I can't quite remember how I got into it, but in high school I was a big webcomics guy, mostly pixel stuff. But the one I loved the most at the time, and felt permeate deep into my identity in a way that 8-Bit Theater and the rest never could, was Questionable Content—a still-running series about a self-insert-shaped character working at a coffee shop in New England and palling around with his coworkers, most of whom were women, all of whom had high levels of snark and indie rock erudition.

I fell out of readership in much the same way I fell out of a lot of bits of my high school identity—you go to undergrad, you have your first Natty Light, you buy a couple pastel polos, and suddenly it is four years later, and you wake up checking your fantasy football scores rather than the collage of daily comic strips.

Five years later, feeling a little more comfortable in my having an identity that was not primarily formed in reaction to my friends and whatever book I was reading (or pretending to read) at the time, I revisited QC. It felt something like a time capsule—not just into what passed as laudatory alternative humor and culture, but also a time capsule into myself.

It was fun to remember being the kind of person who fantasized about working at a coffee shop — who fantasized about having an increasingly idiosyncratic coterie of band T-shirts. It spoke to a culture that I wasn't even really sure existed, but desperately wanted all the same, and I remembered at once how adulthood felt like a distant, beautiful island filled with serendipity and meaning.

I bring this up in the context of Secret Mall Apartment not just because I think the characters of QC would befriend the protagonists of the documentary, but because it's hard not to have the same kind of feeling—both a nostalgia for remembering all the discussions and jokes about these lovely artist/squatters, and a not unpainful feeling of distance between who I was and how I thought about these people then versus now, and how my understanding of meaning and grandeur has shifted over time.

SMA is about the physical world: it is a treatise on who owns a space and what it means to modify a space, and all of those things. But it also feels like a bit of a time capsule into what the internet or what communities used to be—the idea of privacy and being part of a secret club, and the thrill and joy of discovery before we had fully swung into an indexed world where the difficulty was in curation rather than discovery.

Okay, so, the film. I'm not really sure this works well as a documentary. There's a thinness to it that sits in an uncanny valley between cinema, reality, and an explicit top-down narrative. Workman, the director, does a lovely job with the aesthetics, but the fact that padding the narrative with quick asides about relationship drama and 9/11 just to meet a 90-minute runtime feels indicative that there is not some big story to tell here. It's a small story! It's the kind of thing that briefly went viral before "went viral" was a phrase, and I think I was more bemused than enlightened by the attempts of the crew and original collective to try and conflate the mall with a broader statement about Society And The Way Things Are Today.

Which, to be clear, is fine — and charming in its own way. Were these eight people engaging in an explicit art project? Almost certainly not. They were kids fucking around. Does it make you think? Does it change the world in some interesting, albeit slight, way? I think so, and the distance between those two truths does not matter that much, and I think I (we) used to feel better about that, that a random art project could be a random art project and not a referendum.

All of this is to say: it's a fun way to spend ninety minutes. Don't overthink it. (Or maybe do.)

★★★