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In a piece for the Dispatch, “The Decline of the American Mall”, Nic Rowan opens with Don Dellio’s comic novel, White Noise. The protagonist is going through a midlife crisis and goes to a mall to try to solve it.
“I shopped with reckless abandon,” he says.
“I shopped for immediate needs and distant contingencies. I shopped for its own sake, looking and touching, inspecting merchandise I had no intention of buying, then buying it.”
The more he buys, the more he grows “in value and self-regard.” In the mall, he says, “I filled myself out, found new aspects of myself, located a person I’d forgotten existed.” He feels as if the building itself enhances his self-understanding.
Writing for the New York Times Magazine, writer Kelly Kalivaris called dying malls the “Roman Ruins of Our Civilization”, with religious odes to the almost divine nature of the emptying of mega-malls.
Macy’s. Best Buy. Barnes & Noble. It feels silly to be sentimental about these dwindling commercial spaces, but I have no choice — this is the beautiful, dark, twisted America I grew up in! These dying spaces are as much sublime purgatories as they are my Roman ruins. My formative years will always be associated with drifting through the atriums of big chain stores that pushed out small, beloved independent businesses. But now I watch in awe as these behemoths meet their own end.
Of course, there’s much to be said about how online shopping was the proverbial meteor to the dinosaurs that were mall chain stores. And indeed, those same dinosaurs were the ones that preyed on and ate the smaller, more defenseless mom-and-pop stores in the neighborhood. Nature Capitalism is scary. Why are we nostalgic about predatory mall-chain dinosaurs that killed the smaller community spaces that came before? Do we really want to go back in time and resurrect these mall dinosaurs— Jurassic-Park style?
Yeah—— I don't know about that. I’m reminded of the famous Jurassic Park Line—
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No, malls aren’t coming back.
Our childhoods aren’t coming back.
Looking at the state of the economy, our ability to “shop with reckless abandon”— well, for many of us, we never quite had that anyway. But the promises that malls had— American monoculture in which we can all partake in consumption— that anything we could see or touch could be ours with just a swipe of a card, or a layaway plan.
I’d argue that the dominant cultural and political force in our country right now is nostalgia. Nostalgia is extremely powerful, and in many ways, it is easy money. We have powerful desires to indulge in the belief that our childhood was better, carefree, and full of possibilities. In a time where the very foundations of the American dream are unstable, and the future of work, family, and America’s place in the world looks bleak, Nostalgia Core tells us that the best time is behind us.
And I believe it is leading us into dark places. This piece from Mini Philosophy has had me thinking.
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Many times, we have to fight nostalgia in order to pursue justice. It’s worth overcoming our wistful memories of bopping to Diddy in the 90s so that we can hold him accountable for terrorizing the women in his life. We are already seeing White Political Nostalgia play out in our politics. The roll-back of affirmative action, the purging of Black voices from education and journalism, and now the Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act are all fueled by white nostalgia for an America where Black people were kept from power and authority. It is nostalgia for a time when the only socially permissible roles for Black people in America were under the foot of White people. While billionaires outsource jobs overseas, or to AI, white people are being sold the idea that they can return to power, to a carefree time with more opportunities, as long as they get rid of the Blacks and immigrants first.
And this is the thing— maybe we are all collectively hurtling into decaying mall nostalgia because it feels like were are in an era where America is destroying itself. We Black people know about the swimming pool politics. In the South, white people would pour acid in pools instead of sharing the space with Black people. We remember what happened with Tulsa, Oklahoma, and the Greenwood. That this country would rather destroy itself than share power with Black people, women, poor people, or immigrants.
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Alas. The future looks bleak. But the glorious past we think we remember never existed. So we are yearning for a time where it seemed like, for a moment, we all shared space, and some Dippin’ Dots.
Might as well enjoy what we can while we can. Can anyone send me an Orange Julius?
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America is giving dying mall vibes