on undead malls

an excerpt from Meadowlands/Xanadu/American Dream

1.

In 2019, Pittsburgh’s Monroeville Mall finally erected a statue to George Romero, who filled the mall with zombies during the winter of 1977-78. He was dead. His bust juts out from a marble column: bronze, bearded, grinning. Gazing at some couches between the Army Career Center and the Dick’s Sporting Goods.  

By the time of Romero’s death, a third of malls across the country had gone dark. Around this time, on the Jersey side of the Hudson River, the megamall known as American Dream Meadowlands, formerly known as Meadowlands Xanadu, formerly actual meadows, began the first of several phantom openings. Around this time, I began to visit malls.

A mall receives light twice-live-sized. Its skylights dilate til movement is abstract, graphable. Like airports, malls gesture towards a grandeur that may, in fact, still be possible. And even if it isn’t, at the very least malls gesture toward a role the human body might still be able to occupy in space. 

I never really noticed until they were nearly gone. I remember rushing through Nordstrom with my mom, an unwanted sartorial quest. The memory is modular, solvent. Marble, plexiglass. Hiding in the racks among the discount dresses and coats, a cheek against the cold tile. 

2.

In the fall of 2020, I felt more like a zombie than ever before. Days arrived in loops, iterations. One indistinct night, after watching Paul Blart: Mall Cop, I found myself in the shower, turning in slow circles. I often did this in the shower: stepping slowly in a circle, writing in my head. This time, the water had begun to grow cold; I realized I’d been standing there for almost an hour, drafting an essay about Blart. I laughed, abandoned the idea. The more time passed, the harder it was to remember what the joke was. When Kings Plaza, the mall nearest me in Brooklyn, finally reopened, I went. 

In the phantasia of urban space, something felt restored, perfectly, a vital need for all its artifice. The massive stability of the structure, the legible arrangement of expectation and surprise – an illuminated, riskless finitude. I had a body again that could ride a series of escalators upward until it found a t-shirt too brightly colored to wear, and could buy it nonetheless, on sale for $4.50.

The first thing you notice about half-abandoned malls is all the cops. The fewer goods there are to protect, the more security. As I wandered past the scattered groups of masked shoppers, looking hopefully around like a would-be tenant in a gutted apartment, I realized my movements were being closely monitored. I would stop and sit on a bench, writing a list of kinds of mall light. One: pedestrian light. Security lingered, expectant.

While it’s easy to attribute the shutdown of indoor malls to the rise of online shopping and Amazon, some mall closures are planned. Through leveraged buyouts, hedge funds and private equity firms force retailers into store closures and even bankruptcy, only to sell off the debt for a profit. As Lilli Loofburrow writes, despite our popular associations with the mall, “the best symbol of hypercapitalism operating at full power isn’t a live mall, but a dead one.” In some cases, the malls themselves eventually declare bankruptcy and close, only to be bought by the same asset managers and traded back and forth for a profit. While investors see a steadily increasing portfolio, visitors are treated to the shock of shuttered retailers or even fully abandoned malls, in other words, the shock of scarcity within a space consecrated to the impossibility of scarcity.

This phenomenon seems eerily connected to other late apparitions, made stranger by the pandemic’s ambient vacancy: zombie architecture, airbnb’d downtowns, ghost developments, shell corporations, AI-piloted shipping, phantom calls, automated management apps, self-driving cars, algorithmically generated NFT’s, algorithmically generated children’s videos. Inner spaces, too, have become uncanny in this way: is this horoscope app just generated text? Is this suggested track just perfect for this cloudy day or is my local weather data being mined by affect-algorithms? Am I chatting with a bot right now? 

3.

Brian Ulrich’s photo series Dark Stores, Ghost Boxes, and Dead Malls was the first to turn the dead mall into an icon: commercial ruins captured on large-format film with the eerie, semisacred glow of long exposures. The collapse of the illusion of eternal expansion is literalized here in a scorched retail earth, pocked with ‘labelscars.’ 

Such neologisms chase decay’s baroque profusion. “‘Dark stores’ and ‘ghostboxes’ are retail industry terms for emptied, vacant and dying retail stores and big-boxes,” writes Ulrich, laying out a taxonomy of dilapidation, a new, haunted iconography.

While Ulrich may have been the first to get the pictorial scoop on the dead malls, countless others followed: photographers, bloggers, Youtubers, all attracted to the primal symbolism of the dead mall, to its eerieness, “still seeking,” as he writes, “some connection to the former gods.” 

In this description, I want to see the last priests of Dionysos, as imagined by Hölderlin, traveling furtively across a destitute world in search of traces of the divine: “they are, you say, like the wine-god’s holy priests / who fared from land to land in holy night…” 

4. 

After Kings Plaza, I visited a mall I’d read was abandoned in midtown Manhattan, a beautiful example of the shell mall. Once home to a department store which boasted the highest shoplifting losses in the nation, it is now basically empty. It has 3 full floors: a street-level floor, used mainly as a passageway; a basement floor with an empty food court, roped off; a second floor, with a single Lenscrafters. All the empty shops are boarded up with a false green wall. I rode the escalators up and down, and up and down again, attracting the attention of almost 10 security guards positioned around the empty atrium, where the upper floors could also be glimpsed. From what looked like open-concept marketing offices, the glow of LED screens flickered through the upstairs glass. The escalators churned on, undaunted.

Could I have been the only one to have felt the trace still resting on these ruins? Lit up like radioactive dye. Like a divinity has just passed through this walkway in a hurry, on its lunch break?

Lili Loofburrow, who imagines these abandoned malls as “gigantic commercial carcasses in America’s cities like so many washed-up whales,” seems to be getting at what Mark Fisher calls “the eerie.” For Fisher, the eerie (as distinct from “the weird,” with its frightening juxtapositions and twistings-together) is characterized by an absence of what should normally be present: an empty development, an abandoned mall. In an eerily empty landscape, there is a sudden re-enchantment of the inanimate: the land itself suddenly seems to have an agency that wasn’t there before, to hold some mystery, some threat. It’s somewhat like the scene from the Empire Strikes Back mentioned by Amitav Ghosh in his book The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, “in which Han Solo lands the Millennium Falcon on what he takes to be an asteroid—only to discover that he has entered the gullet of a sleeping space monster.” 

Because the eerie raises the questions of unknown or mysterious agency, Fisher identifies this affect with the eerieness of capital, “at every level an eerie entity: conjured out of nothing, capital nevertheless exerts more influence than any allegedly substantial entity.” 

In the abandoned mall, we must proceed with caution. Who or what is acting upon us here? The sudden closure of a beloved retailer, thought of as an agentless feature of the landscape, can awaken us to the horrifying unpredictability, the monstrous, dying organism that we live within.

5.

Soon, the YouTube algorithm started showing me “Dead Mall” videos. I quickly learned two things: they are very popular, and there are a lot of them. Most of their creators, from what I can tell, follow a blueprint laid a man named Dan Bell: first-person footage of a dead or dying mall with calm, matter-of-fact narration, overlaid with soft, echoey vaporwave renditions of mall music, and occasional splices of vintage VHS-era advertisements. 

The videos are thickly drizzled with nostalgia, from the hauntological flavor of their fake-diegetic ‘mallsoft’ tracks to the melancholic gaze of their narrators. There is a clear Romantic love of the ruin in these virtual tour guides, who revel in shuttered stores, carpet stains, empty food courts. And yet, their melancholy has a capitalist-realist fatalism to it: a sadness motivated mostly by a thwarted desire for these cherished stores to persist, and an analysis of this loss which never rises above the level of reporting bankruptcies and failed resales down to the dollar. 

Mostly, the videos seem calculated to make their viewers sad. Sadness circulates through this rubble, most clear in Dan Bell’s narration, who returns again and again to the dead malls, muttering variations on the phrase “this is so sad.” Bell, who has spoken publicly about his all-consuming depression, seems to have no real purpose in his investigations other than this melancholic indulgence; his zombified response to the malls’ demise partakes in this way in the same compulsiveness of the malls’ initial construction. 

Alive dead arise collapse from into the same gray field. 

Still, something beyond sadness must compel the depressive’s eternal return to the ruin, like the return to the ruin of the page. What desire is this? At their best, the dead mall videos bring to mind Tarkovsky’s Stalker. In the film, the titular protagonist guides the curious through the treacherous and enchanted Zone in search of spiritual transformation. An overgrown, ruderal foliage surrounds what look like the relics of a human catastrophe, creating the ur-eerie film landscape. 

In Stalker, the eerieness of the dream-landscape is connected to its uncanny agency; there are metaphysical traps and portals throughout, which only the Stalker knows how to navigate. As Fisher writes, “nothing is uniform here: time, as well as space, can curve and fold in unpredictable ways” in the mysteries of the zone. And somewhere deep in the heart of the Zone’s rubble, there is a Room where wishes can still be fulfilled.

Most of the film’s eerieness is merely implied by the Stalker’s spiritual attitude. He is cautious and open to the unpredictable, knowing no prior experience is to be trusted here. The Stalker comes to represent what Fisher calls “an ethics of the eerie,” in which humility and caution temper, without canceling out, a desire for the unknown.

If Tarkovsky had made the film today, maybe he would have shot in a dead mall. The Dead Mall Youtubers are surely the heirs of Stalker’s eerie landscapes, its location’s radioactive trace that, according to legend, eventually killed the famous director. Like self-styled Stalkers, they position themselves as guides to a dangerous landscape, with its threats (mall security, looters, squatters), its mysteries (alleged ghosts, curses), its memories of a former world, now lost. In this way, they are perhaps drawn to the promise of the unknown, in search of the miraculous. 

Perhaps this is the flip side of the uncanny agency which seems to pervade dead malls, ghost malls, ghost cities, and the online world of bots. There is a hierophanic function to the bot-mind, the eerily abandoned space, which punctures the expected real, which leads us to seek something there, in spite of our fear: some kind of guidance. “The perspective of the eerie,” writes Fisher, “can give us access to the forces which govern mundane reality but which are ordinarily obscured, just as it can give us access to spaces beyond mundane reality altogether.” Within the foreclosed wish-fulfillment of the dead mall, and in spite of its dangers, maybe, through some providence, there is still a Room which knows us, which reaches out to our depths.

This reenchantment might be wayward or foolish. It doesn’t matter. These are faithless times, and we prefer the auto-generated guided meditation. To be called to attend the underside. The Room or The Algorithm, some hierophanic reflection of desire. In their way, algorithms seem to deliver what is referred to in the Occult as an Egregore: spiritual entities which emerge from a group’s collective ideation. Egregores are sometimes depicted as angels. In accelerating collectivity, the internet and its surveillance feedback loops are thought to produce egregores rapidly, deliriously: the meme, for example.

Writing then partakes too in the ethics of the eerie: this desire for the unknown which holds the eyes on the dead mall until they cross ever so slightly. A common that blurs. What angels emerge from the dried fountains, the dust-caked skylights, the radioactive greenness of the artificial plants?

In the seemingly algorithmically generated Netflix show, Stranger Things, the fictional Starcourt Mall (filmed in an actual dead mall) appears decked out by the technicians of nostalgia – pink and blue gels, neon signage, and the magic of costume departments are mobilized in a dry, procedural reconstruction, a compulsive fantasy of return. And yet, like the show’s mall, with its secret subterranean chambers, this fantasy is merely the shell of a deeper fantasy: a group of Soviets have taken over the mall, and are repurposing it to their own, non-individualistic ends. Their role as the classic Cold War nemesis is obviously perfunctory – they are here to perform an alternative to nostalgia – opening up the repressed question of a communist mall. Are these algorithmically generated angels?

We are often drawn to the mall for reasons we do not fully understand, here at what feels like the end of [a] world. We shuffle into the empty atrium in search of egregores, new network spiritualities, of emergent patterns of significance amid zombie-capital’s unending hallucination. Maybe this entranced, reanimated love is the revenge of some undead longing: above and beyond nostalgia and fear, a restored faith, what Benjamin called a “weak Messianic” hope. 

6.

Walking through half-closed or semi-closed or closing malls with their scattered pandemic crowds, I thought of Walter Benjamin, daydreaming in the bygone arcades of Paris, taking notes for his infinite, unfinishable book. He would find hidden messages in a random aggregate of ads, labels, descriptions of toys, like some kind of charmed neural network. 

He wrote, “If the soul of the commodity which Marx occasionally mentions in jest existed, it would be the most empathetic ever encountered in the realm of souls, for it would have to see in everyone the buyer in whose hand and house it wants to nestle."

I began to buy things and take them home from the mall. Cheap things, mostly mass-produced, mostly plastic. A clip-on LED toilet light. A pillow made of new synthetic fibers. I clipped the light onto the glass door of my shower and watched the pulsing colors change as the water ran over my shoulders, lit up like radioactive dye. It felt strangely alien there, like it belonged in some other shower, or maybe I was suddenly someone else, or in someone else’s shower. The light turned green then slowly blue, and I turned in circles, thinking again about my essay about Paul Blart. I imagined myself as Benjamin, taking a long shower, drafting an essay on Blart.

The ruin of the mall is already present as background and generative force of Paul Blart’s comedy, its central conceit of transposing a clumsy mall security guard onto Bruce Willis from Die Hard. On its surface, Paul Blart is, like Die Hard, a ‘good cop’ movie, a genre of the exception which upholds and justifies that which it is exempt from. Of course, insofar as a movie is about the goodness of police, we are in the daydream of capital. However, in the course of its parody Die Hard, the film seems, in some moments, to explode the cop genre, and thereby property’s defense, from the inside.

But Paul Blart is a failed cop. Through the accident of his hypoglycemia, he is rejected from actual policing – or at least, this is the film’s ready explanation. As we come to learn, though, there is something more to his failure as a cop – he is also a failure as a mall security guard. His problem extends – it appears – into the spiritual: he is a failure, we learn, because he loves too much. He is too kind to be a cop. 

Near the beginning of the film, we see him reveling in the social world of the mall, and of his loose role of unenforceable authority within it. He helps locate lost children, compliments patrons, and cheers up the kiosk workers. And these gestures of humanity beyond the minimal requirements of the job are what mark him in some way as unfit. His failure, in other words, is the failure to refuse to imagine the mall as a social space.

In Paul Blart, our eponymous hero is granted emergency access to the mall in order to repel a gang of thieves; he crawls zanily through the ducts and back passageways of the empty mall, using products from various stores as makeshift weapons, transportation, and distractions, as needed. 

On one level, this activates the same deep thrill as Dawn of the Dead – a wish-fulfillment of the mall as infinite storehouse, where objects are not bought but taken. While this may be true from the side of the viewer, Blart is not an isolated individual, atomized by apocalypse. For all his privileged access, his daughter and coworkers must be saved, not to mention his beloved mall – his use of these items is not a phantasia of desire, but of responsibility. 

In a way, then, the film is actually about two systems of property. On one side, our current system, an item can never be taken, even if taking it is absolutely necessary. Social responsibility does not override the regime of items waiting patiently for their singular owners. On the other side, there is the joyful fantasy of Paul Blart, in which one loots because one must, because it is healthy. In Paul Blart’s mall, inert items are freed, made collaborators and co-conspirators in the social, and the mall itself becomes a library. A richer, unthwarted mode.

Blart came to earth, perhaps, to restore our misdirected faith in the Free Store, to perfect this promise. In this way he is angelic, the dead mall’s true egregore; Blartist looting is spiritual warfare for undead times.

—

This post is adapted from my forthcoming book, Meadowlands/Xanadu/American Dream.