- 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.”
Trickle down economics in a nutshell. Growing up in the UK I never understood the appeal of malls. Towns and cities in the UK developed organically and mostly unplanned meaning there are always plenty of small backroads and alleys to explore for hidden gems. That's also disappearing or disappeared completely now in favour of virtually identical, almost cloned main high street town planning and out-of-town shopping centres - the modern equivalent of malls. The large cities still have hidden coves and small unique shops but they harder to find these days. Though upscale malls in wealthy communities continue to do well, Mr. Bell isn’t interested in those; he visits dead malls, and among the deadest are ones in working-class and rural communities.
The appeal of malls was concentration. There is no part of the UK as fundamentally empty as the western US: Santa Fe, for example, had a mall with a candy-maker and a JC Penney and a couple clothing stores and a music store and a Cracker Barrel and a couple other things and we would literally drive an hour at 70-80mph to get there. From what I recall of the UK, driving an hour gets you about a quarter of the way across London. That concentration ceased to matter a lot more before brands and tastes were diluted damn-near homeopathically by the internet. Last weekend I had me some Gini-coefficient whiplash: I rode the Blue Line through Compton and Watts, past one of the largest dead men walking in indoor malls. Then less than 24 hours later I was at Fashion Island, where we were cut off by a rent-by-the-hour Ferrari California that was procured specifically to appear fabulous at one of the whitest, most plastic surgeried, most over-dressed shopping centers in North America where the reserved seating for Planet of the Apes came with seat-service creme brulee and fruit and cheese plates. Fashion Island is doing just fine, thanks. The Tesla store was standing room only.
The space. Yeah. It's really hard to grasp. I get it superficially after visiting Australia, but it's never like growing up with something fundamentally different. I understand the isolation though - we used to live in a small village where the most exotic purchase was Spiderman comics from a guy who built a business travelling around villages in a van selling shit. Back then there was no culture of driving around much so that isolation was cultural too. People then in the UK just didn't drive around much except maybe Christmas or weddings.