MEGAMALL...coming to an open space near you!
What happens when the big mall developer comes to your town? Promises, promises. Great jobs, lots of jobs, more taxes for your community, lots of fun things to do. Over the course of many years, the town of Nyack, in Rockland County, just outside of New York City, battled against big mall developer Robert Congel. Pyramid Companies of Syracuse, one of the biggest mall developers in the Northeast U.S. targeted Nyack in 1985 and by 1996 had decided to build the second biggest mall in the U.S. after the infamous Mall of America, outside Minneapolis, MN. Like so many other communities, citizens joined together to in an attempt to preserve the quality of life. Megamall, documents this David versus Goliath fight: complete with town hall shouting matches against suited slickers, who keep increasing the size of the project, paying off the planning board and city council in order to have the votes necessary to prevail.
James Howard Kunstler and Roberta Brandes Gratz are the superlative "talking heads." Kunstler, the author of The Geography of Nowhere, says it all when he declares that over the last 30 years we’ve mutated from citizens to consumers. Gratz, a writer whose “The Malling of the Northeast” ran in the New York Times Magazine several years ago notes the “total erosion of place and it’s replacement by a selling machine, that’s all a mall is.”
It all comes together as a portrait of what we increasingly recognize as the overwhelmingly negative impact of the mall and big box lifestyle. The buildings are build to deteriorate over time so that we have even more hulking masses of abandoned or semi-abandoned buildings littering the landscapes we claims to care so much about. We have people who are turned into nothing but consumers, whose entertainment becomes contained in a space that is purposely lit so that you don’t know what time it is and is constructed to be hard to get out of. No wonder I get nauseous when ever I’m inside a mall. It’s a proper and natural physical reaction that we override, just like when we ignore the signals that we’re full and keep eating.
The film makes all of these points but it’s not polemical really. It’s really more about the citizens and their concerted efforts to stop the steamroller of big business from obliterating them. Given the changes of fortune in the real estate and financial sectors over the past couple of years, lets hope developers like Congel are suffering as their portfolios of exploitation dwindel. And let’s hope that the changes that are inevitable will do something about consumer mall driven culture because as numerous economists, policy makers and just plain citizens say, we won’t be shopping our way out of this one.
Megamall is currently on the festival circuit.
Produced and directed by Vera Aronow, Sarah Mondale and Roger Grange; written by Sarah Mondale and Vera Aronow; cinematography Roger Grange; edited by Vera Aronow with Marian Sears Hunter; and music by Tom Phillips.
With: James Howard Kunstler and Roberta Brandes-Gratz.
