The mechanical bride 25 first girl I want that licking… I want Betty’s legs…. I want your mother’s death…. I want your wanting me. I want your life. Feed me, baby, feed me.” As an instance of how the curious fusion of sex, technology and death persists amid the most unlikely circumstances, the reader may be interested in a display of “Ten Years of Look” (October 29, 1946), in which the central picture was a wounded man coming home “to face it all another day down another death-swept road.” Flanking him was a sprawling pin-up: “Half a million servicemen wrote in for this one.” And underneath him in exactly the same posture of surrender as the pin-up girl was a nude female corpse with a rope around the neck: “Enraged Nazis hanged this Russian guerrilla.” If only “for increased reading pleasure” readers should study these editorial ghoul techniques—conscious or not as they may be—and their poetic associations of linked and contrasting imagery. Perhaps that is what the public wants when it reaches out for the inside story smoking hot from the entrails of vice or innocence. That may well be what draws people to the death shows of the speedways and fills the press and magazines with closeups of executions, suicides, and smashed bodies. A metaphysical hunger to experience everything sexually, to pluck out the heart of the mystery for a super-thrill. Life, on January 5, 1948, ran a big picture captioned “Ten Seconds Before Death.” A Chicago woman called the press and told them she was going to commit suicide. A photographer rushed to her apartment and snapped her. “Just as he took this anguished portrait, she brushed by him, leaped out the third-story window to her death.” This is merely an extreme instance of what is literally ghoulishness. The ghoul tears and devours human flesh in search of he knows not what. His hunger is not earthly. And a very large section of the “human interest” and “true story” activity of our time wears the face of the ghoul and the vampire. That is probably the meaning of the popular phrases “the inside dirt,” the “real inside dope.” There is very little stress on understanding as compared with the immediate bang of “history in the making.” Get the feel of it. Put that sidewalk microphone right up against the heart of that school kid who is looking at the Empire State Building for the first time. “Shirley Temple gets her first screen kiss in a picture you’ll never forget,” and so on. In all such situations the role of modern technology in providing ever intenser thrills is evident. Mr. Leiber has thus written a very witty parable which shows an intuitive grasp of the mysterious links between sex, technology, and death. Many people were disagreeably surprised by the similar parable of Charlie Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux. The wistful, self-pitying, chivalrous little figure had gone. Here instead was a lady killer in every sense. As Parker Tyler pointed out in his book Chaplin: Last of the Clowns, the early Charlie was a man-child seeking the security of the womb in a harsh world. In Monsieur Verdoux he in a sense exchanges womb for tomb. In order to have material comfort and security, he is ready to kill. But womb, tomb, and comfort have always been interchangeable symbols in his world. He was the giant killer in his first pictures, the lady killer in his last. The same mechanism of sentimentality dominates both. In other words, his is a popular dream art which works trance-like inside a situation that is never grasped or seen. And this trance seems to be what perpetuated the widely occurring cluster image of sex, technology, and death which constitutes the mystery of the mechanical bride.