I’m fascinated by dead malls because they conjure nostalgic feelings about environments that weren’t exactly healthy for my community. I don’t always know what to do with such nostalgia. How can we explore those ambivalent connections to these landscapes? Or what Mike Davis called Evil Paradises? They were, after all, embedded in our childhood memories.
GT: Malls were the corporate “solution” to the public square—replacing it with privatized space. I grew up in malls too, and what I’m nostalgic for is the feeling of being around people, the feeling of being in an open space, the feeling of being around friends, of having unstructured time to just wander. For teens this is especially important—having a space where they can congregate away from parents, outside of school, where the purpose isn’t just to shop but hang out, too. Alexandra Lange has conducted fascinating research on this.
But then you reach a point where you learn a bit more about what the mall really represents—consumerism, privatization—and now we’ve got this nostalgic tension: I miss the mall, but I recognize what it represents in the history of capitalism. We find ourselves caught in this tension frequently, and instead of trying to punish the nostalgia out of people, the corporate sector invites us to relieve it through consumption. The marketing industry tells us, here’s a bunch of stuff to bring old feelings back so you don’t have to miss them anymore. It appears at first glance that our consumption of nostalgic goods and content is due to our nostalgia for the past. But this isn’t quite right: the purpose is to extinguish nostalgia through consumption. It’s a new spin on an old formula. In the distant past, nostalgia was a threat against capitalism because it might inspire one to pause and dream, and not work. Juridico-medical authorities all the way up until the middle of the 20th century were looking for cures and drawing up plans to discipline nostalgia out of individuals. Now that nostalgia has been commodified, we have new weapons to get rid of it, but they don’t seem like weapons.
I really got to thinking about this in regard to the Star Wars reboots. Every time a new Star Wars movie comes out, there’s some article somewhere talking about the nostalgia factor of this latest installment. But how can anyone be nostalgic for Star Wars? There are new Star Wars movies coming out all the time! That to me is the most dangerous thing about today’s nostalgia. You’ve got politicians, elites, corporations framing what’s worth being nostalgic for, and then saying, “Here you go.” Here’s some content for you to eradicate that feeling. It’s one in a long line of methods to combat this bittersweet feeling.