This essay provides a historical prologue for theorizing the cinema in postmodernity. The origins of the mobilized gaze are situated in the nineteenth-century flâneur, that paradigm of modernity. As the department store supplanted the arcade, space opened for a new urban subject, a female flâneur—a flâneuse. The mobilized consumer gaze led in turn to an apparatus that simulates spatial and temporal mobility: the cinema. The most profound symptoms of the postmodern condition—the disappearance of a sense of history, entrapment in a perpetual present, the loss of temporal referents—stem in part from the implicit time travel of cinematic and televisual spectation. The shopping mall—the present-day extension of the arcade—has the multiplex cinema and the VCR as apparatical exponents. The title of the essay is thus an appropriative double pun (on fleurs and on mal), locating the flânerie of the postmodern cinema spectator in the shopping mall.