Edgar Allan Poe

I found there to be many parallels within the many ideas represented in the film we watched in class on Marshall McLuhan. I believe that the director used Edgar Allan Poe’s story as the main theme throughout the film and continued to refer back to it because it went well with the narration of McLuhan’s life. In Edgar Allan Poe’s poem the idea is that there is this shipwreck and its told from a sailors point of view who survived. It’s a whirlpool sucking everything down and it looks like the sailor is a goner. While he’s waiting for the piece of debris he is holding onto to be taking down, he is watching what else is going on around him. As he is watching he notices a pattern. This anticipates the chaos theory before they had the theory had ever existed, and it is brought about in Poe’s poem. The sailor notices that there are some things instead of being sucked in are being pushed out. The normal strategy is to stay on the debris which is keeping you afloat, but instead, because of his pattern recognition, he lets go and is saved from the whirl pool. When he is picked up by an oncoming boat, no one believes his story. With this being said, I also found that the director used the representation of Poe’s story because the story represents this idea of pattern recognition going back to Poe’s era. The analogy of no one believing the sailor along with overlooking this idea of pattern recognition is just like how no one understood or bought into McLuhan’s ideas. I think the director of the film continues to refer back to Poe’s story in order to tell the story of McLuhan’s life because they complement each other well. The director is making it a point to state that when Poe introduced this idea hidden in his poetry it was over looked, just like no one believed the sailors story and just like McLuhan ideas. Although McLuhan seemed to be ahead of his time, it’s unbelievable to imagine the advancements we could have made if we bought into McLuhan’s ideas and if we took them more seriously no matter how perplexed they might have seemed at the time.