses, showing people flowing through structures of all sorts who are ghosts McL: the bad news is that you lose your private identity, everybody is a nobody; all humble before god and gods… 12.1 • Mcl: the teacher & showman: an ironic tale -- Teacher/Talker // citizen vs. nomad … to become a photo of a little sail boat – seen from a high angle – floating down the Red River. It is the same scene that we have repeatedly seen and each time there is slightly more animation within the photo; that is, not all elements of the frame are animated. In this case, what is obviously animated is the wake the little boat is leaving. MCLUHAN V/O (teenaged)

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I am going to work out some of the great laws… I believe it will be the biggest step ever taken in philosophy if a hundred or so of these laws were to be carefully worked out and studied… 12.2

The boat seen from a distance, disappearing down the river. MCLUHAN V/O (teenaged) My course as it now lies is to be the best that I can be, to follow my noblest inclinations, and if fame comes, to regard it as the least of my possessions.

NARRATOR From childhood, McLuhan wanted to become a “great man”. When he finally got his wish, it was not what he had imagined. N – what he wanted most of all was to teach … McL: “the man who found these laws would be great, and much misery could be eliminated if these principles were known to man Ch: he believed knowledge was found in dialogue -- what he sought his whole life was people to talk to… -- his father was a great talker, and his brother too -- when he found he couldn’t understand his students, he decided to adopt their language: which was what motivated him in the first place -- students were enchanted by him, even when they didn’t get it; he would deliver, speaking for hours… -- he was never so happy as when he had people here to bounce ideas off -- performing in the classroom: he used slides early on -- yet nothing he cared about more than education: harped on it continually: it was the only defence -- yet he couldn’t resist using tv to look at itself, to explore its ground -- on television he just kept talking as he was , never talked down to it and was therefore never understood -- willingness to clown for tv, photographers -- willingness to talk to corporations -- willingness to talk to anybody about anything they wanted, while always trying to find a way to reconcile opposites, to get back to his main ground -- for this most of all he was attacked, called a charlatan and mystigogue from within the jealous ranks of the academy -- criticized both for taking no moral stance and having no science (that is, for not being a dialectician… -- he didn’t care when he had his health and a platform, even if as a goofy professor (woody allen?)

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-- but it began to wane… even the popular press got bored, the books didn’t sell -- condemned and mocked as unscientific but he never stopped working… invented the tetrads and issued the challenge to disprove… -- he got sick and the worst of all: lost his voice -- and left calling from beyond the grave: disprove it if you can… --- point of the tetrad is to eliminate efficient cause and provide a new model, a way of looking at the world that shows formal cause, all the possibilities -- the heculean task of processing right through the left, having logical cause and effect or not happy p.133 -- when people could not longer learn from him: “they dropped away like flies” (implication that he was not a warm man, he didn’t have a lot of chummy friends) -- all his books fell out of print… 12.3

MCLUHAN VIDEO (circa 1968) <I was invited to a happening, as they call them. It was interesting. I wasn’t at all certain though that anyone there had actually read my books.>

12.4

Archive footage from the University of St. Louis.

12.5

Photo of young McLuhan – looking very serious -- with his smiling students. CHORUS (Corinne) That was what mattered to Marshall more than anything else. In his heart he was a teacher, he was never so happy as when he had a group of students over at the house.

12.6

McLuhan in a classroom, in front of a slide projection of an advertisement. CHORUS He understood early on that most university professors were mediocre and boring to their students. He always strived to shake them up.

12.7 Students in a classroom – as if looking at McLuhan – their faces ranging from fascinated to perplexed. CHORUS The media was not deemed worthy of academic analysis before McLuhan coined the term and began using his slide shows to tear the media apart. Some students were shocked, others thrilled.

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12.8

Intercut between their expressions and slides of ads and comic books. NARRATOR Throughout his career, McLuhan inspired some students to do brilliant work and drove others to despair, usually for the same reason: his refusal to offer clear explanations.

12.9

MCLUHAN VIDEO The medium I employ is the probe not the package. Instead of explaining, I explore, I probe.

12.10 People crowd around a newsstand in New York. 12.11 Inside an issue of the New York Times is a review of Mechanical Bride, the headline noting with approval the “outraged” tone of the book. NARRATOR His first book, the Mechanical Bride was reviewed as a brutal critique and sold poorly. After that, McLuhan began refusing even to make moral judgments about the media he studied. MCLUHAN V/O The fundamental answer to how things change is not found in morality, but in changing technologies of communication. 12.13 A 1950s book shop. 12.14 A close-up on a copy of The Mechanical Bride leads us into a montage of McLuhan’s unusually crafted books: the various typographic treatments in The Gutenberg Galaxy and Explorations; the cool imagery in Medium is the Massage, The Global Village and Culture is Our Business. Also shown are teaching tools like his aphoristic playing cards (“Affluence creates poverty”) and some of the many photos in which he mugs with cameras and other props to illustrate his points. CHORUS McLuhan realized that value judgments were easily categorized and ignored. He wanted to provoke people into questioning everything, including whatever he said. Whether in print or in person. 12.15 Grainy black and white video, from the late 1950s, of McLuhan talking to educators. From the looks on their faces, it’s clear that his oft-repeated comments about the coming dominance of electric media are fascinating and frightening his audience.

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12.16

MCLUHAN VIDEO My kind of study of communications is a study of transformations -- the old theories of communication are about transportation. I don’t study it, I’m not interested in it; I am however interested in what these media do to the people who use them -- and in how people are affected and transformed by the media they use.

12.17 A quick montage of stills of McLuhan posing or lecturing in the corporate environs of IBM, General Electric, and many other companies, as well as in locations all around the world: Greece, Hawaii, Australia, Venezuela... CHORUS The more he appeared, the more people wanted him. By the 1960s McLuhan was traveling the world, in equal demand among counterculture students and the corporate executives they despised – two groups fixated on change. 12.18 A series of interview clips of people from each group, mainly from the 1960s. Clearly they are fascinated with the idea of change that McLuhan seems to embody and struggling mightily to grasp all that he’s saying. CHORUS Yet what most people knew of McLuhan’s work and reputation came not from his books, which many found too hard to read, but from television. 12.19 A 1950’s family sit around an early-model television set watching McLuhan talking to a perplexed interviewer. NARRATOR The first theoretical paper on the possibility of television was published the year McLuhan was born. By the time he reached middle age, it dominated all other culture. He was one of the few academics willing to talk about television on television. For almost two decades, he was in constant demand. 12.20 A montage of McLuhan’s rise to fame through TV… 12.21 … inserted into a series of televisions, from the earliest consumer models through the groovy Plexiglas spheres of the 1960s to the functional black “monitors” from the late 1970s. The imagery on the sets begins with old black and white academic panel shows, such as the BBC show hosted by Frank Kermode, and gradually warms and colorizes through appearances on Jack Parr and other American talk shows, doing political color commentary and finally appearing on entertainment shows like Laugh72

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In. The montage should make much of McLuhan’s love for one-liners, odd aphorisms and groaner puns. The sequence is intercut with clips and ads showing how rapidly and incredibly the tenor of the times changed between the late 1950s and early 1970s. McLuhan comments on everything under the sun – yet he scarcely changes; he is always the same cool and obtuse character, but for the constant updating of his references and puns. The point of the sequence is that, seen over a long period of time, McLuhan’s message remains consistent and ever more meaningful -- yet interviewers make very little progress in understanding what he is talking about. The sense, toward the end of the sequence, is that the interviewers are getting tired of talking with McLuhan. CHORUS Eventually, television got bored with looking at itself. Television interviewers lost interest in McLuhan; while academic critics became openly hostile. 12.22 Clip of Jonathon Miller attacking McLuhan as glib and conservative, which leads us to several other clips of derision – mingled with headlines from bad reviews – criticizing McLuhan’s penchant for posing questions and providing few answers or for seeming to obscure issues. CHORUS Eventually, McLuhan came to be seen as a nutty professor, someone who was, at best, impossible to understand. CHORUS When Woody Allen cast him in Annie Hall in 1976, it was because he thought McLuhan “idiosyncratic”. Even Allen didn’t understand him. McLuhan insisted that his line be phrased as a question, which Allen overruled. 12.23 The clip of McLuhan in Annie Hall which ends with McLuhan telling a pompous academic something like: “that you ever got to teach a course in anything is quite incredible” NARRATOR How people were taught mattered more than anything else to McLuhan. He never apologized for his probing approach because he believed it was the only strategy that could save the Western world’s education system.

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12.24 Archives from the 1970s show children in a standard classroom – sitting in neat rows, studying George Washington – and home after school, watching the Watergate trials on television. MCLUHAN V/O Our crisis in education is due to the speed up in the flow of data. In the 19th century there was a relationship between the answers taught in school and the outside world. In the electric environment of the 20th Century the information level is so much higher outside the schools that...all that the best teachers can do is teach their students to ask the right questions. 12.25 Video footage taken during the Monday night sessions at the Coach House in 1978 show McLuhan prodding his students to interrogate issues from odd angles. McLuhan is an old man and there is a sense of his frailty, but he is still more than able to mix it up with the motley crowd of long hairs, geeks, artists, business executives and politicians. CHORUS By now other professors at the university were telling students that McLuhan’s courses were worthless – but students signed up anyway. And people of all sorts continued to attend his informal Monday night seminars. NARRATOR McLuhan was long past retirement age, but his pace hadn’t slowed. With the help of his son, Eric, a Joyce scholar, McLuhan was still struggling to find the synthesis he had been searching for all his life. 12.26 Various clips of Eric and Marshall working together, ending on one which includes a book and gives us a segue into the following montage. CHORUS McLuhan wanted to update Understanding Media with a book that would pose one question: what do all media have in common? 12.27 A montage of illustrations from various books showing the long history of fourpart structures, of the intuitions of philosophers over the millennia that life can only be understood in four dimensions. Some of these images are two-dimensional, a few are animated and three-dimensional. Visually, the object is to give a sense that these symbols are tools for seeing multiple dimensions simultaneously; and that the perceptions underlying the tetrad have been around a long time. NARRATOR

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McLuhan looked again at ancient analytical and philosophical models, which often had four part structures. He looked at Aristotle’s four rules, at the four causes in classical philosophy and the four problems of Francis Bacon. He looked at linguistics and anthropology with their four-sided attempts to understand the relationship of history and structure. Wherever he looked, McLuhan saw generations of philosophers and artists trying to reconcile space and time, past and future. 12.28 A photo of McLuhan bent over his desk. 12.29 Close on the desk, covered with images of brains, paintings and so on, as in the final scenes of Section 6.

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NARRATOR In all these efforts, McLuhan saw rhymes with his effort to bridge all the dichotomies he had studied: between rhetoric and dialectics, art and science, electric and alphabetic, ground and figure, right brain and left, acoustic and visual… 12.30 Close on a diagram of the two sides of the brain, laden with symbols representing all the other polarities discussed above. NARRATOR … ultimately, between the divine and the human… between human consciousness and human invention, spreading through space and evolving over time… 12.31 Superimpose a swirling, blank piece of paper – to which each aspect of the tetrad is added as Eric speaks: CHORUS (Eric) <He had known since Understanding Media that every technology enhanced some aspect of human beings, and obsolesced something and, if pushed far enough, reversed its course. We wondered what else was true. Finally we hit on retrieval, the idea that every technology also retrieves a knowledge or capacity that has been lost. We struggled for some time to find a fifth law or a technology where the four didn’t apply. We found none.> Close on the tetrad. NARRATOR Before they could finish the book explaining what they had found, Marshall McLuhan suffered a massive stroke. 12.32 The complex, swirling image implodes from within, as if flushed down a toilet. From the sides, water rushes in and we dissolve to: 12.33 SEA -- Swirling water, seen from overhead. 12.34 The old steamer trunk – seen in the beginning – explodes to the surface. It is battered and empty. 12.35 All around it, papers and books begin to surface, coagulating into a slick of meaningless pulp streaked with ink.

MCLUHAN -- SHOOTING SCRIPT – DRAFT ONE – MAY, 2001

NARRATOR McLuhan could not read, write or speak.

MCLUHAN -- SHOOTING SCRIPT – DRAFT ONE – MAY, 2001

CHORUS (Corinne) When people could no longer learn from him, they dropped away like flies. CHORUS (Marchand) The university saw its chance to close the centre, to save money. CHORUS The last time McLuhan saw it, all his papers and books had been heaved into piles, thrown out like garbage. NARRATOR McLuhan died on New Year’s eve, 1980. CHORUS All of his books went out of print. NARRATOR In 1988, the University of Toronto published the Laws of Media, but virtually no one took any interest in it. The swirling debris of texts dissolves into: SECTION 13: THE MARINER’S TALE 13.1 Much the same scene, animated; the papers replaced by the detritus of a ship wreck – amid which bobs the tiny figure of the Mariner, lashed to his barrel. OLD MARINER V/O It must have been an hour, or thereabout, before the gyrations of the whirl grew, by degrees, less and less violent... 13.2

The sky above is clearing; the winds dying.

13.3 Close on the Mariner floating out of the mouth of the fjord, beneath a tall cliff. Several fishing boats are in the distance. OLD MARINER V/O It was the hour of the slack, and I was borne toward the coast... 13.4

A fishing boat pulls aside the Mariner and he is hauled on board.

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13.5 The Mariner -- his black hair gone completely white, his hands trembling, his countenance one of exhaustion – cradles a cup of tea and mumbles, making the occasional wild gesture as he recounts his ordeal to the men. OLD MARINER V/O The fishermen who drew me on board were old mates of mine, but they knew me no more than they would have known a traveler from the land of spirits… I told them my story. They did not believe me. 13.6 The fishermen laugh and shake their heads as they hoist sail toward the town of Lofoten. 13.7 As the sleek fishing schooner cuts across the trackless sea, the Mariner sits in the stern; shivering, glass-eyed and wretched. The fishermen occasionally flash him a condescending smile. McLuhan’s voice-over is slightly resonant, as if arriving from far away: MCLUHAN V/O Everything we experience has to have a logical cause and effect relationship or we are unhappy… For thousands of years the left hemisphere of the brain has suppressed the qualitative judgment of the right and the human personality has suffered for it. The isolation and amplification of one sense, the visual, is no longer enough to deal with acoustic conditions above and below the surface of the planet… Western man seems unable to let go of the visual, even though he is floundering in the acoustic world... In the electric age it is no longer a matter of personal temperament or preference, but concerns the very fate of the intelligible. 13.8 Close on the whirlpool flecked with debris. Superimpose the tetrad formula, with the midpoint of the cross (+) over the centre of the whirl. MCLUHAN V/O <Tetrads reveal the visual and acoustic; the figure and its ground, simultaneously.> (They) … reveal… the hidden effects of artifacts on our lives. They are endeavors of art, bridging the worlds of technology and biology; between the artifact and the personal or social response… Each tetrad is the word or logos of its subject, and all these words are peculiarly human. 13.9 The superimposition fades and the painterly, animated water transforms into “real” water.

MCLUHAN -- SHOOTING SCRIPT – DRAFT ONE – MAY, 2001

13.10 We descend into the funnel, tilting the camera 90 degrees, so that the spinning water becomes a wall against which we now superimpose… SECTION 14: TETRADS A series of tetrads of technologies. The four aspects of each technology are presented in tracking shots, moving in the same direction as the water background. Each shot runs in fast-motion at each end and slow-motion in the middle, so that we move from one shot to the next as if in a whip pan. The overall sense is of spinning within the vortex of each technology; as if we are panning 360 degrees to see each of the four faces of each technology. All the while, the glistening blue-black water sparkles and shimmers beneath, unifying all the imagery. None of the tetrads last more than 30 seconds. As follows: MCLUHAN V/O The camera enhances the aggression of the user. 14.1

Paparazzi flash an unwilling subject. MCLUHAN V/O It obsolesces the privacy of the subject.

14.2

Unwilling subject with a coat over his head. MCLUHAN V/O It retrieves the past as present.

14.3

Two or three universally recognized photographs. MCLUHAN V/O It flips into public entertainment.

14.4

The subject with the coat over his head on a newspaper front page. MCLUHAN V/O A high rise enhances solitude.

14.5

A person sits alone, seen through a high rise window. MCLUHAN V/O Obsolesces community.

14.6

High angle view on a bustling street.

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MCLUHAN V/O Retrieves the catacomb. 14.7

People living in a small, cave-like cell. MCLUHAN V/O And flip into slums.

14.8

Wideshot of a rundown apartment building. MCLUHAN V/O Drugs enhance tolerance of pain.

14.9

Stoned teens laughing inside the crumbling squat. MCLUHAN V/O They obsolesce symptoms.

14.10 Through their broken window is a horrible neighbourhood. MCLUHAN V/O They retrieve fetal security. 14.11 One stoned teen, curled in a ball. MCLUHAN V/O They reverse into addiction. 14.12 A corner of the room, littered with needles. In the background, the whirling water begins to fade until it is merely sparking highlights which give an unreal quality to the moving imagery. MCLUHAN V/O Money speeds transactions 14.13 Money changing hands. MCLUHAN V/O Obsolesces barter. 14.14 An 18th Century rifle and a stack of furs change hands. MCLUHAN V/O Retrieves conspicuous consumption.

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14.15 A modern woman decked out in jewelry ala Cleopatra, MCLUHAN V/O And reverses into credit, or non-money. 14.16 A credit card swiped.

MCLUHAN -- SHOOTING SCRIPT – DRAFT ONE – MAY, 2001

MCLUHAN V/O The global network of computerized media enhances connection, feed and counter-feed. 14.17 A brief montage of positive, global communications imagery: a doctor giving medical advice via a computer; people communicating through the internet; the Berlin wall falling and so on… MCLUHAN V/O It obsolesces human scale and the individual’s ability to react. 14.18 Middle aged men line up at an unemployment office; a fifteen year-old dotcom millionaire; clean soldiers waging high-tech war; Chinese refugees washing up on Canadian shores… MCLUHAN V/O It retrieves the Tower of Babel. 14.19 Tribal people in modern garb and vice versa; cross-cultural clashes of all sorts, adding up to a sense of people’s inability to understand each other. MCLUHAN V/O And it reverses the loss of specialism, to the global programming of technology. 14.20 A series of shots of control rooms intercut with time lapses of their impact -showing technologies acting robotically and people programmed: in a subway, a factory; a shipping dock; an airport. 14.21 A satellite skims above the Earth. 14.22 A series of synthetic Earth views, showing various aspects that can be seen with a satellite -- pollution, crops, urban sprawl, wars -- as well as some faux images representing global coordination – the movement of money, people, technologies, knowledge. MCLUHAN V/O MARINER ENDING • Mariner – I spun and finally washed up among fishermen – broken in body etc.. they did not even believe me… UNDERWATER -- the booking tumbling…

MCLUHAN -- SHOOTING SCRIPT – DRAFT ONE – MAY, 2001

TETRAD MEDITATION -- the whirlpool, animation, water and light merging in a whirl of change… in fact – a four-fold view of the world, as it exists today McL: the reveals interplay; reconcile east and west, visual and acoustic; brain, trivium, figure, ground, etc -- it is the logos of the thing -- all done very quickly against the background of a vortex, with the four sides of each element illuminated, with the camera slowly moving into a commanding position in the centre of the vortex -- the actual whirlpool falls away and we are in the midst of concave of whirling scenes; matched 360 pans which include tilts up or down (vertex or vortex) of our modern, everyday world -- money -- drugs -- cell phones -- genetics -- prayer McL: the whole ground is always shifting , everything changing… chaismus… trick is seizing the tetradic development at just the right moment -- the trick is standing in the centre of the vortex REVERSE BACK THROUGH TETRAD of GLOBALIZATION -- computer + neurons + electricity -- done like a commercial, flowing electrical/water lines weaving the various scenes <There is no correct order to the tetrad. All aspects are present simultaneously.> The tetrad helps us to see “and-both” the positive and negative results… the past and future at once… As part of his spiritual health, man should make as his first object the recognition of pattern as a means to avoid excess and achieve equilibrium… The trick is to recognize the four-fold pattern before it is complete. McL: equilibrium is not to be found in any of these, but in a balance between them, in the resonance, in the play… with great attention paid to how they brush together – with other media Enhance – connection -- heroic images of communications technology -- great lights sweeping through darkness, police at disasters, doctors at a distance, children lost and found, wonders brought to us by the camera, teary romance moments shared… etc -- people connected at airports, etc -- walls falling, places reunited 84

MCLUHAN -- SHOOTING SCRIPT – DRAFT ONE – MAY, 2001

Obsolescence – order -- teens bouncing off the walls of an impossibly rigid high school, listening to their own music and rhythms, covered in tribal garb and corporate logo -- people thrown out of work; wars, refugee movements as people are displaced (obs of the previous hierarchical order) Retrieval –tribalism -- people in the electronic metropolis city, surrounded by menacing, gossiping and preening phantoms (as before, but now “realist”) – with the pulse of their data and financial status thrumming through everything -- fights for identity between the ground (reality) and the figure (image) -- iconic fantasy 14.23 Reversal -- programming -- aerials showing heat (of activity) and electromagnetic energy, flowing patterns -- all those images as bubbles, washes, rivers, neurons… mix to create -- chaos as order (an electronic image of the earth; realistic, but ‘off’) McL – we’ve put the brains on the outside, now we have to use them – there are no passengers, only crew… there is the possibility of connubial bliss A natural view of the Earth, all whirling and swirling clouds.

MCLUHAN -- SHOOTING SCRIPT – DRAFT ONE – MAY, 2001

CHORUS -- dots appear on the globe showing where all they teach mcluhan now, how his ideas are being revived in various locations and spreading out like a wake + connecting Ch: McLuhan believed in the presence of the believed in the noosphere, a human consciousness that surrounds the Earth, as real as the atmosphere or the troposphere. CHORUS It is something everyone always contributed to, but it’s now been rendered concrete in the world wide web. CHORUS The reality of globalization, which still farfetched twenty years ago, has rejuvenated McLuhan’s ideas. CHORUS They are taught today in… Tiny pin points light up on the turning globe in sync with the locations – as the pinpoints fade, a dim glow – a wake – is left behind. The place names are said in different voices, with appropriate accents. CHORUS (plural) Toronto… Herbing… Bristol… Adelaide… Bologna… Buenos Aires… Helsinki… Vancouver… Tokyo… The image of Earth, draped in clouds, dissolves into… ; at atmosphere of ideas that enveloped the earth, the atmosphere of consciousness, he believed you could influence it… -- image becomes words, becomes whirl… back to whirlpool beneath story teller… SECTION 15: THE ONCE AND FUTURE MARINER 15.1

… clouds, and sun, reflected in the now-calm waters of the animated fjord. MCLUHAN V/O Nothing is inevitable where there is a willingness to understand.

15.2

MCLUHAN -- SHOOTING SCRIPT – DRAFT ONE – MAY, 2001

The Mariner and Poe’s Narrator – the adolescent styled after the young McLuhan – look down at the sparkling water. OLD MARINER I’ve told my story many times since, none have ever believed me. Now, I’ve told it to you – but I can scarcely expect you to show any more faith. MCLUHAN V/O (teenaged) Now, I’ve told it to you – but I can scarcely expect you to show any more faith. 15.3 The Old Mariner turns to the Young McLuhan, who nods and smiles, making it clear that he does, in fact, believe. 15.4

A wide shot of the two on the cliff looking out to sea, becomes…

15.6

From the cliff top the two look down – the boy smiles and makes a note

OLD PHOTO -- cartoon becomes an image in a book in a photo SAILINGA graphic in a book, lying open in a sailboat, in… 15.7 A black and white photo which, as we widen, becomes a modern, color image of a boy wearing a straw hat, reading a book, sailing on a river, between golden fields, toward a distant horizon. ~~ END CREDITS ~~ -- photo of the boat on the river, and the boy reading -- becomes live image of a boy on a river, a real and yet unreal image, a liquid video image (everyboy; pull back and give hint of curvature of and earth that is morphing in various ways, flickering hints showing all sorts of possibilities…) McL: the whole environment is the educator now… nothing is inevitable if you are aware of what is going on…”