When Demand for Victims Outruns Supply

vibes come and go, but the great victim scavenger hunt of the 21st century continues

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I quite enjoyed the documentary Secret Mall Apartment, which tells the true story of how a group of artists came to build the titular apartment, and spend a lot of time occupying it, in the early to mid 2000s. A dare to spend one week straight in the Providence Place Mall turned into a four-year-long project that has long delighted people with its sheer audacity and tenacious dedication. I was aware of the story already but appreciated all of the extra detail and nuance in the movie version. (I admit that the reality of the apartment was darker and grimmer than I had imagined, but then that’s the advantage of video.) I’ll admit that the documentary suffers from a common failing of the form, which is that the story is not quite sufficient to hang a feature-length movie on, leading to padding with material that feels extraneous. Still, the core story is consistently interesting and the movie does a good job of explaining how the artists were reacting to a series of controversies over displacement and development in Providence.

But since the movie came to Netflix recently, dramatically expanding its audience, there’s been a reaction that I really could not have predicted while watching it. The movie is largely about the artist Michael Townsend, who was the driving force behind the mall apartment project. (Or prank, if you prefer.) Townsend was joined in the project by his wife and six other core participants, the latter of whom were younger than him, several of them his former students. And so an argument you can find, in the ambient internet argument sense I’m already talking about, is that this stains the project with an inappropriate age gap. Yes, that’s right, these are complaints not about a sexual or romantic age gap, but about an… art project age gap? Or really, a friendship age gap? The mind boggles. But since first encountering it on Letterboxd, I’ve found versions of this complaint on BlueSky and Twitter and TikTok…. People are really doing this. They’re really using this documentary as a means to expand the whole age-gap-discourse franchise outside of romance and into friendship and collaboration.

This is all very bizarre: the younger people who worked with Townsend are in the documentary! They’re both on camera in archival footage from the time (that is, when they were younger) and in new interviews conducted recently; we have access to both their attitudes back then and their attitudes now. And they all talk about that period as a magical one for them, as a time to look back on with fondness. We don’t need to suppose whether they were feeling terribly exploited by their older friend thanks to the fact that he was, uh, older and invited them to take part in his art projects. They’re right there, on video! Including the ex-wife, for the record. Townsend’s ex-wife Adriana Valdez-Young has been invoked repeatedly by the people who are eager to see exploitation in this project and documentary. But Valdez-Young played a major role in the mall apartment project and is clearly proud of it. And for the record their eventual breakup is dealt with directly in the documentary. I actually thought the film did a very good job of demonstrating why Townsend’s various obsessions would be difficult for his wife to deal with, even as she was clearly an enthusiastic and dedicated artist herself, and her active participation in the documentary demonstrates that she still has a great deal of affection for that time in their life. I thought the movie deftly demonstrated how two people can break up and yet still look back with fondness for what they built together. But apparently not everyone agrees.

So here we have a documentary which contains all of the information that we would need to answer the question, “Was the older artist exploiting young people in the project?,” with the answer being a firm no - a firm no provided by the very “victims” in question. And yet there’s a slice of the public, no doubt very small but also persistent and loud, that just can’t accept that good news. I know pieces like this always lead some to question why I bother, why I find it necessary to talk about what are objectively niche opinions. But again and again, those niche opinions have spread further throughout the progressive world; more, I think examining these odd impulses is essential for understanding where liberal mores are going, what influences condition progressive attitudes. And whatever vibes may have shifted, whatever new turn we’ve taken in American culture war, there remains a slice of the liberal populace that simply cannot accept the idea that any given human relationship might be healthy, mutually beneficial, and consensual among all parties. The offense detective impulse remains very much alive, even in an era in which social justice politics have clearly receded.

And the question is… why? For whose benefit? Why does this 21st-century progressive impulse to seek out victims where none can be found persist?