Citadel Mall Stadium 16
by Elijah Siegler
On March 31st, most businesses closed in South Carolina by order of Gov. Henry McMaster (essential businesses, including gun stores, were never required to shut down). That order was lifted on April 20. And so, for many months now, within a mile or so radius of my home in Charleston, many evangelical churches have been open for live services (some requesting RSVPS, some advertising self-service communion), along with many bars.
But movie theaters statewide remained closed until the end of August. One hot afternoon in late July, I drove by the shuttered movie theater a couple of minutes from my house, and looked at the posters from more than five months previous (The Invisible Man; Trolls World Tour). The Citadel Mall Stadium 16 has no special purchase on my heart. Sure, over my sixteen years in Charleston, I have taken my kids there to introduce them to Pixar, Marvel and Star Wars movies and to revivals of Jaws and Raiders; I have enjoyed new films by Paul Thomas and Wes Anderson; I have been gifted with headaches from the occasional IMAX 3D spectacle. But really, it’s a typical mall multiplex, surrounded by a parking lot, dumpsters, and trees; and a short walk (though who would walk it?) from the Target.
Its emptiness unexpectedly but powerfully reminds me of the very many empty, repurposed, or destroyed movie theaters from my childhood in Toronto. I grew up amid standalone movie palaces all over downtown. They are all gone; to go to a movie theater in Toronto now requires first walking through a brightly-lit mall. The names of the departed inscribe the boundaries of my city and my memory: The York, The Uptown, The Eglington, The Hollywood, The Imperial, The New Yorker, The Cumberland, The Backstage. (Writing them down here for the first time, I notice too how their names recapitulate Toronto’s split colonial identity—we Torontonians see ourselves as outposts of both the class-conscious British Empire, and the razzamatazz American one. Compare these names with my local theater’s—named for the Military College of South Carolina, founded in 1822 to put down possible slave rebellions.)
But what makes these defunct movie theaters powerfully empty places from both a “religious studies” and a personal perspective is that they are memorials to my own long-lasting moods and motivations, whether those were of the comfortingly ritualized, of the collectively effervescent, or of the solitary mysterium tremendum varieties.
Movie-going was the closest I came to attending weekly religious services (my family joined a synagogue shortly before my Bar Mitzvah, and unjoined quickly thereafter). In Toronto in the late 70s and the 80s any kid with four bucks in his pocket (two dollars on Tuesdays!) had access to Hollywood entertainment that felt nostalgic even when it was new. I faithfully viewed War Games and Ghostbusters, various Star Treks and Die Hards, to say nothing of the Star Wars, Raiders, and Back to the Future trilogies. I venerated Christopher Reeve as Superman and Roger Moore as James Bond in movie palaces all long out of business.
Certain films evoked such particular emotions in me that I still have distinct memories of when, where, and with whom I saw them. These movies bound the audience together as one tribe, and marked for life my friends and I as such. We walked up the street from our downtown high school in the fall of Grade 11 and saw our first Hong Kong film, Peking Opera Blues, and the film’s wirework, bad subtitling, and gleeful genre-mixing caused us to shout in sheer joy. My best friend and I saw Aliens in the balcony of the packed University Theatre, which was at the time Canada’s biggest movie house, [and we didn’t take a breath for over two hours.
The Empire Strikes Back at the University Theatre, 1980, Toronto, Canada. The author saw this movie at this theater. Photo courtesy Vintage Toronto Facebook community.
Some movies evoked specific feelings which I can recall more clearly than the content of the films themselves: the fear that last lasted months after my father took me, at eight years old, to see Invasion of the Body Snatchers; the embarrassment I felt when, at fifteen, I took my grandfather to see Decline of the American Empire, hoping to impress him with my taste by choosing a sophisticated foreign-language comedy, not realizing it featured a lengthy hand-job scene. Do folks raised with religion have similarly vivid memories?
A photo taken by the author in July 2020 of a sign that should have been taken down in March 2020. Citadel Mall Stadium 16, Charleston, South Carolina.
I am sure many of my neighbors here in South Carolina must remember attending, as children, big tent revivals at campgrounds now vacant. These revivals were ingeniously designed to induce awe-full experiences in their audiences. I remember going to big screen movie revivals that did the same thing: That same friend and I seeing 2001: A Space Odyssey on another huge screen; a bunch of us going to Apocalypse Now in IMAX; my father and I watching Eraserhead at an art house theater. A fourth example, though not a revival, also induced awe: Kurosawa’s Ran, again with my father. All of these movies, experienced on a big screen, were, for me, ineffable. Afterwards, walking the dark streets, or waiting for the subway, we were silent. What was there to say? What was there even to think about other than: what did we just see?
Visiting the silent and empty Citadel Mall Stadium 16 this summer brought all this back. Selfishly, I’d love to shut down the bars and churches in Charleston but keep the movie theaters open. (Realistically, with our state’s high positivity rate, they should all remain closed, of course). But having lived here as long as I have and studied religion in America even longer, I understand how bars and churches give my Charleston neighbors their own awe-full experiences, of Saturday night sin and Sunday morning salvation, memorialized as powerfully as my going to the movies. The empty places of American Christendom cannot remain empty long.
Elijah Siegler is a Professor a Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at the College of Charleston. He is the co-author of Dream Trippers: Global Daoism and the Predicament of Modern Spirituality (University of Chicago Press, 2017) and the editor of Coen: Framing Religion in Amoral Order (Baylor University Press, 2016).