Both authors of the readings this week seem to feel a profound attachment to the ‘beautiful’ side of the mall. Kowinski seems to reserve his sense of ‘community’ for malls designed by Viktor Gruen, while Zepp seems to find beauty in even the most banal mall, finding beauty in elements that aren’t even necessarily true, like symmetry.
Kowinski’s descriptions of the mall--in themselves--are beautiful, but like his own stage analogy of using ‘darkness to hide all distractions and light to focus audience attention’, he seems only interested in representing those aspects of malls he sees to be positive. His stage analogy, for example, works insofar as a spectacle, but finds itself woefully misconceived when the intentions of a mall and a theater are considered. Yes, in the end, both are businesses, but many a theater are founded on the notion that they will only perform life-changing plays, plays that cut to the quick of human drama and nature and its most vulnerable. They are trying to make people consider the world and their lives on a deeper, fuller level. I am yet to see a mall that seemed to be doing anything more than trying to get me to be caught up in a glorious image of consumerism. Destiny USA, perhaps, is striving to do so with all of it’s green initiatives and experiential elements that truly seem to be trying to create ‘another world’, but many an argument has already been made that these fantasies are nothing more than a selling point for the environmentally conscious or thrill-seeking consumer. As Kowinski touches on in the second two articles, I feel that the most good that can be said about the creation of malls is they can serve as a social condenser to meet people and form relationships, even if those relationships are centered around materials. I concede based on a few quick google searches that the Victor Gruen malls seem to be more architecturally inspired and ultimately more ‘beautiful’ than standard malls, but they’re still malls. They’re there to sell you things, and the goals of many of those stores is to convince you to buy things you not only never knew existed, but that these things are the answer to making your life ‘happier’. To quote Kurt Vonnegut in Cat’s Cradle: “Americans are always looking for love in places it doesn’t manifest.” Isn’t there something wrong with glorifying a love of consumption?
Zepp doesn’t seem to think so. He seems to just accept it as the condition of modern society. The mall is where people now go to find ‘centeredness’. I admit that at first I found Zepp relating the experience of a mall to all traditional forms of religion and spirituality absolutely hilarious, but as I read on a began to realize that they’re pretty accurate, at least as far as America is concerned. Humans have an innate desire to worship, and they’ll find it wherever it makes sense to them. The American mentality has made worshipping consumerism make sense.
This idea rings more true particularly to me as I’ve been working on Set Design for a play at the stage called ‘Equus’, by Peter Schaffer, which just so happens to be all about misplaced worship (and opens this coming weekend). When we first meet the main character, Alan, a rather mentally deranged boy of 17, all he says (or rather sings) is commercial jingles. The first worship in his life was television, and the ‘catchy tunes’ made him love to be a consumer if for no other reason because he loved their product’s theme songs. When his father took his TV away trying to explain it was ruining his mind, his mother introduced another form of worship in the form of religion. When his father took that away due to the violence inherent in that, he invents his own worship in a twisted religion of horses. In the end he stabs out the eyes of four of them but the point is that worship is a natural part of being human, and inevitably people will worship what ends up making the most sense to them to worship. Because all forms of media (and even our friends) can often give off an image that ‘products’ are what can make life enjoyable, that is what we find ‘making sense’ to us. Everyone we know can’t be wrong…can they?
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