What’s more, his insistence on riding the Segway, and his unethical use of security feeds - in accordance with his vow to “ detect, deter, observe, report” - may place him in proximity to what the author and scholar Shoshana Zuboff has termed “surveillance capitalism.”īlart is not an internet giant commodifying personal data for profit, but he does collect ambient information, undetected no sooner has he developed a crush on Amy, the new vendor of a hair-weave kiosk, than he’s back in the control room, zooming in on her face via CCTV, the poor woman unaware of this invasion of privacy as she goes about her own labor. This rings true to me from the outset of the movie, long before Blart has to put his life on the line. He doesn’t understand his own best interest.” If that’s the case, workers are living in ‘false consciousness,’ which seems to fit your protagonist. Why is it that working people identify with the ruling class when it’s clearly not in their material interests? In this case, why is it that this poor schlep who is probably paid something on the order of minimum wage risk his life for people (that is, capitalists) who exploit him?”Īccording to Marx, Dworkin tells me, “the prevailing ideas of any given society are the ideas of the ruling class, which to extend this are circulated through their dominance or control in education or the media or the church. “What I see in your brief description,” Dworkin replies, “is the classic issue in Marxism. Dennis Dworkin, chair of the history department at University of Nevada, Reno (and proud dad of MEL‘s Sam Dworkin), whose work has grappled with Marxist theory and class struggle. I sent a brief synopsis of Paul Blart and some theories about the character to Dr. (I am compelled to note, as someone who grew up the next town over, that creating the mirage of a luxury shopping center where none exists is a way of shaming residents for insufficient consumerism.) As a mall cop, Blart receives little respect but steady disdain from retail employees, customers and his colleagues, but he does enjoy two perks: the use of an officious-looking Segway and an intimate, camera-augmented knowledge of his territory.Īs the film’s narrative purports to reveal how Blart has been underestimated, so should we not discount the hallmarks of petty authority as somehow trivial. Nevertheless, he more than meets the requirements for a job as security guard at the fictional West Orange Pavilion Mall. He would be accepted for this role as class traitor, we’re led to believe, if not for his hypoglycemia: When his blood sugar gets too low, he crashes.
His fondest dream is to join the New Jersey State Police, and so enforce the laws by which the bourgeoisie keep the proletariat at a disadvantage, materially and politically. Goodmorning to the 88 percent of people that liked mall cop /VzvYowoXRaīegin with this: He desires power, and, more than that, to become an instrument of state power. It was a triumph of meager expectations.Įven Roger Ebert gave it three stars, pleased by its chubby “nice guy” protagonist, who goes from lovelorn loser to alpha male by foiling a heist of the mall on Black Friday. holiday weekend, and even now, it holds eighth place in that category. Poor quality is no problem when you have no competition, and this prescription for bottom-line success was particularly effective: Paul Blart had the second-best opening for a movie on the MLK Jr. It is, you should know, an exemplar of Hollywood economics: a small-scale movie produced “cheaply” (it cost $26 million to make), released in a fallow month so it can quickly outgross its budget and seize the top spot at the box office.
It was released on January 16, 2009, four days before Barack Obama was sworn into office, at the very terminus of George W. Paul Blart: Mall Cop is a 90-minute, PG-rated “action-comedy” starring Kevin James, best known for the sitcom The King of Queens. In so many ways, we’d like to forget it all.
Even the bright spot of the decade - the election of our first Black president - now feels too distant to improve our recollection of the time. Mistakes were made: everything from the show Entourage up to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. The aughts in America have loaded us with regret.
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