It's Where I Want to Be!

July 6, 2023 2:50 PM

No American who came of age in the nineteen-eighties — or in most of the seventies or nineties, for that matter — could pretend not to understand the importance of the mall ... Introduced as “A SAFARI TO STUDY MALL CULTURE,” Mall City consists of interviews conducted by Hugh Kinniburgh and his NYU Film School collaborators during one day in 1983 at the Roosevelt Field Mall on Long Island. Unsurprisingly, their interviewees tend to be young, strenuously coiffed, and dressed with studied nonchalance in striped T-shirts and Members Only-style windbreakers. from Open Culture

From 1982 - 83 artist and producer Hugh Kinniburgh was part of the first wave of independent video producers in NYC. Collaborating with comedy writers, medieval warriors and a former assistant to Nam Jun Paik while using early video tools like huge Norelco studio cameras and switchers (allegedly from Desilu Studios) and early versions of portable Betamax video cameras, the final 'tape to tape' edit could take weeks. These are examples of early DIY video: goofing on unsuspecting New Yorkers, gonzo documentaries, moody art video and even TV satire. After relocating to the west coast in 1990, he continued experimentation using Hi8 cameras and the Video Toaster collaborating with notable San Francisco comics, musicians and visual artists. He lead the dawning of the Avid computer based editing era. The work continued into the 2000's. Video clips restored from Betamax masters, Beta SP and DVD. Before there was Youtube, there was Hughtube.

More about Mall City

posted by chavenet (23 comments total)

YES PLEASE
posted by Going To Maine at 3:02 PM on July 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

The opening two minutes of Fast Times are practically a documentary of my high school years at the mall. Going to the mall was a really big deal.

Thank you, Amy Heckerling and Cameron Crowe.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 3:05 PM on July 6, 2023 [4 favorites]

Abehammerb Lincoln, for those of us who grew up small towns hundreds of miles from a mall, "Dazed and Confused" is ALL documentary.
posted by ITravelMontana at 4:17 PM on July 6, 2023 [8 favorites]

No American who came of age in the nineteen-eighties — or in most of the seventies or nineties, for that matter — could pretend not to understand the importance of the mall

What is is about white suburbanites that they can't even pretend to understand that their experiences are not as universal as they like to think?
posted by ActingTheGoat at 4:24 PM on July 6, 2023 [13 favorites]

"Zebra.. they're finally gonna make it now"
posted by elkevelvet at 4:25 PM on July 6, 2023 [3 favorites]

This has always been my favorite documentary of Peak Mall Culture.
posted by kinnakeet at 5:43 PM on July 6, 2023 [5 favorites]

ActingTheGoat, I think even if you didn't personally spend a lot of time at the mall, mass culture at the time made it abundantly clear that the mall was where teens were hanging out and having good times. If you were watching network TV or movies or reading magazines aimed at your age group, especially if you were a girl, much of that content was basically commercials for the fun you could be having at a mall if you lived near one. Even if you personally weren't chilling at the mall, and to be clear I absolutely was, like, constantly - the cultural cachet of being a teen at the mall in the 80s and 90s was pretty hard to miss.

I will grant that it was possible even then to not consume any mass culture for your age group at all, but it was definitely more of a media monoculture in the US back then than it is now. You really had to be walking a pretty unusual path not to internalize that the mall was where teens-in-general wanted to be, even if you weren't actually one of the teens roaming the local mall.
posted by potrzebie at 5:55 PM on July 6, 2023 [8 favorites]

Soooo much time spent at the Farrell’s in the mall. A dozen high-schoolers pooling funds to devour a Zoo. Good times.
posted by Thorzdad at 5:55 PM on July 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

hey you
out there in the mall
Pinball down the hall
can you feel it.

Farrell's
How many birthdays did you spend
The funny music it all depends
on pin strip wall paper and straw hats
and at Spencer's
did you steal it
hey you don't tell me coupons
aren't a go, oh, no.
don't give in
without a bite.
posted by clavdivs at 6:16 PM on July 6, 2023 [5 favorites]

This was a solid reminder that a lot of what I remember as the 80s is actually the 90s. (And, weirdly, the other way around?? Like are you really telling me Pretty Hate Machine is from the 80s? WTF.) In other news: I am old.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 6:49 PM on July 6, 2023 [3 favorites]

You guys, I spent fucking oodles of time in the mall from roughly age 10 to age 18, exacerabated by parental divorce that regularly left me in custodian of a father whose preferred method of handling me was to just hand me $20 and drop me off at the mall , especially and including when it became necessary (in high school) to take me along on his business trips because my school's spring break schedule was different from my little sisters. Which means that if your mall was in a mid-size to major metro between Atlanta and Philadelphia, reasonably odds I got dumped there (and possibly tried to bum a cigarette off of you, thanks, ps) between 1991 and 1994.

The worst part of this is that to date I still find malls to be strangely comforting.
posted by thivaia at 7:34 PM on July 6, 2023 [6 favorites]

Roosevelt Field mall was my mall. Graduated from a nearby HS in the very late 70s. The hours I spent in the Record World and the World Imports and in the food court and all over the mall are hours spent trying to grow up. Loved the place.

Sadly, the name Roosevelt Field is because it was an airport or air strip. Lindbergh took off from there when he flew across the Atlantic. I know somewhere at the mall is a plaque commemorating the event.

Oh, I was never strenuously coiffed or dressed in anything but dungarees and a t-shirt. My mall culture was closer to hippy and music focused than the big hair and members only era of malls
posted by JohnnyGunn at 8:51 PM on July 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

Raise your hand if your mind went someplace completely else when you saw the title… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ji-1BAPljZU
posted by allisterb at 12:14 AM on July 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

I scrubbed my way through it after getting the vibe for five minutes, and there’s a bit at the end where they show Donkey Kong. In that place and time, it looks incredibly vivid and compelling. Bright and just way more alive than everything else there. I could see playing it just to look at nice colors at that time.
posted by ignignokt at 5:30 AM on July 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

i’ll never understand how i spent so much time at the mall without more than 5 or 10 dollars in my pocket at once but i guess that’s why i had to get good at street fighter. the better you are the fewer quarters you spend. in a central florida summer in the 90s there was nowhere else to go than the mall if you were broke, hated the beach and wanted to get out of the house but not out of air conditioning. someone mentioned feeling comfortable at malls still and i completely get it. walking through those doors into a wave of cool air and high ceilings immediately lowers my heart rate. it’s pathetic maybe, to be calmed entering the temple to consumerism but the mall was a refuge from my family and from the heat. they had an arcade, and a waldenbooks. what else do you need in life
posted by dis_integration at 5:55 AM on July 7, 2023 [7 favorites]

It always looked and felt like a High School inside, but with shops and a food court instead of classrooms and a cafeteria. Why they didn't combine the two is beyond me; a missed historical opportunity, maybe signalling our decline.
posted by Brian B. at 6:00 AM on July 7, 2023 [4 favorites]

For me, "peak mall" were the few years I was managing a Hot Sam pretzel stand in the mid/late 80's. Once the sodium hydroxide was mixed up, the highest stress in the gig was asking, "You want a Coke with this?". The rest was hanging out at the arcade next door, or trading pretzels for other things, e.g.: whipped cream nitrous from the Ben and Jerry's lady or late-night movies at the 12-plex upstairs.
posted by mikelieman at 6:20 AM on July 7, 2023 [4 favorites]

Went on a bit long but oh, my those accents. Those accents! And that white shirt with black lines.
posted by Going To Maine at 9:51 AM on July 7, 2023 [3 favorites]

TRANSPORTATION BY DAVE’S MOM’S CAR

That’s all you really have to know, right there.

I wish the lighting was better. This took me right back, but I have just enough PTSD from 1983 (peak 8th grade hell) that I don’t think I can push past the quality issues on top of the she reminds me of that jerk Robin B____ oh man I HATE her vibes a lot of these kids are throwing off to get to the good nostalgia part.
posted by Mchelly at 3:20 PM on July 7, 2023 [3 favorites]

The depressing ugly little mall in our small town was completely vacant except for a customerless high end furniture store. It felt like The Omega Man in there.
posted by CynicalKnight at 5:02 PM on July 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

I spent a lot of time at the Mall because it was three of the dozens of jobs I had as a kid. Sooooo much child labor in the eighties.
posted by srboisvert at 3:43 AM on July 8, 2023 [1 favorite]

What is is about white suburbanites that they can't even pretend to understand that their experiences are not as universal as they like to think?

I grew up on a farm in the 80s. Hundreds of miles from the nearest mall. I got cable television at 14, internet at 16. I went to McDonalds once per year, at my request, for my birthday. It was an hour drive when there were still so few of them that they were that far apart (there's a McD in my little home Hamlet these days). I still knew about and craved the mall experience so much that when I went to university I very excitedly got a job on purpose in a mall café (where you could still smoke!). I had access to radio, magazines, movies, school buddies who traveled, and on and on. The Mall was definitely a monolithic cultural presence.

(I would later marry, and ultimately divorce, a senior development officer of a big ol' mall company. Which mirrors the arc of my esteem for malls in culture.)
posted by late afternoon dreaming hotel at 9:42 AM on July 9, 2023 [1 favorite]

That mall was also the place where I first saw, and stole, my copy of "The Joy of Gay Sex." Rite of passage (sorry, McCain Mall, I stole a *lot* of stuff from you). Still have it. I can't imagine that would have been possible in my state outside of that nexus of commercial interests providing cover for one another (it was in the "arty" bookstore right next to the Spencer's, so it seemed like they had a sort of red-light-district-by-proxy ambiance). Amazing how much certain things have changed since then, others have gotten worse, and so much has just been stagnant. I tip my hat to what the mall represented to people like me in those days, even as I throw a shovel full of dirt on the concept today.
posted by late afternoon dreaming hotel at 9:48 AM on July 9, 2023 [2 favorites]