Scenes from the Mall

The Jordan Creek Town Center in Des Moines is the largest shopping mall—scratch that—the largest “retail park and lifestyle center” in Iowa and the fourth largest in the Midwest: two million square feet, 164 stores plus sundry kiosks, 20 movie screens, 25 restaurants and eateries, and anchored by Dillards, Younkers, and Scheels All Sports. Opened in August 2004, the Jordan Creek Town Center is comprised of three districts: the shopping district, which contains a decidedly upscale two-level enclosed mall done up in a streetscape design; the lake district, which contains walking trails, a 3.5 acre lake with boardwalk, an amphitheater, and several fine-dining restaurants; and the village district, which contains several big-box retailers like Best Buy, PetCo, Old Navy, and Costco, along with any number of smaller establishments. Until February 22, 2011, I had never been to this 19th largest mall in the United States, and the newest of the nineteen.

On that date I had an appointment with a Des Moines endocrinologist. Now, going to see the doctor, even the family physician, Hunter Thompsons me with fear and loathing, and being scheduled to see a specialist—well, let’s just say I’d rather be a piñata at a baseball bat convention. So, I asked my wife Kathy, a registered nurse and the best hand-holder I know, to accompany me. Kathy has her hair done at Mini and Max’s in the Jordan Creek Mall, so, to save herself an extra trip, she scheduled a hair appointment after my poking, prodding, and blood drawing session. I was reluctant to go to the mall, but she knows my weaknesses all too well: “There’s a Barnes and Noble across from the hair salon, and a Starbucks and Godiva Chocolatier at the food court, and big comfortable leather chairs all over the place,” she told me. That sealed the deal for me—that, and the fact that, unlike all the other times I go to bookstores, she assured me she would not demand that I turn my credit card over to her before I entered. Some six and a half years after its hoopla-ed opening, I would finally get to savor the “shopping experience” of the Jordan Creek Town Center mall, a citadel, the promotional literature says, to “fashion and lifestyle.”

It is easy to criticize shopping malls, easy to toss off dreary Marxian bromides like “commodity fetishism,” “reified experience,” and “ideological mystification;” easy to call those who frequent them “cultural dupes” in thrall to “narcissistic consumerism;” easy to pronounce malls a culturally fabricated space of jostling signifiers through which empty selves wander and wonder, seeking to fill the emptiness, the lack, the radiant, hungering desire for a fulfillment their vacant, everyday lives do not provide. It is easy to say that places like the Jordan Creek Town Center are nothing more than a fantasy of consumerist empowerment; a false consciousness of choice and autonomy; a kind of George Lucas-like Industrial Light and Magic experience that holds at arm’s length, unopened, the sealed book that we are; an emporium of eye-glazing wonders for people who possess a need for possessions to hide from themselves their lack of self-possession. It is easy to say all this; the reality, however, for me, as I spent an hour wandering through the mall, was less grandly conceptual, less a pontificating academic voice in a whirlwind, more a thin, prosaic slipstream, a bleak liturgy accented with sadness.

Outside Younkers, an old man sat in a wheelchair, asleep, head in hand. Someone ambling past the counters and displays inside, perhaps stopping to sample perfume or try on some trousers, had left him there. At the first kiosk I encountered a young woman was selling Rosetta Stone foreign language software. She told me it creates “an immersive environment” and has “really cool voice recognition technology.” “How many languages do you speak,” I asked. “Oh, none,” she said; “I just sell the DVDs. I got enough trouble with English.” And she laughed. At another kiosk selling T-shirts, the young salesman sat scrutinizing his fingernails with exquisite care. At the next, selling sunglasses, the young saleswoman was texting. In the Godiva Chocolatier store, when the woman behind the counter asked if she could help me, I replied, “Oh, no, thanks; I’m just salivating.” She did not smile. “Well, let me know if you need help,” she said, and disappeared into the back of the store. I repeated the remark at The Cheesecake Factory. The young man did not smile. “OK, that’s cool,” he said, and resumed wiping down the glass-topped counter. I repeated it yet again at Auntie Anne’s Pretzels, and the woman’s lips contorted into an almost smile, though it did not escape into the rest of her face. At the Fudge Shop on Scheels’ second floor I sampled a bit of peanut butter fudge while the young salesman sat reading Stephen King’s Under the Dome. “This is really good,” I told him. He looked up. “Yeah, but I didn’t make it,” he replied, and, slipping back under his dome, went back to reading.

The delightful fragrance of the Bath and Body Works Store drew me inside. “It smells great in here,” I told the saleswoman. “So I’m told,” she said; “I’m used to it; it’s lost on me.” Unolfactoried in a nectared space of musk and sweet and spice. At the center of the mall’s second floor, slouched in a leather chair butted up against a wrought-iron railing, an earbudded teenager lay sleeping. Why wasn’t he in school? Outside the Apple Store, the only Apple Store in the state of Iowa, five navy-blue knit shirted employees were convened. As I passed by, I heard one say, “Well, look, here’s what I tell them,” and I remembered an article I had read about Apple employees lying to customers, telling them that trying to unlock their iPhones will render them as useless as bricks—and I thought of words as bricks, plucked from the hod of thought, and how easily they can be mortared into a deceptive solidity. And I remembered the Oz-pointing yellow brick road and the curtained charlatan at the end of it.

Taking a down escalator, I entered the lower floor of Scheels looking for warm winter boots, the only purchase I had thought about making, only to find a profusion of flip-flops and sandals and thongs and crocs and biking, baseball, soccer, and running shoes—nothing but spring footwear. The young salesman was friendly and apologetic. “Snow is being forecast for the weekend,” I told him. “Yeah,” he said, “but, you know, if management says to strike the winter display and put up the spring shoes, well, you gotta do it.” We talked a bit. He was 19, had his own place, liked to hike, had his eye on the assistant shoe manager position. I asked if he planned to go to college. “Maybe, but right now I want to work and make some money. Maybe in a couple of years, though,” and I knew he never would, knew the poetics of his life were end-stopped, even if they did rhyme.

It was time to head back to Max and Mini’s to pick up Kathy. I arrived where I started, at Younkers. The old man asleep in the wheelchair was gone. I imagined him eating a bowl of ice cream, a reward for his lonely waiting. I had purchased nothing, not even the Frappaccino Lite I had briefly contemplated while passing Starbucks. I felt, somehow, subversive. No getting and spending for me this day. Instead, I walked. I looked. I had circumnavigated the mall, had followed the scripted path laid out by the mall’s designers, leading me past the open mouths of store upon store. I passed past a profusion of stores, the same store in many cases, only the name different, nothing distinctive about them except their determined effort to be distinctive. An exultant banality.

It was a dark transit, but I found I could make no portentous pronouncements about hegemonic economic forces spin doctoring into misrecognized freedom and individuality and choice. I garnered no insights into the privatized logic of consumer-driven culture. We can never really know the thrumming, vibrant churn of meaning that things capture, contain, and allude to. There is always, locked in the heart, an immaterial etcetera, made of feeling and experience, unkeyed by and attached to material things. What I do know is that I saw something smaller than socio-political theorizing, but bigger, possibly, than philosophy; something cataracted by its very everydayness, a structure of feeling, an affect, shadowed and unsayable, a desire, perhaps, for the elsewhere, the something other, the unfastened moment, the more than.