The dashes should be inserted between "bridge" and "an", and the second dash should be between "gorge" and "while".
Without the hyphens, the sentence is a bit too long and over-connected. There needs to be some sort of pause to describe the bridge the jumper is jumping off of.
This is basically saying people after the war tried to ignore the hardships from WWII and used media, fashion, and new tech to drive away the bad thoughts.