jasper mall [2020] 

this quiet gem of a documentary centers on the year in the life of a dying mall located in jasper, alabama.  jack-of-all-trades security/manager mike mclelland is our guide as he works to keep the dying jasper mall on life support.  the filmmakers take a back seat to their narrative letting their images yield toward a poetics with no narration & no additional music.  the soundtrack is the mall's own piped in music.  the history of the mall is told by its principals.  these people include a group of elderly men who meet daily in the food court to play dominoes; the owner of a floral shop; the owner of a jewelry repair shop; a pair of teenagers exploring their first love to each other; two young women who work as hair stylists & who long to escape their small town; & several others.  

the year is 2018.  we are introduced to each person as they live their ordinary lives of hope, desire & need.  the technique of cinema verite,  along with the mall's own house music, delivers to the viewer the slow death of the mall as the camera pans down largely empty corridors & vacant stores & the voided spaces of mall's previous two anchors, kmart & j.c. penney.  

yet, the specificity of this mall relays the larger problems of retail in the united states.  the middle class, that once robust section of the population who could afford the trinkets & baubles of mall shopping, is shrinking.  online retail is ascendant.  in the 1980s thru the early 2000s malls were part of the social sphere as well as a the place to buy things.  people would go to the mall to hang out.  kids especially.  but malls were also places of ceremony.  none more so obvious than at christmas when a bored santa at jasper mall waiting for families to make their customary pilgrimages for their small ones to see santa & sit on his knee.  

significant are the people who work at jasper mall who were in turn habitues & patrons of the same.  this documentary opens with shots of closed up stores.  it ends with even more closed shops.  all across the united states malls are dying.  & those of us, like me, who spent a portion of their lives at these citadels of postwar consumer culture, can't but feel more than wistful, sad even, of the changes of our culture.

for that is the success of this documentary.  the filmmakers achieved a loving, kind, slower type of movie.  one that allows for its principals to speak for themselves & on their own terms.  the grand palaces of consumption in the united states are dying.  the pandemic will kill off most of these places for good.  the jack-of-all-trades security/manager of jasper mall mike mclelland does his level best to stay hopeful that his mall may turn around.  we are treated to photos of a once filled-to-the-brim parking lot & past better days of jasper mall.  but even its caretaker knows the mall's days are fast dwindling.  

the u.s. mall is dead.  long live the mall.