Zen And The Art Of Going To The Mall

When the mall ruled

My four year old daughters have evidently been drinking what's in the New Jersey water, since they spent most of the summer asking if we could go to the mall. I finally broke down yesterday, but we decided to go a little further afield than our local mall in Livingston and make a day of it. In any case, it was hot and brutally humid yesterday, with the kind of air you choke on more than breathe.

We took the 45 minute trek to the Rockaway Mall, located in the far suburban interzone of Dover, near the foothills of the Appalachians. I saw the trip mostly as a way to keep my daughters occupied and to find a couple of shirts on clearance for the school year for me and some pants for the one daughter who inherited my abnormally long legs. It was mission accomplished on both counts. The large play area in the mall was more than big enough to accommodate double toddler wackiness, and the clearance racks yielded a cut rate gold mine.

What I was not expecting was the feeling of peace that came over me at the mall. It helped that we were there at 10AM on a weekend, with hardly anyone about. With the prestige and attendance of malls now being eroded by online shopping, they've actually become much more pleasant places to be. On an awful, muggy day I could walk around in air conditioned comfort without sweaty balls. My daughters could expend their vast reservoirs of energy without making a mess for me to clean up or constantly demanding to watch some godawful kids show on TV. Sure they made the usual hue and cry for me to buy them a toy, but their general level of happiness at being in the mall made it pretty easy to turn back their entreaties.

Walking around the mall I also remembered what the mall meant in my youth. In my small town it was the center of youth culture, and luckily within walking distance of my house. My hometown mall was about a quarter the size of the Rockaway Mall, which made trips to Omaha positively thrilling. Going to Westroads Mall at age eleven was a sublime experience. I realize now that some of that experience was aspirational. In the 1980s the mall was the apex of the Hegelian unfolding of history, as far as I was concerned, and going to those big Omaha malls was a taste of what I could experience once I grew up and got out of my isolated, small hometown. I did probably spend too much time in college at the mall, but I took it as a sign of my independence and moving up in the world. I bought artsy movies at the Suncoast Video, existential novels at Barnes and Noble, and punk rock CDs at Blockbuster Music. (Some of those stores were mall-adjacent, but I went as part of my mall trips.) I was a sophisticated mall goer. Well, maybe except for the time I saw Showgirls at the mall multiplex.

The mall has lost its once mighty status, both socially and in my heart. Once I moved to Chicago after college my nascent love of urban life went full-blown, and I began to see the mall as a symbol of the tacky and inauthentic nature of mainstream American society. I rarely went to malls after that, unless out of necessity. Yesterday the mall was much quieter than malls back in the 90s were, almost sleepy. It felt like the times I'd been to church in massive medieval cathedrals in Germany with only a sparse scattering of worshippers. In both cases, the experience was spiritual. So much for the gulf between the sacred and profane.

Ode To A Video Store

I've spent a lot of time lately thinking about much the landscape of daily life has changed in the last decade of digital disruption.  It's been especially strange to see the destruction of Blockbuster, the behemoth that destroyed local video stores back in the 1990s.  As late as 2004 it looked to bestride the earth like a Colossus forevermore, now it's gone.  I refuse to weep a tear for that wretched chain, with its philistine insistence on fullscreen movies, censorship, and strong-arm late fee collections.  However, I do mourn the local video store, mostly because I have been lucky to enjoy some truly great ones in my life.  My favorite, That's Rentertainment in Champaign-Urbana, thankfully still stands.  Sadly, Video Kingdom, my cinematic lifeline in my isolated small Nebraska hometown, still sells electronic equipment, but no longer rents movies.

Its fate was intimately tied to the mall where it was located, a mall that might as well have tumbleweeds blowing through it nowadays.  Back when I was growing up it echoed with laughter and the sound of kettle corn popping at Karmelkorn in the Food Court.  You could spot Video Kingdom at the mall because it had one of those huge knight in armor mock-ups standing out front.  I was going there so long ago that I can remember a time when the boxes on the shelves had two colors of tags in the back that you'd take to get your tape at the counter: blue for VHS and yellow for beta.  The tape did not come home in the shiny video box (remember, those tapes cost a king's ransom back then), but in a brown container in the bland color style so beloved in America circa 1984.  (My family bought a brown 1984 Chevy conversion van, so it's a color I knew well back then.)

Although there was a rival video store opened across town shortly later, Video Kingdom would still always be hopping.  In a town with few entertainment options, it was an embarrassment of riches.  I also wonder nowadays if its proprietor was a film buff, because I was able to get my hands on lots of things that were fairly obscure, and which never would have come to the threeplex at the mall theater.  (Not only did it only show the most mainstream fare, it often took weeks or even months for movies to show up there.  I am little ashamed to admit that I drove thirty miles to see Forrest Gump with friends in another town in 1994.)  By the time I reached high school I religiously watched Siskel and Ebert, and read magazines like Spin and Rolling Stone.  I would often hear and read rave reviews of films that did not come within 100 miles of where I lived.  Without fail, I could find them at Video Kingdom.

Because of Video Kingdom I was able to rent Reservoir Dogs, the first contemporary film I'd seen that suggested something wildly different from the narrow limits of mainstream Hollywood.  I was able to see Do The Right Thing, perhaps the first film I watched that really forced me to think about how life was lived outside of the confines of my Nebraska homeland.  Video Kingdom stocked Short Cuts, a movie that began my lifelong love of Robert Altman.  One weekend my parents were out of town, and instead of throwing a party (no one would have come, anyway) I rented Taxi Driver, a film I knew would be so gritty and violent that I dare not see it in my parents' presence.  It both thoroughly shocked and excited me in ways I didn't know movies could do.  My best friend and I watched Blade Runner and Apocalypse Now! avidly, my friend going so far as to tape some of the audio track on cassette and play it in his car's tape deck.  I was a social outcast and a bit of a weirdo in high school, but having access to these films made me feel special and smart, like someone who was in on something that other people could not possible understand.  Without that video store, I would not have had such a comforting past-time, nor would my love of cinema be so well-developed today.

Of course, if I was a teenager in my hometown today I wouldn't need a video store to give me access to these things.  Netflix has pretty much any movie you could ever want.  It would have made my process of discovery easier, but by being easier, much cheaper and less thrilling.  At a time when I needed to believe that my being a misfit was actually a sign that I had transcended my surroundings, the local video store gave me hope.  For that I owe it my eternal gratitude.

Requiem for a Dead Mall

Over the holidays, my wife and I trekked out with our daughters to my rural Nebraska homeland.  Since my spouse is a Jersey girl, and we wanted to walk a bit away from the biting plains winter wind, I took her to the local mall.

I hadn't been there in years, despite the fact that it was a major focal point of my teenage years.  I was not prepared for what I saw, although my dad warned us before going over that "you could fire a cannon there and not hit anyone."  There were only a handful of stores open, the rest just sat there empty.  The lights were dimmed, and most of the people there were folks over 50 getting in a little walking, not there to shop.

Back when I was a teenager, the mall was THE place to be.  It was always jam packed with people, making it the easiest way to come into casual contact with my acquaintances.  I spent hours in the local bookstore, bought some of the most important albums of my life at Musicland, watched some seriously formative cinematic treats at the multiplex, and plugged innumerable quarters into the machines at the video arcade.  The food court brimmed with restaurants, events were always taking place in the mall's central area, and there was always something to take in, a welcome thing in a town so isolated.  I attended baseball card shows there, broke some boards as part of a karate exhibition my dojo put on every year, and conducted demonstrations as part of the Cub Scouts.  It wasn't just commercial space, civic groups used it all the time.  In sum, the mall was our modern agora, the place where the people of my town came together as one.

Going back, I was struck by the lifelessness of it all.  The food court was barren, the promenade devoid of people, and the Kmart that anchored the mall could only be accessed from the outside, as if the rest of the mall was something to be embarrassed by.  When Kmart is afraid of being associated with you, you've really fallen as far as you can go.  Something I found especially striking was the flags lining the promenade, reflective of my hometown's reactionary, overdone patriotism that I thought could be interpreted as a subversive artistic statement.  This flag-festooned tomb of a mall might very well be a metaphor for the death of the American dream.

When I went home and talked to my parents about it, I was hardly surprised to find out that the mall was no longer locally owned, but had been bought up by a management company that obviously didn't care whether my hometown had its commercial agora or not, as long as a little rent money trickled back to the home office out of state.  Some of the stores moved back downtown, (including the bookstore), but most of the retail is out by the Wal-Mart on the edge of town.  It used to be common for cultural critics to decry malls, but at least they fostered a sense of community. My hometown mall is dead, and its citizens are much worse off for it.