Billie Eilish Is Queen Of The (Deserted) Mall In Eerie 'Therefore I Am' Video

Billie Eilish released her debut album, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?, 19 months prior already, and thus much has shifted since then. She won all the Grammys. She recorded the new James Bond theme. And right now, she even got Glendale to close down the mall for her.


In her exceptionally DIY new video for "There I Am," Eilish spends five minutes gallivanting around the deserted Glendale Galleria in California, helping herself to soft pretzels and doughnuts. It's a familiar haunt; she grew up frequenting the mall as a young teen in the 2010s. Right now she runs it, in the vacant clip that evokes Dawn of the Dead's suburban post-apocalyptica and plays like a nuclear-fallout version of New Radicals's beloved late-'90s kids-take-over-the-mall anthem, "You Get What You Give."


A lot of what I said above is utter projection, although it's hard not to read between the lines this year, a fraught time plagued by a raging pandemic and nearly 1.3 million people dead around the world. I went to the mall a lot as a kid out of mere boredom, gathering in large groups and walking around drinking frozen sugar drinks without a face covering. Imagine such a magnificent now!


In Eilish's and for that reason I Am," which she directed, she captures this feeling of estrangement and isolation by wandering around a closed, multi-level, capitalistic expanse maskless and alone, free, nevertheless implicitly haunted by the shuttered shops and eerie emptiness. She's having a nice time, though, smiling as she lip-synchs to a bouncy pop track in the vein of "All the Good Females Go to Hell" and repeatedly relays, "I'm not your friend."


"Therefore I Am" follows Eilish's previous single, "My Future," which she performed virtually at the 2020 Democratic National Convention in August.


Get lost in the vast post-commercialistic chasms of and for that reason I Am" above.