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2001-09-10 / 8:04 p.m. ~"Dark Days"~ Bonus entry here! I wanted to write about "Dark Days", the documentary by Marc Singer, which I stayed up to watch last night in bed, knowing I should be at least trying to sleep. I don't know exactly when it was released, but I remember reading about it, me and my Entertainment Weekly 'scrip., reading every word of every issue, yada, yada, yada, and I was intrigued. The reviewer had found it bleak, depressing, sort of unpleasant, as I recall, but I could be recalling wrongly. Still, I wanted to see for myself, the story of the homeless people living in the Amtrak tunnels beneath Penn Station in New York City. It's shot in black and white, and the music is fairly constant in the background, music that sounds like trains, that sounds like what we're watching. I quickly realized there was no light down in these tunnels, where these men and women live, with their dogs, and the rats, it's pure darkness before the lights are brought in to shoot them, living. Marc Singer, as I learned in the little after-interview, is a handsome Londoner, and a passionate and compassionate soul, who actually moved in to the tunnels himself, feeling he would have to be there, to experience as much of what they experience as possible to tell an accurate story, to portray them as they deserve to be. He explained how he used them as his "crew", building makeshift dollies, and tapping into electrical supplies to have any light at all. Fascinating stuff, and these people, these articulate people, building their shacks, living there, underground, for years. Some with pets, some with friends, most alone, rooting through garbage above ground for food during the day, and we follow them, whatever they are doing, the light always this ethereal thing, artificial and unwanted, showing us the seamy reality of it all. I felt so many different emotions watching these people, everything from disgust to profound respect to complete bafflement as to why they were there, why not living "normally"?, to "There, but for the grace of God go I". The scariest feeling of all. That could be me, that could be any one of us, in the dark days of our lives, living in a way we could never imagine, doing it every day, living like that, until we forget what it's like to live above ground, forget what it's like to have a toilet to shit in or a bathtub to bathe in, or a good night's sleep without rats crawling all over our belongings, and our bodies. Thankfully, in the end, as Singer explains post-film, he most of all wanted to get these folks OUT of there, and Amtrak decides to evict them. Civil Liberties folks step in, deals are cut, Section 8 Housing becomes available, and we see 4 of the main "characters" in this real-life story get their own apartments. And I see what Singer says, what he saw in their faces, them in their own abodes, safe and warm, and clean, those smiles unlike any others. It was beautiful and I was as happy as he to see it. This movie was incredibly moving, I highly recommend it. Only qualm, only one at all, why not show the outcome of the dogs? Surely they weren't allowed to go to the new apartments with the owners. Did ASPCA step in? What happened to them? Maybe the handsome Mr. Singer is not a dog lover.... Cost of the War in Iraq
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