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Prologue

Women be shopping

Hi friends,

Times are tough, so hope you’re up for some good ol’ fashioned suburban escapism.

I grew up in central Jersey — a mall mecca for the uninitiated. Many afternoons, my friends and I would walk or, eventually, drive the mile from my high school to our town’s 1.2 million-square-foot (!) shopping center to feast on Sarku Japan teriyaki chicken in the food court, take iMac selfies at the Apple store, or work a shift at Delia’s (RIP).

On weekends, we’d head to one of the three neighboring mall towns for a bit of fresh window shopping, free sampling, and incessant chatting to exasperate the Serious Monied Patrons.  

Today’s newsletter is my love letter to this imperfect third space of my adolescence, so loyally rendered in two B-at-best movies.

Yours in mall rattiness,
Delaney

Delaney Rebernik
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Act I

Dreaming + dying after dark

Editor’s note: This essay contains spoilers for the films Chopping Mall (1986) and The American Mall (2008).

Shopping malls may be a dying American institution (emphasis on maybe), but not too long ago, they were a setting ripe for slaying, scheming, and even dreaming on the big screen. 

It makes sense to this former mall worker. There’s a pregnant quiet to these behemoths after dark.

Closing shifts at Delia’s, the now-defunct teen fashion destination where I worked from 2006 to 2011, would find me dragging garbage bags and broken-down boxes out the backroom exit, down a dingy corridor to the second-floor trash chute. Led by blinkering fluorescents, I’d pass the staff entrances to upscale stores I was used to seeing from the front. In this light, they were at once alluring and forbidding, their aluminum backsides so ugly and artless compared to the glassy window dressings that beckoned shoppers by day, all pretenses swallowed by the stillness.

These shadowier hours on the clock after close boasted secret passages and privileged information — so at odds with my $7.15/hour paycheck, subjection to bag searches before leaving, and “on call” assignments that left me wondering two hours before a potential shift whether I’d be greeting customers or getting a head start on my calc homework.

It’s in this tension between access and exploitation that the 2008 MTV movie musical The American Mall is nestled.

Yeah, it’s exactly what it sounds like.