Like trying to navigate the suburban landscape on foot, to be in a mall in 2025 without a phone is crippling, and overstimulating. The date’s been studied, the art of grabbing one’s attention fine-tuned into a real science—with non-descript “pleasures” radiating from every Yankee Candle outlet and perfume cart. It’s to the point where, perhaps, the attention slot machine in all our pockets mitigates the amount of sensory stimulation, offering brief reprieves (encouraged, too, by photo opportunities at anaphylaxis-inducing “Dubai chocolate” stands or escapes into “Selfie Boxes”).
When I think back on those punk Situationists bobbing around the backways of Paris with intentional randomness, I think about how impossible their exercise seems in today’s digitized landscape. After all, in order to create counter-currents within the urban fabric, there had to be real, physical pathways that quietly guided the ant trails of the masses for them to run against. Now, physical reality isn’t meant to be navigated with our eyes, but with real-time maps laid out for us—as if we were characters in some shitty video game—by the largest tech companies. Who needs street signs? The planners of the mall in Columbia, Maryland thought it at least mildly superfluous, given how long it took me just to find a map of this arcade of upper-middle class aspiration. Had I had my phone in my pocket as usual, there’d be no need for such alternative endeavors. Nor would there be a need, either, for Debord’s cohort to lose themselves in the Paris catacombs, unless they were doing it for likes and subscribers.
A mall still provides opportunities for subversion (there’s already something passively subversive about navigating it without a mobile device). This is to an extent the subject of Jeremy Workman's 2024 documentary Secret Mall Apartment, a film that makes itself a semi-valuable curio rather than a full-on revelation given its formal failings. The film follows a group of artists in Providence, Rhode Island, who break into the disused, half-built backrooms of the then-new Providence Place mall in the early-2000s, and construct a small living space within it. The archival footage, shot on a consumer-grade digital stills camera, is stunning. But the film intersperses itself with all-too-calculated talking-head footage shot during the doc’s production two decades later, turning a more interesting film about the space of the mall into a cute and deceptively sanitizing portrait of the artists. Those decisions by the filmmaker likely made the work more palatable, as is evidenced by how (just locally in Baltimore) the film played a brief stint at the Charles Theatre a year after having gotten airtime at the Maryland Film Festival. Yet this palatability belies the film’s ability to dig at what’s so interesting in the bowels of a building.
As an unusual quirk of the Columbia Mall, the food court isn’t located in a large, elevated, and central hub, but is instead (like the Pioneer Place mall of my Portland childhood) deep in the mall’s gut, pushed off to the side and hidden from light. Here in the catacombs of capital, odors are wafted to convex points passed by the increasingly hungry customers who shuffle by—pretzels, cinnamon, lemon zest, hot cheese, orange chicken, McDonald’s, Popeye’s, Chick-fil-A—all the scents of their signature variations on the same gut-sinking food. Sugar on chicken, oil on noodles. The tables point out of circular benches like points on a compass, everyone has their backs to each other under the wavy, intestinal panels that’re lit from below while the daylight in the shopping corridors are just out of reach. I check my fortune: “You are only starting on your path to success”—Panda Express. No numbers on the back—best to keep away from lottery tickets and Kino. No providence in the data today, best keep going on foot.