Tripping the Late Capitalist Sublime
“Dead shopping malls rise like mountains beyond mountains/And there’s no end in sight/I need the darkness someone please cut the lights.”
—Arcade Fire, The Suburbs (2010)
When my wife and I lived just north of Boston, we’d drive past wood-paneled, yellow-painted two floor colonials and Queen Anne Victorians, pastel blue Cape Cods and rustic brown salt-box houses, until the meandering cow path of Lowell Street shunted us onto the Middlesex Turnpike toward the Burlington Mall. I never enjoyed malls when I was young; our closest was the Monroeville Mall where George Romero filmed Dawn of the Dead, and I disliked the creepy uniformity of those spaces, the steep escalators and strange indoor fountains, the shiny linoleum, piped in Top 40, and artificially lit interiors. Over time, I defeated my own snobbishness. The futuristic slickness of the Apple Store, the faux-exoticism of Anthropologie, the seediness of Spencer Gifts and Hot Topic, the schmaltziness of Yankee Candle. “Not only is the mall a place of material reward,” writes Matthew Newton in Shopping Mall, “it is also a space to meditate on your surroundings,” where wandering “feels almost like slipping off into a dream.” The few things I bought at the Burlington Mall included a pair of swim trunks at Macy’s, my glasses, and maybe bubble tea slurped through one of those unnervingly thick straws. What I did do, however, is stand in the second-floor food court overlooking the turnpike glazed in January snow with the low-winter sun of early dusk appearing as if a squib of yellow butter scrapped lightly across browned toast glowing golden. I see no shame in admitting that I love the mall.
Everyone in literary circles has met the man whose family had homes in Manhattan and upstate New York, in rural New England and in Hilton Head, and somewhere in Europe, but who hates Pottery Barn, Williams-Sonoma, even Starbucks. These types emphasize that family wealth isn’t theirs, but their parents’, and the bright orange sashimi and red tuna nigiri sitting in an open fridge at Wegman’s, the fake distressed wood of Pier 1, the cutting fragrances of Sephora were only bourgeois affectation for the rest of us. A privilege of the wealthy class tourist is the ability to whole-sale skip over life in the middle, even while that middle disappears. Despite not needing the money, these types often romanticize manual labor, seeing in summer gigs as a dishwasher something authentic, the callouses from scrubbing a rough steel-wool pad across pasta-caked plates and burns from scalding water, the rhythmic mindlessness of loading glasses and bowls into their plastic tray and then sending them on a conveyer belt through the industrial washer. Such fantasies are a rejection of the suburban, the bourgeoise, the basic. “The assumption that everyone else is like you. That you are the world,” such a man might quote from ’s “The disease of consumer capitalism. The complacent solipsism.” ($15.49 on Amazon Prime). Despite being privileged enough to grow up
