I can’t speak for everyone, but if teenage me found out that there was a secret Playstation clubhouse in my local mall, with an access panel hidden over a toilet, I would have gone through the looking glass in a heartbeat. This is a proposition that 2024 documentary Secret Mall Apartment presents, with Providence, Rhode Island artist Michael Townsend as its white rabbit.
Secret Mall Apartment tells the story of a group of artists and friends at the turn of the 21st century who, upset that the new Providence Place Mall was gentrifying their neighborhood, managed to turn an unused corner of that mall into an illicit hangout.
The film is screening at FilmScene on Sunday, June 8 as part of the Vino Verite series — now in its 10th anniversary! — co-presented by Bread Garden Market and Little Village. The evening will feature a wine tasting, hors d’oeuvres and a Q&A with director Jeremy Workman.
There were a number of approaches that Workman could have taken in telling this story, ranging from a lazy, jam-tacular skateboard rebellion to an overbaked allegory that panders to the Art Basel crowd. What we get feels grounded and altogether reasonable.
One of the key ingredients is the pacing: Workman, who serves as his own editor, builds the narrative with the patience and guile that the Secret Apartment 8 also had to use. There are times when reality must be addressed, and we stop off for these visits with supporting cast and family in kind, then we get back to the work of building the Secret Apartment along with our artists.
Secret Mall Apartment also works because we all know that one guy, the industrious kook. In liberal cities there tends to be some kind of Michael Townsend — a visionary who is willing to do whatever it takes to see a project to the end, finances and hygiene be damned. When I went to Ohio State, this came in the form of a gent named Hibbs, who built his own instruments from PVC pipes and set the Guinness World Record for hula hooping. Another friend once built an entire practice/recording studio in a hidden storage room in a Pasadena movie theater, where the average rent is still insane.
Workman gives us clear framework for the world of RISD graduate Michael Townsend, both physical and emotional. One of Townsend’s former students actually cuts and assembles a scale model of the shopping mall, complete with a tiny diorama of the titular space. Later, this same student talks about how their work with the Hasbro Children’s Hospital and The Hope Project remains some of the greatest moments of his life. There’s a level of visual wonder and pathos here that other directors would have botched.
This film also pulls from other documentaries that blow doors. An early scene shows an overhead map with a clear line of demarcation in downtown Providence between the haves and have-nots; between this and the prevalent theme of repurposing commercial spaces with civil disobedience, the film builds upon Dogtown and Z-boys in the best possible way. There are also meta moments that feel like American Splendor in their audacity, rebuilding the site of the dwelling itself for an ending that is as ambiguous as it is delicious.
This documentary is not meant to change anything, but it may, like Townsend, slowly, quietly sneak its way into the symbolic heart of late-stage capitalism. You might as well get in on the ground floor.
Lee Keeler is a film professor for the Des Moines Area Community College. He is a regular contributor for Boing Boing and spins records at Black Sheep in downtown DSM. He co-founded Green Gravel Comedy in 2014.
