Guardians of the Galleria

It’s been a bad few decades for reality. In the early 1990s, shows like Cops and Rescue 911 began conflating truth and scripted life. Then, around the turn of the millennium, the explosion of reality TV made the word “reality” mean exactly its opposite. From there, it’s only gotten worse: the unknown knowns, Fox News, the simulation hypothesis, the birth and engorgement of social media, influencers, virtual assistants, alternative facts, deepfakes, fake news, QAnon, the Big Lie, and a pandemic that wrenched the world into a state of surreal, suspended anxiety. It’s not surprising, then, that we are so hungry for distractions and activities that make us feel good, that evoke fond memories, and that, ostensibly, lay out the world in understandable terms, be they transactional or moral.

No two icons of late twentieth-century culture fit this bill better than the shopping mall and the superhero. Anxious? Why not buy a new shirt? All the better if it’s...