Hans Eisenbeis,  MALL OF THE WILD
(Mall of America)


 Shopping malls are defined as "a whole microcircuitry of desire, ideology and expenditure for processed bodies drifting through the cyber-space of ultracapitalism" according to one reference site, the Panic Encyclopedia. This compendium of critical readings from Canadien panic popstar Arthur Kroker and friends includes entries on Viral Theory, Astronomy and Torture, Florida Sunstrokes, Commies and Elvis. 

 Sitting in the Rainforest Cafe at the Mall of America, I'm surrounded by young Americans, talking about themselves. A tape loop plays an endless cycle of crashing thunder, screaming parrots, and grunting monkeys. There's a contentious divorce story on my left, prospects for career relocation on my right, and a "Seinfeld" dialogue directly ahead. Robotic birds jerk in the artificial canopy overhead. Rain falls all around me in literal curtains, landing without a splash in a mesh-lined gutter. Between the strained relationships, artificial conversations, and remote-control wilderness, I may go crazy. Or at least I'll have another beer. 

Everything about this place is wrong. From the podium at the entrance proclaiming "Your adventure begins here!" to the domesticated parrots available for purchase; from the huge tanks of exotic salt-water fish to the awkward caveat on the menu ("The Rainforest Cafe will not use beef from countries that deforest rain forest land to raise cattle"). It's not just the tokenism of this "environmentally sensitive family dining experience." Something is dreadfully off-key. The food is great: Searching in vain for a clear ethnic consensus on the menu, I settled for a plate of spicy pork chops with red beans and rice, a dish called "Jamaica, Me Crazy!" But something about this synthetic rain forest, this eating-as- entertainment-cum-activism is bugging me. Then I realize it's not just the Cafe -- where, incidentally, a group of teenagers have just been told there's no smoking. It's not just the idea of malls, either, malls in the usual suburban sense, a bunch of stores and a foodcourt gathered under one roof. What, at this late date, could be unsettling about that? No, this is something else. This is about the Mall of America -- not a mall but a kingdom, a nation unto itself. 

Nestled in the inner-ring suburbs of Minneapolis and St. Paul, the very birthplace of Southdale, America's first mall, the Mall of America draws its fair share of international attention. People allegedly fly here from all over the world to shop, jumping in a cab for the ten minute ride from the airport, never exposing themselves to the famous Minnesota cold. Jet-setters from Japan, Europe, Africa, and beyond can shop till they drop in the nation's largest mall -- indeed, it's one of the world's largest commercial structures. Cultural critics, too, love to meditate on the grand absurdity of the Mall: it's the post-modern de-evolution of the drive-in, subdivision, and suburb; a dubious idea on steroids; a post-industrial conflation of consumption and entertainment; and so on. 

 Two books published in recent years, City of Quartz by Mike Davis and Edge City: Life on the New Frontier by Joel Garreau, examine the infrastructures and metastructures of the modern American landscape. Davis's book is the canonical progressive history of Los Angeles, while Garreau looks at the phenomenon of satellite cities, built around parking lots and shopping malls, instead of the harbors and town squares of old. You can buy both these titles at Amazon.com. 

 Baz Luhrmann's "Romeo and Juliet" depicts the Montagues and Capulets as car-cruising, piece-packing, style-conscious ruffians, who would be no doubt find themselves banned from the Mall of America. In his recent review in SLATE, critic Alex Ross praises the "visionary touches" of the director and assesses the twitchy charisma of the star, Leonardo DiCaprio, "whose career really began to take off when River Phoenix died of an overdose." 

 After all, this is a shopping center with 500 stores, 12,000 employees, and up to a million visitors per week. It cost $650 million to build, and it's large enough to house seven Yankee Stadiums or 20 St. Peter's Basilicas. The Mall is anchored on its corners by four of the country's most successful commercial institutions, ranging from the suave sophistication of Macy's to the square-dealing simplicity of Sears. The centerpiece is a 7-acre amusement park -- Knott's Camp Snoopy -- with rollercoasters, carousels, and a Ferris wheel, lush with real trees and ferns, criss-crossed by bark-lined trails under an impressive grid of skylights, steel tubing, and hangar paraphernalia. 

To be perfectly frank, the great big Mall of America encompasses everything that makes this country so great and so big, from piney glades to ATMs, all under a single roof. At least that's the theory. And people seem to believe it. 

One might reasonably expect a place that's hosted 500 weddings to be something more than a shopping center. After all, matrimony is a sacred human ritual. On the other hand, if anything's more sacred to Americans than marriage, surely it's shopping. And that, without question, is the purpose and the vision of the Mall of America. Besides, who am I trying to kid? Marriage isn't that sacred anymore. Neither are "families" and "family-life," judging by the 5,000 unsupervised kids who show up at the Mall every weekend. 

Those kids have been in the news of late, thanks to the Mall's month-old directive, charitably called "the Parental Escort Policy." Local media hucksters sometimes refer to it as the program to exterminate Mall rats. It's a curfew requiring all children under 16 to be supervised by an adult on weekend nights. The Mall hired 30 extra security guards to act as bouncers at every entrance, and conduct sweeps throughout the building after 6 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays. Chafing under pressure from law-abiding, bill-paying customers and shopkeepers, Mall authorities decided simply to exclude kids because some of them were getting into spectacular trouble (guns were drawn, young rivals were dangled from the mezzanine -- it was like the Verona Beach of Leo DiCaprio in "Romeo and Juliet"). In response, officials insisted that the Mall is not public property, it's not really a social place, and it's not designed for anything except hardcore shopping. Let's be clear, they seemed to say: This is the Mall of America, not some kind of metaphoric Ellis Island for children. 
  Which is supremely ironic, since the Mall is a juvenile tourist attraction of international proportions. Indeed, the Mall's PR people love to compare the facility to Disney World. There's Knott's Camp Snoopy at the heart of it all. Nearby is Lego's "Imagination Center," a massive collection of outrageous Lego creations, including scale models of the space shuttle, a motorcycle, and a blimp, as well as Lego labs, presumably for children to set their imaginations free -- along with a few digits in mom's credit line. And there are state-of-the-art virtual reality arcades. Jumbotron television screens. FAO Schwartz's Barbie store. The Rainforest Cafe. It may be getting more and more difficult to distinguish retail outlets from entertainment venues, but in the end it's a simple and perennial grift: separate wages from wage-earners as quickly and thoroughly as possible. If children can be used as a wedge, so much the better. If they obstruct the process, eliminate them. 

And there's a good reason why Mall authorities chose 16 as the age of consent. Not only is it legal wage-earning age, it's also the age at which local drivers are licensed. The new escort policy is designed to make sure that anyone who is capable of using the Mall the way it was intended -- which is to say driving there, parking, and spending bushels of money -- can do so. 16 year-olds are a most attractive demographic, since they can work the thousands of low-wage service-industry jobs, spend their cash on break, and jump in Mom and Dad's car just as soon as the clock or the cash has run out. 

Indeed, despite the 15 separate metro-area bus routes making stops at the Mall of America, it is the car culture the Mall serves and feeds on, and with which it shares the delusion of choices, free will. There is at least one car dealership inside the mall, as well as several other stores where cars are part of the window display. Finally, it's the two massive concrete parking ramps bearing 12,750 parking places (only slightly exceeding the total number of Mall employees) that contribute so greatly to the striking ugliness of the Mall from the outside. 

 Lego, by now the McDonnell-Douglas of under-12 set, began in 1932 in a Danish village when a master carpenter started making wooden toys with his son. From the injection-mold forties to the robotic nineties, the history of the Lego company is a case study in endurance and evolution. It's enough to make you think if NASA had subcontracted out to Lego, we'd have had a man on Mars by now. 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 Another major player in the "malling of America" -- the Disney corporation -- has been in the news of late, what with Mike Ovitz's $90 million platinum parachute. Our Filter commentator looked at the strange inbreeding metaphors that popped up during the ABC-Disney press conference more than a year ago. 

 This prefab, bunkered exterior, so in contrast with the sense-saturation inside, continues a tradition of mall design dating back to the Mall of America's spiritual progenitor, Southdale. Like fabled domed cities, the mall must deliver a totality of experience within its walls, the shops and the gardened boulevards, the palace and the kingdom, birds and monkeys, thunder. The true outside is rendered undesirable, obsolete, a suitable wasteland for feral children with cash-flow problems. The exits are never clearly marked, and windows are as scarce as bathrooms. When we do finally make it "outside," it's only for that brief troubling moment before we find our car, get back "inside," achieve totality again, and an illusion of control. 

The Rainforest Cafe, of course, is the ultimate expression of this inverted space. Where the older malls of the mid-seventies sported Potemkin village storefronts and faux cobblestone streets, the Mall of America recreates an entire ecosystem. It's a classic case of postmodern recursion: a little synthesized, hyper-controlled environment tucked inside a great big one, like Matroshka dolls. Leaving the Cafe, I'm confronted by dead ends in every direction but one. I'm forced to squeeze uncomfortably past a rack of Rainforest Cafe T-shirts, tin boxes, sacks of French roast coffee, kiosks of lapel pins. Little signs everywhere encourage me to make a purchase, a small portion of which will be donated to noble causes with clever acronyms. I need to get out of here -- all the way out. Thank God I don't have to worry about being harassed by some teenage gang of hoodlums on the way. I may not even have to make eye contact with anyone else tonight. I can't wait to get back behind the wheel of my modest little Toyota and take charge, just me and the open road...and what's left of my "Jamaica, Me Crazy!" in an ugly, featureless little box on the seat next to me.