Dark Days

Released 2000
Directed by Marc Singer

For two years Marc Singer lived with the people who make their home in the tunnels beneath Penn Station in New York, creating an unflinching portrait of a part of society that is literally and figuratively beneath our notice. "You'd be surprised what the human mind and body can adjust to," says Tito, one of the tunnel dwellers. He and his neighbors are homeless, but the tunnels offer them a degree of safety that doesn't exist on the streets above. In this strange place they manage to achieve a remarkable degree of domesticity, building shelters, keeping pets, and cooking meals.

Singer has an eye for telling images, such as Dee dragging a sofa along the train tracks like Sisyphus rolling his stone in Hell. With its grainy black-and-white photography and haunting soundtrack, this is a surprisingly beautiful film, but it is never sentimental, nor does it try to impose a false nobility on its subjects. Dark Days simply shows us a world that we never knew existed, and in this simplicity lies its power.

Summary from Simon Leake

How would you like to live rent-free and without bills of any kind? What if it means you have to live underground in a subway tunnel, where it's always pitch-black, cold and teeming with rats? It doesn't sound like a good deal to me, but it's amazing what this group of drug-addicts and recovering drug-addicts did with such conditions. The human will is indomitable, and these people made the most out of something unimaginable. I expected most of them to be crazy, but they only include one crazy guy in the movie (Lee, who later committed suicide). The rest were down there due to the horrific drug crack.

These people surprised me in many ways. They dragged all manner of items down from the surface to their rather sophisticated underground huts, and they took a lot of pride in their "houses." For a few years, one guy even made people take their shoes off before coming in. There's footage of the underground dwellers coming to the surface to root through garbage for food and things to sell, but there are also some moving moments when the dwellers talk about tragedies in their lives. One is when the youngest white boy (Tommy?) talked about his abusive father and passive mother, and others are when people talk about tragedies that befell their children (I'm hoping one of the stories was a figment of one man's imagination).

After 20+ years, Amtrak eventually decided to evict these people. The movie takes a very negative view of this, but I can't blame Amtrak. These people were damaging the infrastructure, and Amtrak had every right to kick them out. The interesting part is how a group for the poor stepped in and was able to get them moved to public housing, but I have mixed feelings about that. It's uplifting to see them move into real apartments where they quickly lament the time they wasted underground doing drugs, but why were they given such beautiful apartments? They're way better than the first several apartments that I lived in, and I had to pay rent. I expected them to continue their drug habits until they were evicted again, but at least some of them had good luck. According to Marc Singer's summaries on the DVD of what happened afterward, a couple people died, but most everyone kicked drugs and straightened out their lives by getting married and finding steady work. If we can take it all at face value, it's a wonderful statement about what we can do for people by giving them a step up. --Bill Alward, November 13, 2003