1C Lesson Plan for “The Mall as Prison” by David Guterson (286)

 

Part One Essential Lexicon:

1. Concupiscence: search for happiness based on gratifying pleasure and ego resulting in dissolution, ennui, and nihilism. Julian McMahon plays a handsome bachelor in Nip/Tuck who in Season Four suffers from dysmorphia. He believes he's not handsome enough and wants lipo for "ripped abs." In other words, concupiscence is not only aching for desirable things but never being satisfied, the condition of being insatiable. 
2. Dissolution; moral degeneracy; languishing in the despair of a moral abyss. A man who cheats on his wife once may feel horrible by the sting of conscience, but a man who cheats 1,000 times feels nothing as he has succumbed to moral dissolution. 
3. Ennui; bored with life; numb to life and succumbing to despair
4. nihilism; the loss of self and the loss of meaning so that nothing matters anymore
5. flourishing, from the Greek word eudaimonia (happy demons); means to blossom, to become who we were meant to be.
6. apotheosis; elevating something to divine absolute. For example, the mall has become the apotheosis of consumerism
7. binary: Two people in the world; those going down the path of concupiscence and those going down the path of eudaimonia or flourishing.

Two. The Mall As the Apotheosis of Consumerism and Concupiscence, a False Religion

 

One. The Mall of America is essentially a Temple of Substitute Religion in which consumerism replaces the deity as the center of worship. See paragraph 4. In paragraph 5, shoppers are referred to as “pilgrims.”

 

Two. As a Substitute for Religion, the Mall is Tyrannical Monster that consumes and overtakes us. In paragraph 5, we see that we become lost in the labyrinth of boutiques and become claustrophobic.

 

Three. The Mall is an insidious drug that enters us and makes us say, “I am the mall.” We become mindless and lose all sense of time. See paragraph 6.

 

Four. Shopping becomes the apotheosis (elevated to divine status) of daily life. We become giddy and euphoric.

 

Five. Other cultures have known about the magic of shopping that modern Americans are presumably ignorant of. It was an occasional event but in America it’s never-ending. See paragraphs 16 and 17.

 

Six. How is the American mall a degraded form of shopping when compared to the great shopping sprees throughout the world in the last several hundred years? In other cultures, going to the bazaar was a community experience; in contrast, at the American Mall shoppers are strangers, mindless zombies. This is not healthy worship. This is called blind worship. See paragraph 18.

 

Seven. The Mall provides a false religion complete with mindlessness, psychological addiction, timelessness, eternal dreaming, enervation, and zombie-like catatonia. See paragraph 30 on page 292.

 

 

 

 

Part Two. Why the Mall Is So Dangerous (In Ways We Can’t Even Imagine)

 

One. The mall is all about maximizing our desires out of the practical realm and into the irrational realm.

 

 

Two. No one knows, including the “experts,” why we desire things. We have ideas, theories, like we’re shopping for emotional reasons, like renewal, self-esteem, therapy, stimulating our pleasure centers, etc.. Yes we desire things for all those reasons, but those explanations are only partial. In the end, we really we don’t know why we crave things that cost more than we can afford. It’s not knowing the mystery of our desires that makes our desires so dangerous.

 

I don’t know why I crave watches that cost between $1,000 and $5,000. I don’t know why I crave cars that cost over $50,000. I don’t buy these things, but the very fact that I desire them is annoying and disturbing and a waste of energy.

 

Three. I resent exerting energy not buying the things I desire. To suppress one’s impulse to buy requires energy and will power and I resent having to spend time thinking about the energy I spend on not buying. This is completely insane, but it is the condition of struggling to be responsible in a world that titillates our shopping desires twenty-four hours a day everywhere we go.

 

Four. There is a line from Guterson’s essay: “I am the mall.” In other words, the mall is dangerous because it is not only a physical entity that constitutes the major center of suburban life; it is something we internalize. The mall is the externalization of the Id, which is raw, naked human desire unencumbered by the powers of reason and logic.

 

Five. The mall is dangerous because it consolidates the most recent innovations and creative energy in one location. It keeps us up to date with what’s going on the realm of art, culture, and technology. Natural human curiosity compels us to keep up to date on what the world’s greatest minds are up to. We smart. If something is lame, we’re not drawn to it. In the competitive world of shopping, we only get the best and the brightest.

 

Six. The mall has become an authority on what is fashionable, cool, in good taste and we are consciously or unconsciously influenced by this Authority Figure to the point that we become helpless to its dictates. Being an obedient shopper is all about being helpless to one’s desires and insecurities.

 

Seven. The mall is the Mama that’s missing in suburbia. In a society where both parents work or the one single parent works, a young person needs a center, a place to feed, to clothe, to converse. The Mall becomes a substitute Mama for which all these things can take place. In contrast, the suburban home is often a quiet, lonely prison and the bustle and buzz of the mall provides the sense of belonging young people crave.

 

Eight. The mall panders to the reptilian centers of our brain, primitive instincts that most of us are ignorant of. However, these reptilian instincts—to dominate, to feel safe and secure, to feel a sense of belonging with our species—are exploited by the mall’s creators, the diabolical geniuses of Madison Avenue.

 

Nine. The mall is a substitute for religious meaning. In the absence of faith or a defined purpose, we find religious meaning at the mall, which offers transcendence, sacred experience, renewal, and shared experience, the very things offered in our world’s holy temples.

 

Ten. The mall is a corruption of the Persian bazaar and the Italian agora and other historical shopping venues, which were based on cycles. You shopped as part of a communal activity and within certain time boundaries. It was understood in other cultures that shopping is a highly potent activity and that in moderation it can be exciting and renewing to the spirit, but that if taken too far, the law of diminishing returns set in to the point that one’s spirit was corrupted.

 

In our modern age of commerce THERE ARE NO BOUNDARIES. WE HAVE COMPLETELY SURRENDERED TO THE HELPLESSNESS OF SHOPPING.

 

Eleven. The mall is dangerous not because it is intrinsically bad, but because IT IS TOO MUCH OF A GOOD THING.

 

This is true of all things:

 

Romance taken too far becomes a sick obsession leaving both romantic partners crippled.

 

Eating sumptuous foods taken too far results in gluttony and crapulence.

 

Ambition taken too far results in someone becoming blind to meeting the needs of their family.

 

Cleanliness taken too far becomes an obsessive-compulsive disorder.

 

Shopping taken too far makes on a crack cocaine addict.

 

The problem with the mall is that it is based on taking over your life and in this extreme state it is dangerous.

 

 

Writing Option for Essay #3:

 

See page 328, #3 in which we’re asked to write about the “religious dimensions” of the shopping mall experience, drawing from selections in Chapter 7. We have the holy temple, timelessness, the promise of dramatic “born-again” transformation, the pilgrimage, etc.

 

Write an essay that explores the addictive nature of the mall and how this addiction breeds concupiscence, dissolution, ennui, and nihilism. Interview 2 or 3 subjects, people whose lives are dependent on the mall. The mall has become for these people an impediment to a more productive life, flourishing, and renders them overspent and possibly overextended in credit card debt. Explore the misguided quest these people are on by allowing the mall to become the center of their lives.

A suggested structure for the above option:

In a page, profile someone who flourishes, explain the characteristics that make such flourishing possible.

Then transition to second part of your essay by writing, "Sadly, though, flourishing is not evident in so and so whose life, centered around the mall, is characterized by ____________________, ________________________, ________________________, and ____________________________.