At one point in Clueless (1995), when things stop going Cher Horowitz’s way, she declares: “I felt impotent and out of control, which I really hate. I needed to find sanctuary in a place where I could gather my thoughts and regain my strength.” And so she goes to the mall, in a scene that Joan Didion essentially divined in her 1975 essay “On the Mall,” wherein she describes shopping centers as “equalizers…in the sedation of anxiety.”
Today, anxiety is one of the most common mental health disorders in the United States—yet the malls that once might have sedated its sufferers are in steady decline. Down from an apex of 2,500 in the 1980s, there are currently only about 700 shopping malls remaining in the United States, and there may be just 150 left by 2032, one industry insider solemnly confided to The Wall Street Journal.
When I think of the mall, I think of being 10 years old and spritzing my entire body with a saccharine pink Victoria’s Secret body-mist tester called Very Sexy before I even knew what sex was, but the mall is (was?) so much more than that. As elegy—or, perhaps, requiem—Anthology Film Archives, an East Village paradise of experimental and avant-garde cinema for the past 52 years, presents Shopping Worlds, a series of films dissecting the social and cultural phenomenon of the mall.
Last Friday afternoon, a few hours before a screening of Chantal Akerman’s Golden Eighties (1992), I sat down with Anne Hart, John Klacsmann, and Jed Rapfogel, the curators of Shopping Worlds, in an empty theater—an accidental allusion to the empty malls of today—to discuss their project.
As it turns out, the inspiration for the series was one of the executioners of the shopping mall: the internet. Hart tells me about @luxurydeptstore, an Instagram account centered on malls in the 1980s and ’90s that she started with a friend back in 2019. “She and I are both artists that are interested in the feelings of places—like, what creates the feeling of certain spaces,” Hart explains. “I especially would say I’m interested in places that people take for granted or seem like they’re just in the background of our lives. The mall is really such a diorama of life in a particular period of time.” After she started working at Anthology, Hart and her colleagues were chatting about the account one day when things just came together. “There are some great mall movies,” she notes.
Among those in the series are several mall-core horror thrillers: Dawn of the Dead (1978), Mallrats (1995), Chopping Mall (1986), The Phantom of the Mall (1989), and Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown (1997). Several documentaries are also in the mix, including Frederick Wiseman’s The Store (1984), Harun Farocki’s The Creators of Shopping Worlds (2001), and Hugh Kinniburgh’s Mall City (1983). In these films, the architecture of the mall, its civic function, and the socioeconomic and cultural shifts that contributed to its former prevalence are on full display.
On one night Anthology will exclusively screen a series of videos, all sourced from the internet, about urban exploring in abandoned malls. Watching the shorter films as a preface to some of the longer ones feels a bit like impulsively buying glittery watermelon lip gloss and butterfly clips at the mall even though the only reason you came in was to get your ears pierced at Claire’s—an actual psychological phenomenon known by shopping-mall designers as the Gruen transfer.
“It’s always pretty interesting to see how [the topic] manifests differently—to see Farocki deal with the concept of the mall [in The Creators of Shopping Worlds] but then to see George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, which really is a film about capitalism and the horror of consumer culture but presented in a wrapper of a popcorn horror movie,” Rapfogel says.
“After seeing the Farocki, how are you going to interpret Dawn of the Dead?” Klacsmann continues.
“You go to the mall, and there’s a Hot Topic…and right next to it is an old-ladies store that’s very different,” adds Hart. “[You] pick and choose different experiences. I like that the program actually reflects the architecture of the mall in that way.”
It’s perhaps unsurprising that the mall should feel like such a pertinent topic right now—after all, it fits into the still-thriving Y2K renaissance like Paris Hilton’s perfectly manicured hand into her fingerless spandex glove. In the documentary White Hot: The Rise Fall of Abercrombie Fitch, the mall is presented as a kind of precursor to the modern web: “Imagine a search engine that you could walk through or, you know, an online catalog that’s an actual place,” one interviewee remarks. In that sense, the zombie consumer so conspicuously alluded to in Dawn of the Dead still exists today—except now they’re online. Not only has shopping transitioned to the internet—and window-shopping turned into browsing windows online—but so have many of the other activities that the mall once made possible: grabbing a bite in the food court (e.g. UberEats), watching movies at the cinema (e.g. Netflix), discovering new music at the record shop (e.g. Spotify), and even meeting new romantic partners (e.g. Tinder, Bumble, Hinge, Raya). “You find a lot of [cute girls] at Burger King,” discloses one perspicacious gentleman in Mall City.
When I asked the curators about their feelings on fashion and how those feelings affected the lens through which they curated the program, I was surprised to learn that they didn’t think about fashion at all—instead, they had considered the mall in a more anthropological way. Yet when Alexandra Lange, author of Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall, introduced The Store at a recent screening, she alluded to fashion and being seen as the reason why so many people once found themselves at the liminal third place that is the mall. “The mall is the place to buy the clothes that allow [people] to project their identities in a visual way. They’re the skater or the ballerina or the jock. And it also becomes the place to strut their stuff…. [They use] the atrium of the mall like a catwalk, and the importance of the escalator [becomes] this showcase for movement and drama and fashion in the mall.” (For his article “Life Among the Mall Rats” in the July 1993 issue of Vogue, Charles Gandee interviewed a mall rat named Jason at the South Coast Plaza mall in Costa Mesa, California, referring to the mall as “the stage on which [Jason] performs the time-honored ritual of showing off.”) Yet today the appearances once made live at the mall are curated and performed on social media.
And there is no shortage of memorable fashion moments in Shopping Worlds: a woman stroking the sable fur she dons at a Neiman Marcus in The Store; Jackie Brown in cerulean flight-attendant chic, gazing up at the sacred interior of the shopping mall; Lili resplendent in a ruby trinity: dress, nails, and dangling earrings (Golden Eighties); a child terrorist in a golden mask, eerily Balenciaga reminiscent (Nocturama).
All the talk about death and shopping reminded me of my visit to Barney’s going-out-of-business sale back in 2019. “It was like a museum,” I tell the curators on my way out of the theater.
“You should have made a documentary about it,” Klacsmann says.
Shopping Worlds continues at Anthology Film Archives until August 17.