Daniel E Conderman 
Kevin Smith, I’m calling you out. Yeah, you. The guy with the trench coat, the backwards hat, the 90s indie cred. You may not have meant to, but you destroyed mall culture. Mallrats wasn’t just a box office flop—it was a black mirror held up to every one of us leaning on Orange Julius counters and lurking outside Spencer’s Gifts like it was church. We watched your movie, we laughed, we winced, and then… we realized you were right.
You exposed the truth: we weren’t cultural revolutionaries. We were just losers wandering a dying temple of neon and pretzels. And after seeing it on screen, how could we keep showing up every Saturday like nothing had changed? You pulled the rug out from under us, Kev. The mall wasn’t cool anymore. It was a joke, and we all knew it.
Before Mallrats, being a mall rat was a way of life. We were feral kids hunting for free samples at Hickory Farms, playing five straight hours of Tekken at Tilt, falling in love in food courts lit by fluorescent tragedy. After Mallrats? We ghosted. We bailed. We abandoned our sacred ground to be gutted and turned into Spirit Halloween carcasses.
So here I am, decades later, staring at empty JCPenney shells and wishing I could just blame Reagan or Amazon. But no. I’m blaming you. You.
Kevin Smith, you destroyed the malls. You owe us a reply. Were you trying to kill our culture? Did you know what you were doing? Or was it all just an accident—like when you turn on the lights at 2 AM and scatter the cockroaches?
Answer me, Kevin. The escalators are silent. The fountains are drained. The food court only serves echoes now.
