Ewan Morrison
Acclaimed Scottish filmmaker and writer Ewan Morrison talks to Dawn Purcell about his new project Tales from the Mall and reveals why he thinks Malls are ‘the most important subject in the world.’
Firstly, congratulations on a groundbreaking piece of work with Tales from the Mall, Ewan. Briefly explain to our readers what they can expect from this book.
Tales from the Mall is a mixture of three forms – fiction (short stories that I wrote about a range of thing from demographics, to people whose lives have been shaped and changed by consumerism), true tales retold, by which I mean stories that mal staff told me that I have then retold, and factual writing, whether this is mini-essays on the growth of malls, how malls got their name, how retail science tries to manipulate us and so on - and this includes fragments that the project threw up, which I’ve also included in the book.
What was the catalyst for your interest in Malls and the associated rise and fall?
Malls are really just gateways to global consumerism. They’re like space/time portals. I often think you could enter a mall in Glasgow and walk through it and out the exit and emerge from the back door of a mall in Dubai, or Sydney, or Los Angeles. This is what bothers me about malls: the fact that they erase culture difference, spread a new kind of global uniformity. The more I travel the more I see that every country in the world is becoming more the same, and the spread of ‘mall culture’ is a big part of that.
On a personal level, being born in 1968, I was part of the first truly global consumerist generation. It’s really hard to be able to detach myself from that, to stand above it all and say ‘malls are bad’ or ‘malls are good’. They’ve just always been around in my life. When I was a teenager we experienced the great explosion of malls in the UK, and Glasgow’s city structure was rebuilt to accommodate them; their imagery, their advertising and products, shaped my entire life. Malls are more culturally significant to me, than say, the works of Robert Burns, or Shakespeare or even Samuel Beckett. When the Berlin Wall fell, and we were told that it was ‘The End of History’ that Capitalism was as ‘good as it gets’, my generation really had to adapt to that. It was quite horrific waking up to the possibility of a world in which planned over-consumption – is the only answer, in which the ‘battle of all against all’, ‘every man for himself’ and ‘greed is good’ – is the only answer. Of course, it turns out that History is far from over, that Capitalism isn’t working, that malls too have life cycles, they can also die out.
These are just some of the reasons why I started the project. There wasn’t one singular catalyst. I just think that malls are the most important subject in the world.
In the essay ‘Dead Malls on Living Land,’ you expressed quite potent and conflicting feelings about Malls, their impact and symbolism. Did this forge an agenda for your research or were you able to approach the project objectively?
I’m absolutely torn on the subject of malls. I love and hate them. I try not to use terms like objective and subjective. The objective seems to imply some kind of god-like overview and the subjective – some precious interior world. I’m a big reader of Slavoj Zizek, and have been in and of Marxism since I was 18, which is a quarter of a century ago. In Zizekian terms the subject, the individual is formed by political forces that he/she cannot control or most of the time even see. We tend to romanticise, in the West, the subjective, the personal; to quote Fight Club, to think that we are ‘unique snowflakes’; that everyone has their own unique subjectivity, and so on. I find that a lot of contemporary writing, especially poetry, buys into this myth of the BIG SELF. But it is an ideological construct, this big self that wants to express itself is what is destroying our culture and is the driving machine of Capitalism – this notion we are endlessly sold that we are all somehow unique that by believing in ourselves we can transcend our circumstances. Well, in modern consumerist countries this is a bare faced lie, there is only 7% social mobility, which means that 93% of us are stuck in the demographic boxes we were born into. The idea of a transcendent human subject is really little more than an advert for Capitalism. I’m more interested in the objective forces that shape this overblown notion of self, those which tell us to ‘believe in ourselves’, ‘be your own brand’. A lot of the stories in Tales from the Mall, are actually about people who are on the very edge of self-hood, who are not quite fully functioning selves, who are led astray by bigger changes in the world (So a woman whose company is being out of business by the new lingerie stores, decides to buy some lingerie and have an affair). In the essay Dead Malls on living land, I confronted a dead mall in the USA (there are 300 dead malls out of the 1448 malls that were built in the last fifty years), and the shell of that empty building sacred me. It seemed to say something about how consumerism makes us hollow, also how we now have planned obsolescence built into our lives.
We don’t really trust consumerism, but we go along with it anyway because there seems no other choice.
The sections of the book are great fun and contribute to the feeling of being in a Mall, making the collection almost ‘novel’ like in terms of its immersive experience. Did you always have those sections in mind, or did they emerge naturally through your research?
In conversation recently I’ve come across a formulation for what makes Tales from the Mall work. It’s a PROJECT not a PRODUCT. Yes, there is a book as the end result of three years of work, but at the same time there is a body of research and many stories that didn’t even make it into the book. I like this idea that a writer can be a roving (and ranting) collector, rather than someone who sits at home alone, purging their soul. The mall project keeps on expanding, I’m working on a series of Art prints, from the book, inspired by the book, with artist Rachel Owen.
One of the things I love about the book is that it seems to have it’s own structural logic; its mixing disparate things – facts on how malls are built, on investment corporations, with very personal stories. I had to ultimately go with my intuition on what would sit well next to what. For example, I love that a series of titles from women’s magazines comes directly after a story about a woman who tried to ‘perfect’ her body over the years, to the point of self mutilation. There is the joy of discovery in putting these things together. That was what made the book so enjoyable and rewarding to edit – moving things around, to the point where fact and fictional sections found affinities with each other. Another example is having one of the “Brief Histories of the mall’ about how the communists and most of Europe distrusted US style commerce - how this come close to an intimate true story about a man called, Vasyl, who fled the Eastern block and it’s surveillance state, only to find himself working in a mall in the UK, in CCTV surveillance, searching for his daughter who had run away from home.
These juxtapositions were an immense pleasure to me. I think, because I wasn’t thinking of the book as NOVEL, as PRODUCT, as linear story, it allowed me to take more time and see each piece of text, whether they were my own stories, or essays, or facts, as found texts. Everything, I had written, at the end seemed like found text and so I spent my time arranging, editing. This really has been the most joyful experience in my career as a writer, and one I would encourage other writers to engage in.
You must have come across hundreds of stories and anecdotes. How did you discriminate between which ones to use?
Ah yes, that was tough. I have some great stories that didn’t make it into the book. There is one about an alcoholic lecturer in Economics that is drawn to the mall everyday out of loneliness. He is a right winger, expounds a philosophy of the free market, but at the same time, this notion of the BIG SELF has robbed him of his family and his life. He rants to anyone that will buy him a drink about the horrors of the communist planned economy, the only alternative to capitalism. He tells a story about how Chairman Moa, had the people of China kill all the sparrows in the country, which unexpectedly led to the death of 20 million people years later in the great famine that followed. The beautiful irony is that this old man, this right wing, drunk, beds down on weekend nights, when he has drunk too much to walk home, at the back door of the mall, and the sparrows feed around him on the fallen food that late night clubbers have dropped. I find this very moving, but there was no place for it in the book.
There is another touching story about an anti-mall activist – arrested for smashing a mall window in 1994 – and this is true – who now lives in an anarchist commune, growing their own food. But his partner and two children have given up on his dream of an alternative way to live, and have gone back to the city and the malls. And once a week, because the commune is not self-sufficient, they get a delivery van from Tesco to come and bring them the luxuries they cannot make themselves – which include toilet roll and soap.
The stories are heartbreaking, but my gut instinct told me they were to tangential, or too demanding in themselves to co-exist within the collection. They have a new life in other places, other publications, because this is really a project, not a product.
How co-operative were the people who ran the Malls and worked in them when you approached them? Did some wish to remain anonymous?
I got lucky when I was doing my mall research, because I came across one mall guy, very high up in the Ranking – an operations manager, who was about to retire. So he took a whole day off his usual work, and introduced me to all his staff, from the guy who’s been a car park attendant for twenty years, to a racist cleaner and he stayed with me an encouraged his staff to give me their funniest and strangest stories about shoppers and other staff members. It was a real way in, so from then on I realised that the key was to befriend the operations managers.
I changed everyone’s names in the book and even the names of the malls to protect people’s anonymity. There was a common understanding during the interviews that ‘no names’ would be mentioned, as some of the stories were either confessional or rude - some quite transgressive.
Some stories explore the point of view of the contributors and creators of the Mall; the lonelier side of marketing and selling. Did you find that often the people behind the Mall phenomenon are just as blind and swept along with it all as the consumer?
Market Researchers are generally sad, lonely people; they seem to suffer the most and this is because they have to hold some pretty scary information about human behaviour in their heads – that there are only 82 types of person in the world; that we’re all pretty much trapped in demographic boxes (D18: housewives in the suburbs, F28: Rural Empty Nesters, and so on). It’s like holding a really dark secret about people, and then having to go out smile and be nice to them at the same time.
Information like this is pretty hard to live with because it flies in the face of what we are taught to believe in every day by consumerism – that we are all unique, and free to shape our own lives. So how do market researchers live with this contradiction. They bury it, they repress it, they put a smile on and get on with their work. They live with the unease and discomfort of cognitive dissonance.
You can imagine though how lonely demographic insight can makes someone. Imagine, if you’re a market researcher and you start internet dating. The form you fill in looks like a market research survey, you list the music you like, the books you read, “I like hill walking, my cat ginger and cosy nights in.” and so on. You’re aware that you’re marketing yourself, and that you yourself are a type – one of the 82 types of person in the world. Or you could pretend to be another type – say an “A5: symbols of success” but then you’re lying and it only makes it harder to bare that you are in fact – a D22: someone who works in market research and has a cat.
My own market research shows me that there is a high rate of substance abuse and suicide among market researchers. I think market researchers are really just a more extreme example of how most of us feel about living under consumerism. I really don’t believe that many people buy into the idea that we can ‘shop for a new and better self’ at all. We don’t really trust consumerism, but we go along with it anyway because there seems no other choice. And it makes us angry, when we can’t live up to the things it tells us to be – to ‘be a success’, to ‘be all you can be’ – ‘everyone is a winner’. This makes us a bit mad, and lonely, because any time we flip out and just can’t deal with the contradictions and the lies that all this is based on, we alienate ourselves from everyone else who is walking about pretending that everything is OK.
The fact and fiction about Malls in the book is both terrifying and uncomfortable at times. However, the first story is clearly a very personal one for you. It conveys the Mall as an unlikely place to heal. Were there other stories like this within your research, where the Mall has actually had a positive impact?
Absolutely, I’m hooked on this idea of unintended consequences. That say, someone who means well, can create something monstrous by accident – Like Victor Gruen, the Architect and Utopian Socialist who invented the modern mall as an attempt to put a stop to modern American alienation. Or you have the opposite which is what happens when people with malevolent desires end up creating something good. So, there’s the true story of Rena the Cleaner, a racist bigot, who accidentally saves the life of a young Asian man.
Malls have had unexpected positive benefits for some people. I love the stories about ‘mall walkers’. In the USA they’ve become a huge problem for mall owners. They are basically jogging clubs for the elderly, and they come to malls everyday to walk or jog round them. They never buy anything, they bump into shoppers, they steal the best parking spaces. Some malls have even tried banning them. But aging baby-boomers can be pretty hostile when you try to oppose them, and all over the States these geriatrics in pink and blue flannel jogging suits are fighting for their right to use malls for exercise. Its hilarious and absolutely unexpected, the designers of malls had never foreseen such a thing. And really, what these malls walkers are doing and saying is that since they live in the suburbs, there is no-one else for them to go to walk, safely. They are reclaiming privately owned space, and making it public. This is pretty radical.
Also, there are stories of gay romances, starting out illicitly, as malls are often used as centres for cruising. Men from different parts of the city, even married men, can park their cars in the mall car park and get up to their fun and no-one need know who they are. So again, the mall architects never planned for such a thing.
A further development like this comes from the city of Inverness, in the Highlands, the mall there built in the 90s is now responsible for hundreds of marriages and for widening the gene pool in a fairly backward rural area. Basically the mall pulled in singles from within a hundred mile radius, and people met while on shopping trips.
I like all of these happy accidents– the idea of mall as dating agency, as illicit gay cruising site, as unintended gymnasium, exercise centre and social club for geriatrics.
What do you envisage for the future of Mall culture in developed countries? Is it definitely dead or just evolving in some way? And are less developed countries (sadly) destined to follow the same cycle?
No more malls have been built in the US over the last seven years now, because Capitalism has over saturated its own market there – people really can’t consume any more. And it looks like a return to economic growth is going to be a long way off. Malls are competitive, they have to expand and take more market share or they start to die, which is what’s happening in the US.
This would be an utterly bleak picture for the rest of the world – as every country races to try to follow the American model – if it were not for a few developments in the states that give me some hope. The first is the rezoning of malls, in California as ‘public’ spaces. This means that malls can have bars, buskers, dog walkers, even political protestors.
The other is ‘knocking the roofs out’. When you recondition a dying mall, take the roof off a mall and replace the fake marble tiles with concrete, as is now happening in various places in the states, you get something that is a bit like a town centre. This encourages mixed usage. One of the oddest things to have happened through this is people have started moving in – to live inside them. Malls with apartments! Again this is all good because it saves malls from dying and it reclaims them as land that is publicly shared.
You’ll be riding the success of this for a while, I imagine (and deservedly so) - but what is next for you now, Ewan?
Well, I’m just going to keep on with this ‘project’ idea. We’re trying to get the mall project off the ground as a documentary. I think it would be great and add a whole new dimension. In particular I want to go and film in the dead mall in Reading, where they have monthly zombie tours. That’s right, you pay to get chased by zombies round a real dead mall. What could be more terrifying. So yeah, I want to write and present this TV show and get chased by zombies.
And I have a new novel out in August. It’s called Close Your Eyes (Jonathan Cape), and it’s about a woman who abandons her child, to search for the truth about her mother’s disappearance in the 80s. Themes include: Hippies, a New Age commune, CND, Folk music, bullying and road accidents. About as far as you can get from malls really – or is it?
Ewan Morrison's book Tales from the Mall contains 49 real-life stories from shopping malls in the UK. Out now in paperback, e-book and app. Published by Cargo.
‘TALES FROM THE MALL’ BOOK TRAILER - www.youtube.com/watch?v=vq-ToLyUp9s&feature=plcp
CARGO PUBLISHING WEBSITE - www.cargopublishing.com/tales-from-the-mall/
EWAN MORRISONS WEBSITE - www.ewanmorrison.com/
LIKE ‘TALES FROM THE MALL’ ON FACEBOOK - www.facebook.com/?ref=logo#!/malltales