Life sucks? Go to the mall.
"Man, I can’t believe this shit. Why are we sitting here trying to figure out where we went wrong with our significant others?""I think we just nailed it in your case.""No, no. There is something out there that can help ease our simultaneous double loss.""What? Ritual suicide?"“no, you idiot, the f***ing mall!”
Mallrats starts out with two friends, our main characters, being dumped on the same day. To deal with their losses, they retreat to the mall. The mall holds a whole alternate world full of possibilities and distractions, it is “essentially a fantasy urbanism” in the words of Margret Crawford. Throughout Mallrats the boys have a full set of experiences inside the mall that could have easily taken place on the streets of a city but instead happen inside this forced, “utopia of consumerism” (Crawford, 11). At one point, one of the boys is pushed into the service hallway of the mall, a distorted version of the archetypal back-alley fight.
I think my favorite part of the movie was when they left the mall to run away to the flea market. The flea market is a place that is friendly, everybody knows Brodies name, and anything goes. This comparison of a top-down (mall) vs bottom up (flea market) consumerism was one of the more… insightful moments of the movie. This top-down vs bottom-up approach is applicable to other topics from class this week, for example, organic city fabrics (bottom-up) vs New Urbanism (top-down).
It's interesting that the flee market is where "everybody knows Brodies name" yet the mall is simply an alternate world that allowed them to both be unknown and dissociate from their emotions. This was something that struck me when reading Junkspace as well... we've created spaces that know everything that you want without anyone ever knowing you. How backward! As architecture students today, there's such an emphasis on community, yet the architecture that precedes us knows nothing about that at all. I think this will be a unique challenge for our generation of designers to attempt to rectify.
ReplyDeleteI love how you found architectural and urban meaning in this movie. While watching it, I struggled to discern the relevance and potential commentary this movie was having on architecture beyond that it was happening in a mall. There is definitely something there about bottom-up planning vs top-down planning. Is there a preference between the two that you have? Bottom-up planning seems more accepting to many ways of life, while the top-down planning seems like it tries to enforce a common standard of living, as supported by the main characters being chased and thrown out by security.
ReplyDeleteWhen we consider recent discussions on social justice in the city, would it better if cities planned organic city fabrics once more?
*be better if
DeleteI think that both top-down and bottom-up planning have their place. It seems like top-down planning is better as guidelines, a guiding background theme. One example of this that comes to mind is zoning - some sort of rules and regulations that prevents absolute chaos. But, I think that overall bottom-up planning provides moments that the people created and therefor take ownership of. Bottom-up or community based planning (if it could even be considered planning in that sense... more like bottom-up urbanism) lead to, in my opinion, more successful public space.
Delete