It was fun to “people watch,” and window shopping was something I did when I wasn’t old enough to buy much of anything. I think I personally lament the passing of mall culture. The documentary shows carnivals and Santa parades, events that increase foot traffic for a small period of time, but that’s not sustainable. So, where can you go now? The few malls, like Jasper Mall, that are left are doing their best. But with the push from local governments to give more importance to downtown, malls have an enemy other than online shopping. This battle gave rise to the malls that have faux main streets with shops lined up. That’s very different from the attitudes portrayed by downtown associations – those pesky groups that have, at times, detested malls for taking tenants and patrons away from urban shopping centers. If you needed a place to chill out and kill time, you could do that and be in a safe place away from the elements. Malls, after all, had something for everyone. Further, the feature of this documentary, Jasper Mall, appears to be doing better now than it was during the filming, but it does raise some questions about the intersection between capitalism and community. For me, that’s the moment malls became extinct. When the dot com bubble burst, the few survivors rang in a new online era. I’m a child of the 80s and early 90s, and even up to the millennium, malls were still the place to go. The documentary does its best to be as optimistic as the patrons, proprietors, and tenants, but it’s just a sad end to a once proud empire. These shots, while beautiful, are also haunting. There are some real shots at the beginning of this documentary that feel like they belong in a surrealist film. The height of “mall nostalgia” isn’t enough to support the malls, so we’re forced to ask, “Where are they now?” They aren’t nearly what we remember, and unless something changes, they won’t be anything but myth. Jasper Mall is a documentary about where malls are as of 2020.
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