Are we really going to spend an entire book inside a mall?
Yes, we are.
It's not as though studying people as they congregate to buy and sell things is a totally frivolous or small-minded endeavor. Consider the history of our species, a fair swath of which has been propelled by merchants or their emissaries traveling to the far reaches of the planet, sometimes at great risk, in order to bring back stuff to peddle to the rest of us. As any schoolchild can testify, the romance of the ancient world teems with spice routes and trade winds and trafficking in silks and precious metals, frankincense and myrrh, gunpowder and fur. Theoretically, we could all grow our own food and make our own clothes and build our own houses. But it would be boring. So let's agree that the saga of humankind can be told at least in part through the story of shopping.
Surely, then, you'll concur that the sites of so much significant social activity might be worth a look now and then? We tend to think of the mall as a recent, primarily American phenomenon, and a rather banal one at that, born of demographic convenience -- we all bought cars and moved to the 'burbs -- rather than any profound change in who or what we are. But the mall has been with us always, under other names and in somewhat different forms. Virtually since the dawn of civilization, we have organized our world in part around the function of shopping. Even the simplest agrarian societies needed places to assemble to trade in goods, and from that basic impulse came everything else -- marketplaces, villages, towns, cities. The mall is, at heart, just an ancient organizing principle that hasn't yet outlived its usefulness. Perhaps it never will.
But it's also easy to forget how recent the enclosed regional shopping mall is, maybe because it has so quickly become such a mainstay of American life. The first one popped up (in Edina, Minnesota) a mere seven decades ago, and now malls are the dominant arena of American shopping, which is itself an economic force the likes of which the world has never known. Without even meaning to, the mall has transformed our country, and not always for the good. For one thing, it drew shoppers away from vulnerable towns and big cities, and when that happened, decline usually set in. But there's no guarantee that malls will be with us forever. In fact, some evidence points to just the opposite outcome.
What's that, you say? You're okay with shopping but not with the mall? A common condition. Many otherwise fair-minded, intelligent people scorn and despise malls. Some still end up shopping in them on a regular basis. But they're not proud of it. You of this opinion may not be swayed by arguments of how the mall is a contemporary version of the souks, bazaars, arcades, bourses, and markets of olden days. But by studying the mall and what goes on there, we can learn quite a lot about ourselves -- about the state of the nation and its inhabitants -- from a variety of perspectives: economic, aesthetic, geographic, spiritual, emotional, psychological, sartorial.
I might agree with those who say that some of the adventure and romance associated with trading has been lost along the way. Somehow, the glorious history of commerce has culminated in a sanitized architectural cliche in which you typically find not exquisite treasures and exotic wares but rather eighty different styles of sneaker or sixteen varieties of chocolate chip cookie. No wonder we look at the mall -- at the ambition of it, at the reality, at that already obese teenager stuffing her jaw with a drooling Cinnabon -- and we can't help but wonder: Is this the best we could do?
It's no surprise that the mall is such an easy target for American self-loathing in particular. It's a lot like television in that way: another totally fake environment that attempts to pass itself off as a true reflection of who we are and what we want. We disdain it, and yet we can't stop watching. Or shopping. Once in a while, TV fulfills its highest calling -- when a man first lands on the moon, say, or during the Watergate hearings. But most of the time it contents itself with reruns of Three's Company and infomercials for the home rotisserie.
It's the same with the mall. It could be much better -- more vivid, intelligent, adventurous, entertaining, imaginative, alive with the human quest for art and beauty and truth. But it's not.
It's the mall.
Copyright 2004 by YOBOW, INC.
