Très Mall follows three artists living in Savannah, Georgia through their various misadventures—both real and tripily dreamed. The bleary-eyed protagonist, Jon, has inherited a vacated strip mall which he uses as a site of shifting, uncertain ambitions that don’t seem to go anywhere. He delivers an imagined TED talk from a Casper mattress in a former The Limited. He challenges a dreamed Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos while speeding through a data center. He talks about turning the band practice space into a gallery—which, of course, never seems to materialize.
However, it’s not just Jon and company at Très Mall. Literary theorist and political philosopher Michael Hardt makes a visit as a blue jay to talk work, love, and malls with Jon whose indolence (or “creative block,” as he’ll have it) prevents him from any of the real political organizing this winged Hardt proposes. After all, it’s hard to think critically about labor when you aren’t doing much of it.
Philosopher Graham Harman makes an appearance (appropriately for this object-oriented thinker, as a coffee cup) helping Jon work through his own re-imagination of various philosophers’ four-fold thoughts.
While Jon and his friends might be stuck in inaction, they are certainly not without ideas. With these cameos from major thinkers this highbrow Daria for the millennial age wryly interrogates culture from the spectre of consumerist sprawl.
