Dead Malls and Me
I’ve been a subscriber to Shookey on YouTube for a few years now. The creator’s liminal space image analyses and videos on urban exploration are educational and entertaining, imbued with both wryness and heart. The above is all at once a love letter, a eulogy, and a criticism. It acknowledges the bittersweet nostalgia for malls and the tragedy implicit in watching them die out over the last decade and a half, but it also acknowledges them as cathedrals to consumer culture. The video represents Shookey’s evolution from a content creator just having a bit of fun with internet niches to a more mature, refined social critic. Best of all, Shookey does this while staying loyal to the channel’s preexisting brand, making the shift feel natural and organic, as opposed to a jarring overnight reinvention for more clicks.
Like other American millennials, I’ve spent a lot of time in malls. They were a big part of my life from the time I was a kid trying on clothes for the new school year thru the time I went as a teenager on Friday nights to buy horror movies on DVD from Suncoast Motion Picture Company. I went to hang out with friends, to play the arcade whenever I arrived early for a movie I was catching, and to try to meet girls. It was this central place in my life where I kept returning—until one day, it wasn’t.
I can tell you the last recent times I’ve been to the mall. A few years ago, I drove to one of the malls in San Antonio to get my COVID-19 vaccine. Sometime later, I went to the same mall to sling books at a popup market with my pal John Baltisberger and his partner. Last summer, I was in a mall in New Jersey to kill time before a flight. I even observed in a previous newsletter that while malls are supposedly dying, this particular one was full of life. It was like a surreal trip back through time.
Before those instances, though? I couldn’t say for sure when I’d last set foot inside a mall, only that it had been several years.
This past week, I was interviewed by an anthropology student from the Netherlands. She and her class were doing a research project on the popularity of liminal spaces and the concept of liminality as a whole. She found me thanks to some of my work here on Substack, namely this essay and this one. As we were speaking over Zoom, the dead mall aesthetic and its place as progenitor of the liminal spaces phenomenon came up, so seeing Shooky’s video a few days prior was an interesting synchronicity.
I’ve been to a lot of malls, but the ones I remember most vividly are two near where I grew up in Pennsylvania. There was the Oxford Valley Mall, which had two floors, a fountain where all the weirdoes hung out to smoke cigarettes, and Suncoast Motion Picture Company, where I spent money I should have been saving. The Neshaminy Mall was the other one, a U-shaped structure with a state-of-the-art AMC movie theater and an arcade where I played House of the Dead and Time Crisis. To my knowledge, both malls are still standing.
There isn’t much I can say about dead malls that hasn’t already been said, but they remain fascinating to me as relics of recent history. While it’s true that online shopping has made malls obsolete and that malls were terrible from an environmental standpoint, I miss them because they provided that ever-elusive third space—a neutral ground upon which people could simply exist and get to know each other. Shopping could be secondary.
In my chat with the anthropology student, I spoke about how liminal space imagery became so popular because the pandemic placed us in a seemingly permanent transitional space. We were waiting for something, the next phase. A quantum leap. A cosmic shift.
In some ways, it feels like we still are.
The horror aspect comes not just from the impermanence these abandoned places represent but also from the perceived permanence of liminality. “Life’s a journey, not a destination” sounds great to those who haven’t always felt adrift. The ones who ask: “What if there is no next phase? What if something horrible is waiting outside when we finally escape the labyrinthine Backrooms?”
These are the things that keep me up at night.