As a teenager in the 2000s, before YouTube, TikTok, and the advent of “aesthetic videos,” I would go to the indie movie theatre in my hometown to find comfort in slow documentaries. No voiceover, no overt agenda, just lingering slice-of-life moments that are more about a feeling than a message. It always felt so real, like I was watching a piece of my own little world reflected back to me. It wasn’t just media, but a moment in time.
Jasper Mall (by Bradford Thomason and Brett Whitcomb) feels like that. Chronicling the slow death of an Alabama shopping mall, the 2020 documentary takes you through each hollow hallway with the urgency of a retired senior whiling away the morning. We see an empty jewellery store, low-rent hair and nail salons, and a struggling flower shop whose only calls are for the occasional funeral. Elderly men play dominoes while tinny country music echoes in the background. In the empty parking lot, young employees smoke cigarettes and dream of leaving Jasper someday.
Brown tile, tropical plants, fluorescent lighting. Nearly every shot contains what today’s internet would call a “liminal space,” turn-of-the-millennium architecture that is so empty and generic that it’s actually comforting; a visual skeleton key to the dusty corners of every American’s memory. I’m a child of the 20th century, so Jasper Mall feels like home.
Present-day America suffers from a distinct lack of third spaces, the places outside work and home where we used to gather with friends. As we’ve transitioned to a world online, these spaces have become fewer and farther between. Through a nostalgic lens, shopping malls are one of the greatest casualties of this transition, having served as the setting for decades of teenage memories in every city. They were the malt shops of the ‘80s and ‘90s, conceived to encourage consumerism and segregation, but remembered instead as the stronghold of American innocence.
"Through a nostalgic lens, shopping malls are one of the greatest casualties of this transition, having served as the setting for decades of teenage memories in every city."
For better or worse, shopping in malls was the American way of life from the 1970s until the 2008 recession, and the dying mall is a symbol of our country’s economic decline. It’s the death of a villain, perhaps, but one we can’t help but mourn anyway. Call it Stockholm Syndrome or rose-coloured glasses, but the past looks so much better as it’s being stripped away.
I’m from North Carolina, not Alabama, but I grew up in malls just like this one. I went to Belk’s nearly every other week with my mother as a child. I tried on too-big women’s shoes while she sampled perfumes at the Estée Lauder counter. I fell out of my stroller and lost a tooth in front of the Eddie Bauer store. I played tag with my brother in the clothing racks, fought with my friends in the food court, shoplifted my first thong, and tried coffee for the first time. I met Santa when I still believed in Santa. I shopped when I still believed that someday I’d be able to afford the life of my dreams. I was so naive, playing inside a dollhouse that accepted all major credit cards.
Every suburban girl yearns to move away someday, to the big city where the stores are on streets and the restaurants don’t hand out free samples. So that’s what I did. And 10 years later when I was home for the holidays, I watched my dead local mall get bulldozed to bits. Yeah, I did feel sad. I felt that distinct 21st-century melancholy that the world I was raised in simply no longer exists. It’s not worse, necessarily, just unfamiliar, like an old friend who’s been gone so long they’re officially a stranger again.
Everything must change eventually, and perhaps that’s not such a bad thing. We’re led to this conclusion throughout Jasper Mall. When two teenage shoppers amicably break up after high school graduation, you get the sense they still care for each other, but it’s time to move on. When the former-zookeeper-turned-mall-manager tearfully recounts how activists shut down his tiger park years ago, you kind of have to admit that it was probably for the best. Some things just aren’t supposed to last.
Life inside capitalism requires so much cognitive dissonance. Your humanity is so intertwined with your identity as a consumer that it doesn’t even make sense to try and define where one ends and the other begins. We can’t separate our personhood from product, our purpose from profession, our emotions from institutions. It’s a bleak existence maybe, but it’s also all we’ve got. Jasper Mall feels just like this, cynical and hopeful all at once. Inside of this sanitized, labyrinthian micro-city, memories were made. But as much as we want to preserve our surroundings as tombs of our former lives, what would be the point? The truth is, our memories don’t live there anymore.
If Jasper Mall has a thesis, I imagine it’s this:
There was life here. But life goes on.
As a teenager in the 2000s, before YouTube, TikTok, and the advent of “aesthetic videos,” I would go to the indie movie theatre in my hometown to find comfort in slow documentaries. No voiceover, no overt agenda, just lingering slice-of-life moments that are more about a feeling than a message. It always felt so real, like I was watching a piece of my own little world reflected back to me. It wasn’t just media, but a moment in time.
Jasper Mall (by Bradford Thomason and Brett Whitcomb) feels like that. Chronicling the slow death of an Alabama shopping mall, the 2020 documentary takes you through each hollow hallway with the urgency of a retired senior whiling away the morning. We see an empty jewellery store, low-rent hair and nail salons, and a struggling flower shop whose only calls are for the occasional funeral. Elderly men play dominoes while tinny country music echoes in the background. In the empty parking lot, young employees smoke cigarettes and dream of leaving Jasper someday.
Brown tile, tropical plants, fluorescent lighting. Nearly every shot contains what today’s internet would call a “liminal space,” turn-of-the-millennium architecture that is so empty and generic that it’s actually comforting; a visual skeleton key to the dusty corners of every American’s memory. I’m a child of the 20th century, so Jasper Mall feels like home.
Present-day America suffers from a distinct lack of third spaces, the places outside work and home where we used to gather with friends. As we’ve transitioned to a world online, these spaces have become fewer and farther between. Through a nostalgic lens, shopping malls are one of the greatest casualties of this transition, having served as the setting for decades of teenage memories in every city. They were the malt shops of the ‘80s and ‘90s, conceived to encourage consumerism and segregation, but remembered instead as the stronghold of American innocence.
"Through a nostalgic lens, shopping malls are one of the greatest casualties of this transition, having served as the setting for decades of teenage memories in every city."
For better or worse, shopping in malls was the American way of life from the 1970s until the 2008 recession, and the dying mall is a symbol of our country’s economic decline. It’s the death of a villain, perhaps, but one we can’t help but mourn anyway. Call it Stockholm Syndrome or rose-coloured glasses, but the past looks so much better as it’s being stripped away.
I’m from North Carolina, not Alabama, but I grew up in malls just like this one. I went to Belk’s nearly every other week with my mother as a child. I tried on too-big women’s shoes while she sampled perfumes at the Estée Lauder counter. I fell out of my stroller and lost a tooth in front of the Eddie Bauer store. I played tag with my brother in the clothing racks, fought with my friends in the food court, shoplifted my first thong, and tried coffee for the first time. I met Santa when I still believed in Santa. I shopped when I still believed that someday I’d be able to afford the life of my dreams. I was so naive, playing inside a dollhouse that accepted all major credit cards.
Every suburban girl yearns to move away someday, to the big city where the stores are on streets and the restaurants don’t hand out free samples. So that’s what I did. And 10 years later when I was home for the holidays, I watched my dead local mall get bulldozed to bits. Yeah, I did feel sad. I felt that distinct 21st-century melancholy that the world I was raised in simply no longer exists. It’s not worse, necessarily, just unfamiliar, like an old friend who’s been gone so long they’re officially a stranger again.
Everything must change eventually, and perhaps that’s not such a bad thing. We’re led to this conclusion throughout Jasper Mall. When two teenage shoppers amicably break up after high school graduation, you get the sense they still care for each other, but it’s time to move on. When the former-zookeeper-turned-mall-manager tearfully recounts how activists shut down his tiger park years ago, you kind of have to admit that it was probably for the best. Some things just aren’t supposed to last.
Life inside capitalism requires so much cognitive dissonance. Your humanity is so intertwined with your identity as a consumer that it doesn’t even make sense to try and define where one ends and the other begins. We can’t separate our personhood from product, our purpose from profession, our emotions from institutions. It’s a bleak existence maybe, but it’s also all we’ve got. Jasper Mall feels just like this, cynical and hopeful all at once. Inside of this sanitized, labyrinthian micro-city, memories were made. But as much as we want to preserve our surroundings as tombs of our former lives, what would be the point? The truth is, our memories don’t live there anymore.
If Jasper Mall has a thesis, I imagine it’s this:
There was life here. But life goes on.