Location Taken: Arundel Mills Mall, Hanover, MD
Time Taken: July 2010
We go to see movies at the movie theater in Arundel Mills Mall. It’s not the closest movie theater, but it is the best that’s at all nearby. They have comfortable seating, with a steep slope on the gallery seating so you can always see over the person in front of you. They don’t seem to use cleaning materials that I’m allergic to, unlike some of them. And, most important, they are more likely to show the movies we actually want to see.
You see, I’m not really that in to movies. I see only a handful a year at most. Largely, it’s because I only care for rather good science fiction or fantasy movies, which are more rare. We do catch every single Pixar and Studio Ghibli film in the theaters, though. And this theater’s been showing the Studio Ghibli films pretty much since it opened in 2000. Now, the first one they showed, Spirited Away (still one of my top movies), only showed on one of their smallest screens for a few weeks, but still, before that we had to go down into DC to an art theater to catch them, and I’ve already ranted about driving in DC.
Anyway, back to the picture. I took this at 10 at night, on the way out of the theater after seeing what had to be Inception (It’s the only movie that was in the theaters at the time I’ve actually seen). At that time of night, the only place open is the movie theater. All the other shops are shuttered and the lights have been dimmed to nighttime levels. This is still rather bright, since half the places don’t bother turning off their neon signs. The mall is empty at this time, and the whole feel of the place is different. It’s actually peaceful, this giant building (it’s, what, half a mile long?) resting for the night, looking forward to the next day.
It’s actually a very different feel from a mall that is empty because it is dying. I’ve been in a few of those. There’s one to the south of us that’s closed off half the building because they don’t have enough shops to fill the slots. The most empty one I’ve been in was in Benton Harbor, Michigan. That town is in some ways dying too, losing more people than it gains. I’m sure that they’re trying to stop it, but a lot of Michigan’s having that problem these days. This mall had maybe one in ten of its shops open, and we may have been the only customers in the building. It had a feeling of boredom and desperation, rather than the peaceful resting feeling I get from a building that is merely closed for the day. Dying malls are somewhat creepy, the whole sense of something that had been great, that had been a community center in its heyday, now fading away, unvisited by those who spent so much time and money here in the past.
I doubt those dying malls leave as many lights on at night as Arundel Mills does. Arundel Mills can afford it, after all.
