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HOW TO STOP WORRYING AND LEARN TO LOVE THE MEGAMALL
Ever since the Mall of America opened its doors in 1992, the urban cognoscenti have been making excuses for indulging in the excess. We've all heard the cover stories: "My mother-in-law was visiting from Fargo" or "It's not my fault my niece loves mini golf" or "I just go to people-watch. I never actually buy anything." And we've always understood. After all, that you routinely slog out to Bloomington just to defy death on the luge or to sate your yearning for more loon wall art is not something one readily admits during intermission at the Guthrie.
Until now.
From the get-go, he recounts his pilgrimage to and though the City Unto Itself, likening the postmodern plaza to "a dreamhouse of the collectivity, where fantasies of authentic life are displaced onto commodities that are fetishized in the spatial, anthropological, and psychological senses." Why stop there? "The critic's task," Goss writes, "is not to rudely wake up the consumer to the reality outside of consumption, but to ourselves awaken to the potential of the dream inside of which we shop, and so to reveal the traces of ideals of collectively meaningful life that are so vulnerable to forgetting." Or something like that.
For the uninitiated, semiotics is the study of signs and signifying systems; semioticians like Goss cogitate on how it is that cultural meanings get constructed through language, images, gestures, objects--the mise en scène of, say, the Mall. So that the corn dog stand in the North Food Court is, besides a tasty tribute to the State Fair, a phallitician's dream. Nordstrom's sprawling shoe section, with its pungent leathers and ambient lighting, could be interpreted as a playground for fetishists. And that kid waving a gun up by the cineplex is...well, awfully dangerous. But we're supposing you already know as much--after all, hadn't we all ripped through Foucault, Lukacs, and Marcuse by the time the diapers came off?
Goss, who, uncannily enough, seems to speak for all of us, concludes that wandering the shopping complex's 520 overstocked stores, 22 themed restaurants, and assorted fast-food courts doesn't have to be a mind-numbing surrender to market forces. Rather, if studied through the lens of semiotics, doin' the Mall can be an intellectual exercise that "provides glimpses of imagined authenticity and keeps alive dreams of utopian possibility." Indeed. Here then, are a few selections we've culled from Once-upon-a-Time, and well wishes for shopping happily ever after.
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From the Archive
- Reeling In the Mpls./St. Paul International Film Festival Ninety-three films, three projectors, and the whole wide world (Arts Feature - Apr 14, 1999)
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