Secret Mall Apartment

Secret-Mall-Apartment
Secret Mall Apartment

The housing emergency has received some imaginative responses. In 2010, a group from Providence, Rhode Island, took over an unused corner of a shopping mall for four years. For them, this area represented gentrification and capitalism, and they reimagined it as a community space. Directed by Jeremy Workman with executive producer Jesse Eisenberg, the documentary Secret Mall Apartment provides a glimpse into the creativity behind the project but does not thoroughly study it.

However, that project was fairly crazy, and not just because it was rarely planned at all. In a situation or intriguing circumstances. The story goes that Michael Townsend one of the four men who undertook the challenge remembered that the mall had been built four years prior, and he had seen an oddly vacant area at the time a place that had become redundant after being built. What served for one day was supposed to last only one night, which moved out months later and then years.

It was not accidental that these events happened in this particular mall. In 1999, the Providence Place Mall was established together with a strategy to increase economic activity in the area, but many in the area thought it wasn’t designed for them, as some people even remarked that it was built in order to separate appealing areas of Providence from the undesirable ones. That structure which is basically a cinder block room with no windows in its cheap production design stands quite a bit much like a surreal set for a bad television series warm yet frigid, simultaneously.

Providence Place’s presence and habitants were clearly not for economic survival, but for what they called practicing themselves as ‘micro-developers’ of wasted space. Townsend and his colleagues were looking forward to attempting it, and for how long they would be able to stay. They kept planning one or the other in the spirit of playful cavalier until they found themselves couch-surfing in the 750 square feet. Whilst spending time recording acts many would view as questionable and illegal, “Secret Mall Apartment” would rather lack substance, if it was not for the pixelated tiny camera that Townsend seemed to have with him at all times during this period. Shaky videotapes showing the group scraping through long gaps and trying to lift their Second-hand sofa up onto the roof diegetically enhanced the documentary’s homemade quality and firmly matched the original purposes of the project.

The film, it seems, is much less engaging when it’s not specifically about the apartment. There appears to be an inordinate amount of focus on Townsend and proving that he’s straight and narrow, with his ‘nice’ family members offering testimonials, a part on his children’s hospital murals, and 9/11 tribute looking especially whitewashing. Sometimes, it also seems as if ‘The Secret Mall Apartment’ was initially conceived as a short and was then stretched to feature length with most of the extra middle being retrospectively added.

The entire project could also feel a little bit like overkill because no one ever actually moved there permanently, with Townsend’s wife on the video at the time of purchase saying how she’d rather they focus on fixing their real house instead of his side project making it feel more like a ‘clubhouse’. Only in the last ten minutes does the director try to address the reasons for all this instead of confronting the issue of why one would ever consider the situation positive in the first place.

They do this by building the apartment on a set and shooting Townsend reenacting the moment of his arrest, which is a somewhat surreal scene, not unlike what happens in Nathan Fielder’s ‘The Rehearsal’. It’s ironic how capturing a moment through a lens often makes things appear more true than they are and that is quite fitting for these four years which transformed a place that was more or less non-relevant, into a resemblance of home.

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