Whitney S. May
Whitney S. May, M.A., is a doctoral candidate in the American Studies program at the University of Texas and a lecturer for the Department of English at Texas State University. Her primary research interests include the Gothic and nineteenth-century horror literature, as well as the history of capitalism and its carnivalesque representations in horror fiction and popular culture. Her recent, related work appears in Gothic Studies and Supernatural Studies, as well as in Humanity in a Black Mirror: Essays on Posthuman Fantasies in a Technological Near Future (McFarland, 2022) and Religion, Culture, and the Monstrous: Of Gods and Monsters (Lexington Books, 2021). Her edited volume Encountering Pennywise: Critical Perspectives on Stephen King’s IT will appear with the University Press of Mississippi later this fall.
Bearing the Palls of Shopping Malls: Necropsying (Dead) Mall Nostalgia in Netflix’s Fear Street Trilogy
In 1997, it was none other than that most treasured and trenchant of cultural critics Daria Morgendorffer who proclaimed the shopping mall “that repository of human greed and debasement.”[1] Her arch pronouncement occurred during Daria’s late entry into a strange but nonetheless recognizable subgenre of long-90s American television, the mall episode, or “mallpisode.” From Roseanne to Saved By the Bell, from Seinfeld and Designing Women to Daria, at least one quintessential mallpisode ritually brought the characters of these and many more various popular TV series of the 1980s and 1990s to the nearest shopping mall to transport them, despite their different fictional worlds, into a shared wonderland space of material excess… and prompted them to question the accessibility of its promise, with varying degrees of dedication to the project.
Given that the ‘80s and ‘90s were the heyday of the mall as a cultural symbol, it’s no surprise that such expressions of mall fervor threaded through the period’s media. But it’s striking that it’s doing so in ours—albeit to a much darker degree. As dead mall “a e s t h e t i c” reigns supreme in contemporary mall imagery (exacerbated no doubt by the increasing availability of both dead malls and the capacity to distribute images of them) and as the music microgenre vaporwave gives rise to a more focused micro-microgenre mallsoft[2], we’re also experiencing a distinct, more critical revisitation of mall nostalgia in, curiously, our contemporary horror. Certainly, the time seems right for the wistful, coupled flourishes vaporwave and mall nostalgia. Indeed, Stuart Lindsay (2021) views vaporwave as an expression of “capitalist melancholia,” whose “haunting spectrality is derived from its projection of frictionless consumption, aspiration, and wealth—the dream, as it were, that capital has failed to achieve, as evinced by its widening gaps of inequality and creation of new traumatized populations through debt, job redundancy, and food banks.”[3] It’s no surprise that such postmillennial capitalist melancholia finds itself represented similarly—albeit more visually and more dreadfully—in horror media that employs the dead and dying shopping mall as a crucial analytical lens through which to consider the anxieties of both scarcity and excess.
Textually grounded in Netflix’s Fear Street (2021) adaptation trilogy of R. L. Stein’s young adult novels (1989-1999; 2005; 2014-2017), this article considers the ways in which horror—a mode uniquely concerned with and reliant upon designations of space to achieve its broadest desired affects—responds to and problematizes the distinctive resonance of shopping malls as competitively anxious and nostalgic landscapes. In particular, it prods at the fraught intersection of our contemporary dead mall aesthetic and mall nostalgia—what I call dead mall nostalgia—by considering the ways in which our current media, steeped as it is in our dying-mall moment, autopsies the mall fervor not yet fully decomposed, indeed, still cooling on the slab of our cultural commentaries. Through the temporally expansive narrative lens of Fear Street’s three films, which bear entries in their titular years of 1994, 1978, and 1666, respectively, and whose central conflict across all three films manages to occur, in a sense, at a dying shopping mall, this article offers a postmortem of the dead mall as both (non)place and space to understand the outlines of its nostalgic ghosts.
At every stage of their design and construction, shopping malls have followed rigid and yet robust rubrics of space-making that are, at their core, always already a matter of space-taking, as well. Beginning in the mid-1950s alongside the post-war economic boom, the most successful enclosed-space malls appeared along the veins of highways that stitched together the American landscape. The size of each mall itself was determined by the surrounding area’s population size, which situated the construction plans along the scale from strip mall to regional mall and all the way to international tourist attraction, all based on the algorithms of demand threshold. This careful strategy hinges upon American values of land “use,” which constitutes the most profitable organizations of a given set of acres. James Farrell, in his study One Nation Under Goods: Malls and the Seductions of American Shopping (2003), designates malls as “adaptations to place, but the place is defined demographically and economically, not aesthetically and environmentally.”[4] The result, he determines, is that “in this calculus, the primary value of land [for malls] is its market value. Realty becomes reality.”[5] This consumptive gaze, even as it merely preemptively surveyed land for these potential spaces of consumption, has obvious environmental consequences when it comes to the transformations of natural space into commercial space. Economically, too, the appearance of malls at the height of our frenzy of mall construction had a nasty habit of chewing up the local infrastructures upon which they were built. In his ethnographic study of malls and their cultural relevance The Call of the Mall (2004), Paco Underhill notes that the rapid appearance of malls in the 1970s and 80s left “aging cities and towns quak[ing] with terror every time a new one broke ground, and with good reason, for all it took was a couple of suburban shopping centers to devastate a traditional retail district.” He concludes, rather vibrantly, that “malls were the Godzillas of shopping.”[6] Finally, James B. Twitchell raises an excellent point in Lead Us Into Temptation: The Triumph of American Materialism (1999) when he notes:
Almost without fail the mall is named for what it has destroyed. Think about Meadowbrook, Longacre Farm, Twin Oakes, Rosedale, Old Orchard, Northbrook Court, Woodfield, Briarwood, Woodland, Twelve Oaks, and [his] favorite, Crabtree Valley. It is not that we murder to dissect, or that we kill what we love most. Rather, it is that we insist on memorializing what we destroy with the invocation of what can be no more.[7]
In these ways, breaking ground for a mall has always been, additionally, a matter of consciously consuming what came before—a ritual of sacrifice and a surety of consumption for consumption’s sake, a barter of one space for another whose true price can never be fully realized until it’s examined in the shadow of its own gravesite. The shopping mall’s monstrousness—the mindless consumption and Godzilla-like capacity to devour noted by Underhill—thrums beneath the framing narrative of all three Fear Street films.
The first film begins, and the last one ends, at the Shadyside Mall in 1994. The very first scene for the trilogy constitutes a smooth transformation of mallspace—commercial, deliberate, and necessarily profitable by day into its emptied, hushed, nighttime counterpart. Fear Street: 1994 begins as the teenaged Heather Watkins (Maya Hawke), a cashier in the Shadyside Mall’s B. Dalton’s bookshop, is belittled by a customer for recommending “low-brow horror.” (This is a cheeky nod to Mr. Stein, whose books are the recipients of the customer’s contempt.) As the customer exits the store with her maligned purchase, the mall closing announcement is delivered over the tinny intercom and Heather, although chirping saccharine pleasantries to the woman’s receding back, also rebelliously flips her off at the same time. Time and the transformations of space are demarcated in this moment by the announcement, which signals the close of market time and the marketplace, but Heather’s crude hand gesture ruptures this division more viscerally as a performance of all four markers at once. The wider rituals of transformation begin in this moment: The scene cuts to a time-lapsed longshot of the sun setting over the mall’s empty parking lot. Once it’s set fully, a rich dolly shot slithers along the main thoroughfare of the closed mall. The fluorescents have been doused, which leaves the cavernous central space backlit instead by deep blues and red “Exit” signs that blur noticeably into ranges of bruised purple. This distinctive lighting will be of use to our heroes in the final film. The typical canned mall music—these days the backbone of our current mallsoft music genre—gives way to Nine Inch Nails’s “Closer.” Relinquished from the market time that drives its operative logics, the mall becomes a desolate husk instead, peopled thinly by employees swaying to industrial rock as they restock cases and displays, no customers to charm or solicit and no corporate scripts to regurgitate in the interest of moving products from the shelves they absently reset.
In this closed mallspace, reminiscent of a contemporary dying or dead mall, our first of several killers appears wearing a cloak and skull mask and stalks Heather through various empty stores. Unluckily for Heather, his guise is a Halloween costume from the final store into which she darts, which is how he is able to conceal himself near the display and then leap forward to briefly catch and wound her. She fights back, though, seizing a quintessentially-90s spinning Disco lamp from a shelf and hitting him over the head with it.
When Heather flees, her escape route inherently also follows the cartographic logics of mall design, which send her sprinting toward, not the mall’s exits, but through deliberate catchment zones into its center: through the empty food court which lies in the shadow of the large tree that marks the mall’s core, or its “focal attraction” to use mall-architectural lingo, or its “wienie” to use Walt Disney’s term for the thing that draws aimless wanderers and often converts them into receptive consumers. It’s beneath this tree that she is finally caught and stabbed and where Sheriff Goode (Ashley Zukerman) appears and shoots her killer—posthumously dubbed both the Skull Mask Killer and the Mall Killer.
The trifold significance of this tree—a landmark at the center of the trilogy’s three maps and the lodestar for its three conflicts—is gestured to throughout the first film’s expository title sequence into which it slides after Heather’s murder. The title sequence reveals an impressive array of historical details in reverse that are pertinent to the narrative, as well as a consideration of the mallspace at the heart of all three films: Shadyside and its cheery, suburban counterpart Sunnyvale, it turns out, are twin towns linked at their heart—at the Shadyside Mall. However, whereas news footage of Heather’s murder notes that Shadyside has earned the nickname Killer Capital, USA, Sunnyvale has entered its 30th year with no violent crime. Leaping backward in time, an interviewee muses from a fuzzy news piece on the Camp Nightwing Massacre—the focus of the second film in 1978—that “Shadysiders seem to have no desire to better themselves.” Footage from the 60s trumpets that Sunnyvale is “voted most beautiful place to live,” while Shadysiders “hunker down” in the wake of another threat. Snippets of a Levittown-esque ad urge potential buyers to come find their dream homes in Sunnyvale “where the sun always shines, even when it’s cloudy” as photos of Shadyside’s “Milkman Killer” of 1953 leer beneath the remnants of its audio. A radio newscast warns that the Great Depression has hit Shadyside hard while “the economy in Sunnyvale continues to climb.” And on and on it goes, highlighting the strikingly inverse relationship of the two towns that goes back to the community’s founding in 1666, the timeframe at the center of the third Fear Street film.
This rich local history, replete with its socioeconomic dichotomies, is in keeping with Twitchell’s assessment about the ways in which mallspace at once destroys and memorializes that which it destroys: The Shadyside Mall—and all that’s anchored in its geography—continuously cannibalizes Shadyside and forecloses upon the opportunities of its inhabitants, not merely sparing Sunnyvale and its citizens at every turn, but bolstering their individual successes by seeming to subsidize its abundance.
The second film Fear Street: 1978 explores this subsidy more deliberately in various attempts to reconcile the Shadyside Mall’s time and space—sealed, naturally, by a curse. In this film set nearly two decades before the first, the ill-fated Shadysider counselors of Camp Nightwing rush to try and break the curse that they identify as the secret to why Sunnyvale seems to systematically benefit from Shadyside’s poverty. In order to do this, they must navigate an ancient map of Union, the terrain divided centuries before into Shadyside and Sunnyvale, to find an alleged witch’s dismembered hand. They are quick to note that the features outlined on the parchment match their own cognitive maps of the campgrounds: After one of their own is magically transformed into the Axe Murderer, layering the maps against and onto one another enables the remaining few to determine where the Union map’s “Witch Mark” is and find the corpse hand located there, the reunion of which with the rest of accused witch Sarah Fier’s corpse allegedly at the Hanging Tree—located at the center of camp—will break the curse over Shadyside. The end of the second film adds an additional layer to the elevated map when it is dramatically revealed that the Hanging Tree at the center of Camp Nightwing in 1978 is not only the very same at the heart of Union in 1666, but also the focal attraction at the Shadyside Mall in 1994.
Axe murderers and Witch Marks aside, the shopping mall’s unique preoccupations with time and space—with folding both into attractive, stimulating patterns—are part and parcel of its commercial function. Margaret Crawford’s essay “The World in a Shopping Mall” (1992) explores the science of “malling,” or shopping malls’ mercantile worldbuilding practices, as quintessentially transformational, necessarily enmeshed in the blurring of reality and fantasy and time into the boundless space of the mall. She writes that “Confusion proliferates at every level; past and future collapse meaninglessly into the present; barriers between real and fake, near and far, dissolve as history, nature, technology are indifferently processed by the mall’s fantasy machine.”[8] The Shadyside Mall manages this spatiotemporally throughout all three Fear Street films, occupying multiple places and times at once, in this case narratively by leaning into the mall as linked to respective sites, hauntologically, by way of a curse—the price paid by the first Goode (also Zukerman) in 1666 in exchange for eternal prosperity for his descendants—the deal made at the Witch Mark in a cavern below the Hanging Tree. Goode’s covenant in 1666 haunts the landscape forevermore, encompassing not just the Hanging Tree of 1666, Camp Nightwing’s heart in 1978, and the Shadyside Mall’s focal point in 1994, but everything in between and beyond, blurring the boundaries of space and time in order to maintain an eternal parasitic relationship between Shadyside and Sunnyvale.
So much of the architectural logic of shopping malls operates under meticulous considerations of space and the unyielding, disembodied control it takes to move shoppers’ bodies, discreetly and unbeknownst even to themselves, from place to place within the center. This format is sophisticated enough to compel shoppers to move themselves in predetermined, lucrative patterns between catchment areas. Take, for example, entrances and escalators limited to the very ends of the mall space and the central location of the food court. Benches and “You Are Here” signs help the shopper navigate the consumer terrain, but their choices are anticipated and exploited in the interest of converting them from browsers to consumers in serial “rest” areas. In the trilogy’s climax in Fear Street’s third installment, 1666 (the concluding scenes that link the 1666 narrative back to the 1994 one), the physical and commercial space of the Shadyside Mall is transformed to suit the needs of the protagonists as they lay their trap for Sheriff Goode, and the mall’s operative logics are similarly reconfigured. The band of heroes splashes over the ordinarily inscrutable maps of the walls and floors in black-light paint complemented by the red, blue, and purple hues of the mall at night. Scrawled arrows and messages like “This way!” and “Suck it, Nick Goode!” are meant to lead Sheriff Goode—interpellated as an individual in the wider reaches of the mallspace—to their trap at the center of the mall beneath the Hanging Tree. Not only do the painted messages glaringly and gleefully coopt the discreet navigational patterns of shopping-mall architecture, but they also subvert them: They keep Sheriff Goode following a clear, direct path to the center of the mall as well as distract him from looking at the shops, lest he notice the centuries’ worth of contained, cursed killers soon to be set upon him.
The protagonists of each of the trilogy’s timeframes are drawn inexorably toward this very point and through the various tunnels beneath the Hanging Tree toward the Witch Mark. In 1666, Sarah Fier (Kiana Madeira) flees through the tunnels to escape Solomon Goode after learning that he’s made a deal with the devil that’s brought the curse on half of Union (the half that would become Shadyside), and for which she has been blamed as an accused witch. Goode’s success relies upon Sarah’s silence, and so he ensures her perceived guilt and hanging, thereby assigning any suspicion about a curse to her “witchcraft.” In 1978, the Camp Nightwing counsellors use the map of Union to locate the hand Sarah lost at the Witch Mark in her fight with Goode. And finally, in 1994, armed at last with the truth of the curse, Deena (Madeira) reverses the 1666 chase by pursuing Sheriff Goode into the cavern to kill him and prevent him from passing along the terms of the deal to his own son. The final blow, delivered by Sarah Fier’s ghost but through Deena, dramatizes the hauntological reach enabled by the commercial logics of the shopping mall. While the Hanging Tree predates the mall, the curse in 1666 collapses the terrain forward while the Shadyside Mall’s operative logics collapse it backward, providing Sarah’s spirit access to reach through time and finally take her revenge on the Goode line.
In Fear Street, the triangulation of the three places beneath and alongside the mallspace allows for a totalizing view of the entirety of the American mallspace—and the view is not pleasant. This is hazily confirmed when Deena and Sam (Olivia Scott Welch) escape the underground tunnels to emerge in Sheriff Goode’s mansion. Not unlike the overwhelming barrage of visual stimuli we’d see in a mall, Goode’s home is a plushly-decorated assemblage of discreet, yet pointed visual cues: Against white scrollwork and an excess of taxidermied animals, lush white carpet and Grecian-style nude statues, an ugly poster bearing the word “COURAGE” in all-caps over soldiers’ helmets clashes strangely. Over the mantle hangs a meticulously-catalogued Goode family tree; the volume of its entries on its unfurling branches is a subtle reminder that there are many, many Goodes. Deena and Sam may creep past the tree without noticing it, but the audience is brought in close as the camera temporarily relinquishes its focus on the girls leaving muddy footprints on the blindingly white carpet to zoom into it. Most compelling of all, observant viewers will note another ugly, framed poster in Goode’s den: A bald eagle soars over the message: “FLY BOLD, FLY HIGH.” This poster is placed directly over the entrance to both the mall and the room in which the Goodes have been making trades with the Devil for three centuries.
It’s a denouement that tracks astoundingly well with our dead mall aesthetic, flexing this and mall nostalgia cleanly in its claws, mixing their blood in intriguing ways. Compare this to vaporwave, which blends, among other genres, lounge music of the ‘80s and ‘90s. This in turn has flowered distinctly into mallsoft, which hardens more perceptibly around recreating commercial soundscapes. If, as Paul Ballam-Cross concludes (2021), “By engaging with the imagery of [vaporwave and mallsoft] (either in the cover art of the release or in similar media), users construct a collective ‘memory’ of times and places that have never (or will never) exist,”[9] then the kitschy Americana posters in the Goodes’ home invoke a certain flavor of boisterous American jeremiad deeply pervasive to our political moment. Visually locating the bald eagle imagery and injunction to “FLY HIGH” and ascend to power by way of the tunnel—which locates the transactions of ritual sacrifice in commercial space—the final film discreetly recalls certain calls to American “greatness” by linking them to a consumer power that never existed as a collective reality. And what’s more, it discreetly calls attention to that very fact.
In the first (and to my knowledge only) academic book on vaporwave appropriately titled Babbling Corpse: Vaporwave and the Commodification of Ghosts (2016), Grafton Tanner writes of malls as adjacent to and implicated in vaporwave’s core tenets where consumer despondency is concerned. Vaporwave and its offshoot mallsoft offer “music of ‘non-times’ and ‘non-places’ because [they are] skeptical of what consumer culture has done to time and space.”[10] Writing officially on vaporwave and malls, but more accurately on mallsoft in “Failed Futures: Vaporwave, Capitalism, and Dan Bell’s Dead Mall Series” (2020), Declan Cochran determines that both constitute assemblages made up of the trappings of various analogue cultures which place them into context for the present. Cochran points out that the allure of each relies on accepting their ruptures with linear time. He concludes: “They don’t belong in the present, and they should have ceased to be. Indeed, vaporwave and the mall’s impact is largely contingent on an awareness of their outdated and anachronistic nature; to put it another way, the only true appreciation of vaporwave/malls must be derived from an awareness of how its constitutive elements are no longer ‘enjoyable’ (relevant).”[11]
Compare this to producer and director Dan Bell’s Dead Mall YouTube series, which has run since 2014. Approaching 4 million views, the 61 videos for this channel feature Bell gaining entry to dying, dead, and abandoned American malls and capturing their most unsettling imagery, usually overlaid with an evocative mallsoft track. Bell’s camera eye delights in emptiness; it is drawn consistently to cavernous atriums and given to overhead shots that emphasize absence, at once haunted and tantalized by stillness in spaces designed to deliver the opposite. Bell, however, is not the only witness to this particular aesthetic, nor the only documentarian enchanted by the dead mall as a graveyard for a unique brand of consumer culture: Although all three platforms obscure the numbers of returns on searches, inquiries for “dead mall” on YouTube, as well as TikTok videos and tweets under the “deadmall” hashtag indicate that dead mall explorers—in a somber spin on the ‘70s-‘90s culture, and the ‘80s-‘90s media culture of the mall, almost always young people—are active, attentive, and above all, curious about these monuments to all but bygone performances of transaction. Cochran concludes that vaporwave (and by extension, mallsoft) “only exists by being here when it shouldn’t be. It is an exhumed corpse that has had sunglasses placed on its shrunken head, being wheeled around, fooling nobody. And in the same way that vaporwave ‘exhumes corpses,’ Dan Bell does the same with the malls that he films; the act of filming them is the act of exhumation, cinema as graverobber, camera as embalmer, retro-future-fitted Gothicism for a generation raised on ghosts in the machine.”[12]
Dead mall nostalgia slots neatly into this framework: The sentimental attachments to shopping malls animates the nostalgia for what they were in their heyday—whether this was experienced firsthand or this nostalgia is characterized by a Jamesonian nostalgia for the present—while their hauntological grip on our imaginations keeps us chilled by their apparent undead presence, even if only in glorious decay. Phillip E. Wegner, in Life Between Two Deaths, 1989-2001: U.S. Culture in the Long Nineties (2009), echoes Jameson’s caution about the dangers of periodization, particularly regarding the era under his own examination. Applying this caution to a remarkably expansive analysis of long-90s popular media, Wegner notes that periodization not only runs the risk of a “vision of historical movement close off any possibility of real change—what Badiou terms the eventual break—it effectively takes human agency out of the historical picture, portraying such pendulum swings as an irrevocable law.”[13] Fear Street, tapping in tandem as it does into shopping malls’ universalizing aesthetic and dead-mall nostalgia’s totalizing temporality, enables the possibility of liberatory futures imagined outside the bounds of capitalistic systems that subject the many to sacrificing their bodies in the interest of sustaining the few. Or so it seems as the credits begin to roll. Caught as we are in this dying-mall present, worried as we are about the implications of the dead-mall future, we are nevertheless bewitched by the promise of the living mall in our nostalgic imaginaries. All at once, we are suspended, waiting, holding a mirror to the nostrils of this corpse and deliciously terrified that we’ll see a film of condensation mist the glass… or, perhaps, that we won’t.
It’s precisely that exquisite dread, combined with the universalized mall aesthetic, that drives home the significant post-credit scene of the final Fear Street film: Oblivious shoppers cross a section of the Shadyside Mall while the camera drifts along the grate-entrance to the tunnel and closer and closer to the spot where Sheriff Goode was killed by Sarah Fier’s ghost. The Widow’s Grimoire and the map it contains lies surrounded by forgotten evidence markers and police tape before a pair of hands suddenly snatches it out of view of the camera. The ubiquity of the mall aesthetic at the beginning of this scene, combined with careful costume choices that obscure the time period, makes it so that the viewer cannot be certain of when the grimoire is taken; it could be 1994, or it could be any time thereafter. Although the curse has been lifted, the operative logics of the mall leave time suspended, its contexts relentlessly unlocatable. It takes dead mall nostalgia to shake it loose—to want to shake it loose. The question we must ask ourselves is into what new world it will be unleashed?
End Notes
[1] Daria, season 1 episode 5, “Malled,” written by Glenn Eichler, aired March 31, 1997, on MTV.
[2] Vaporwave is a microgenre of heavily-layered and re-pitched samples of 1980s/1990s lounge Muzak. Mallsoft, a more recent incarnation of the vaporwave style, leans deliberately into remixes of the canned music associated with commercial spaces of this period.
[3] Stuart Lindsay, “Disaster Theory: Vaporwave Music as a Hauntological Expression of Sociopolitical Trauma,” English Language Notes 59, no. 2 (2021): 113.
[4] James L. Farrell, One Nation Under Goods: Malls and the Seductions of American Shopping (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Books, 2003): 23.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Paco Underhill, Call of the Mall (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004): 202.
[7] James B. Twitchell, Lead Us Into Temptation: The Triumph of American Materialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999): 259.
[8] Margaret Crawford, “The World in a Shopping Mall,” in Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space, ed. Michael Sorkin (New York: Hill & Wang, 1992): 4.
[9] Paul Ballam-Cross, “Reconstructed Nostalgia: Aesthetic Commonalities and Self-Soothing in Chillwave, Synthwave, and Vaporwave,” Journal of Popular Music Studies 33, no. 1 (2021): 90-1.
[10] Tanner Grafton, Babbling Corpse: Vaporwave and the Commodification of Ghosts (Portland: Zero Books, 2016): 39.
[11] Declan Cochran, “Failed Futures: Vaporwave, Capitalism, and Dan Bell’s Dead Malls Series,” The Appreciation Index: Dispatches From the Information-Action Radio, 2020, https://theappreciationindex.com/2020/04/16/failed-futures-vaporwave-capitalism-and-dan-bells-dead-mall-series/.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Phillip E. Wegner, Life Between Two Deaths, 1989-2001: U.S. Culture in the Long Nineties (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009): 41.