Dark Days

We watched Dark Days tonight - a documentary about a homeless community existing in the subway caverns of New York City. We watch a lot of documentaries in our house. Yes, most of them - as our extended family usually points out to us if they ever take our advice and watch them - are depressing. But, most of the time documentaries these days are professionally crafted and edited to keep some form of distance between the action occurring in the film and the viewer sitting comfortably at home. You don't tend to sit in the misery of other people. Documentaries like The Future of Food or An Inconvenient Truth are certainly full of their woe, but they also end positively - hoping to lift the audience into a new way of behaving.

Well Dark Days has no such ambitions. Filmed in black and white and using loud, obnoxious subway trains as "cuts" from scene to scene, you watch constantly uncomfortable - trying to understand the anxious, disturbed, drug-saturated minds of men and women who have been reduced to scavenging like rats (which the director also uses as another "cut" device). Thirty minutes into the movie I started fearing the filth had jumped off the television and invaded my house.

You watch men pulling raw meat out of garbage bags - explaining how this is good meat since it comes from a Jewish deli where the meat is not thrown out with the other trash, "coffee grounds and shit" - and you're thankful the filming is so gritty. You watch two young men arguing over who will dump out the latrine - a painter's bucket set-up under a handicap accessible seat you'd expect to find hovering over a hospital or retirement home toilet. Eventually, the new kid takes the bucket not twenty yards from their makeshift house and pours it onto a stinking mound. No music. No narration. Just the inescapable hopelessness.

Or so I thought.

At the very end of the movie Amtrak issues a statement that the underground community has 30 days to vacate or else they will be evicted by force. But before the police can march into the depths, a homeless relief center in New York works with Amtrak to negotiate a better deal: the homeless men and women will be transferred to Section 8 housing and into apartments with another chance at life.

It's naive to think that's all these people need, and Dark Days never attempts to answer the pervasive reality and disaster mental illness and drugs has and will wreak on these people's lives. But, as the movie closes, you can't help but feel that some form of redemption has occurred.

In the conclusion, particularly, is where the brilliance of the black and white film is realized. For sixty plus minutes, the screen has been a barely visible abyss - with occasional light added by bright film lamps and small fires. For the last fifteen minutes of the film, however, the light has been reversed - bright light pours in to apartments, highlighting the sanitary shine of new paint and carpeted floors. One man stands over a frying pan cooking chicken, explaining how you never realize just how dark your life has become. You feel like you're in that room (just like you felt you were in that underground hell), which allows you to breath. And relax. But no where near as much as before you started the film. Some scenes are just too dark to forget.

Wes