![]() He tells us how he used to deliver tigers to the zoo. He leads us through closed down super-stores, spreading his flashlight over the walls. Optimism for Jasper Mall lies with Camo Mullet. But the structure and context of their mall will diminish until everything inside it is gone. Someone else will come in and their game will continue. We sit with them too, and in the only moment of tragedy, one of them passes away, and we really feel something about the state of the scene here. They hang their hopes and dreams on exterior circumstances, opening up to the same crowd every day. They hang on by a thread, maybe the incoming Victoria’s Secret will save some surrounding shops. That the entire conflict of the documentary is the inevitability of closing up shop. ![]() That in the course of the year they do not find any significant actionable events. Somehow, the directors have found the grace not to be mawkishly sentimental about the whole thing and just sit with the process and film it as it dies. Say goodbye to their regulars and see you next Sunday at the church. We see fixtures of a fractured community close up shop. The doc sits with shopkeepers earning sometimes only a couple bills a day not enough to maintain rent, to keep in stock. We spend a year in the confines of the Jasper Mall: a prison for fashion faux pas and old-aged consumer wisdom. This man complains he has few costumers but also plays electric guitar badly during business hours. Mostly, it is a shopping center by way of a retirement community for an American past-time also facing imminent retirement. There are scant few featured in the documentary. The young, hip masses, that really sell the idea of spending time in the mall, shop from home these days. ![]() It is emblematic of the New Shopping Culture. Jasper Mall functions as a microcosm of the country’s consumerist culture in this sense. The expansive description would be that he is the center of the enterprise. The reductive job description would be that he provides security detail over a minimally used public space visited by old-timers. It is a man we’re going to affectionately refer to as Camo Mullet. The star of Jasper Mall is not the dying mall.
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