printAn Ode to Shopping Malls
by kleinbl00
Others have found creative grist in the dead-mall phenomenon. In her best-selling thriller “Gone Girl,” Gillian Flynn set a scene in a four-story destination mall gone to seed in a Missouri suburb. What was once the beating heart of the community had become “two million square feet of echo.” The author wrote the mall into the novel and kept it in her screenplay for the film adaptation, because, she said: “For kids of the ’80s especially, dead malls have a very strong allure. We were the last of the free-range kids, roaming around malls, not really buying anything, but just looking. To see all those big looming spaces so empty now — it’s a childhood haunting.”