While Billie Eilish, at her “tender age” (to use a cringe-y expression), could never possibly know the true clout a mall once had (reaching a final peak in the mid-00s), she certainly has made the space entirely her own–literally. For in her latest video for yet another new single called “Therefore I Am” (following “No Time to Die” and “my future“), Eilish wields this iconic philosophical aphorism sardonically against the backdrop of the environment that was once most hallowed to the American. Because, yes, if ever there was a time to rip off Rene Descartes’ “way existential” line, it’s 2020.
And in America, the line alters from “I think, therefore I am,” to “I shop, therefore I am.” With the gut punch to U.S. jobs and industry post-pandemic, however, Eilish showcases just how fragile the thread malls have been hanging by truly is. The thinness of said thread being thanks not only to online shopping “killing the radio star,” as it were, and the general economic decline that makes Eilish’s video a post-capitalist elegy, but also the emptiness of the Glendale Galleria as spurred by lockdown measures in California. Eilish, who spent her “teen years” (still ongoing, mind you) at this specific mall, very much treats it like a second home–as though she knows its depressingly lit nooks and crannies like the back of her own hand.
Directed by Eilish herself, the video opens on that signature black and white linoleum tile as she traipses up the escalator with her boyish demeanor (both in gait and oversized clothing aesthetic). Her approach is slow at first, until she whips around to face the camera to sing the opening lines, “I’m not your friend or anything/Damn, you think that you’re the man/I think, therefore I am.” At this point, she starts running around through the deserted space like it’s her own personal playground. And it very much is, with no one around to judge her–at least one good perk of COVID-19: it offers yet another celebrity privilege of having an easy time filming in empty locations.
Considering how much the public eye has been searing Eilish under its microscope with their collective scrutiny (most notably after she appeared in a tank top and shorts in mid-October, only to be accused of having a “wine mom body”), it comes as no surprise that this is the proverbial “fuck you, critics” song that many female artists tend to release at some point in their career after a “backlash” (and we all know Madonna’s “Human Nature” is the zenith of this genre).
Produced once again by her love and light, FINNEAS, Eilish comes across as being her most self-assured and confident in the face of unrelenting criticism as she goads, “Stop/What the hell are you talkin’ about?/Get my pretty name outta your mouth.” She then layers on the philosophical (this is a pop culture homage to Descartes, after all) with, “We are not the same with or without/Don’t talk ’bout me like how you might know how I feel/Top of the world, but your world isn’t real.” The incisive irony of her expressing these sentiments is that it takes place in an abandoned center of commerce, the place where, as Miranda Priestly once pointed out, all the lowest common denominators will eventually be met with the “high-brow” culture influencing things from afar. Though in Glendale, “Hollywood” is only a stone’s throw away geographically, even if millions of miles away metaphorically.
With cameos from mall staples like Claire’s, Lids and Auntie Anne’s (where Eilish helps herself to what can only be assumed to be the stalest pretzel ever), the feeling evoked is not nostalgia so much as an unmasking of just how bleak American priorities have been for so long (augmented in dreariness by the fluorescent lighting). The obsession with looking a certain way and adhering to “ideals” imposed by an invisible board of directors shaping the insecurities of a teenager is precisely what Eilish has been railing against from the outset of her still germinal career. This could very well be why she chooses to go on an eating rampage in the mall as a means of “defiance” against those “articles, articles, articles” written about her, as she chants at one point in the song. The specific choice of using the Cartesian philosophy that the only true way to know you exist is not through the body, but through the mind is also a poignant and calculated decision on Eilish’s part.
A pause at around the two minute mark during which Eilish gets on an elevator with her pretzel to go to the ground floor accents the deathly quiet of a space once typically known for reverberating with the sounds of mindless chatter and gossip. Eilish, reveling calmly in having the mall to herself, gets off the elevator, walks toward another food stand and hops over the counter to grab a donut. This, too, is designed to take aim at anyone who would stoop to critiquing her body or what she chooses to do with it. And as she runs again through the vast abyss, it strikes one just how insanely large malls are. How absurd it seems that they were okay’d for so long as a viable use of space.
By the same token, it’s difficult to imagine what a mall could be “repurposed” as in the era that has secured its complete obsolescence. What could possibly fill a void so massive (after all, the malls are now as empty as the American soul)? In this regard, Eilish’s video unwittingly advocates to keep the dead malls as they are, and open to the public as a reminder. A monument to what America still views as its “peak,” its “renaissance” period of capitalistic achievement. Either that, or maybe Eilish promoting all the devil-may-care joy she had in one just single-handedly gave the remaining malls’ another breath of life for new potential success. If that’s the case, Cher Horowitz would surely be proud… since her own Westside Pavilion has been turned into Google office space.
