It’s believed that thousands of people live below the streets of New York City, inhabiting the shoulders and gullies of the labyrinthine subway. Those pounding the pavement to and from work each day may wonder what impels these denizens to navigate dark, dirty tunnels in lieu of facing the myriad bodies and bills that await them above. In answering this question, Marc Singer’s documentary Dark Days examines the lives of a dozen or so sub-city residents.
In individual, homemade houses, a makeshift community resides. Living underneath the city is not done on a whim. It requires commitment. A commitment to survival. Each interviewee, be it Tony, Tito, Ralph, Greg, Clarence, or Dee, has built his or her own home from plywood or other found materials, and to keep the rats – and other vagrants – out, each home must be sturdy and more fortress-like than any cardboard shelter found in an alley on the street. By their own admission, each person within Dark Days is homeless, but at times, it feels as if they are more “houseless.” They’ve created a community with makeshift alarms to ward off intruders and routine visits to each other’s homes. They share cornbread recipes and cook for one another. They compare the quality of their neighbors’ homes, noting new rugs, couches, or space.
In this way, they are similar to those they live below, fashioning a status system created through hard work and reputation. Those one top of the pyramid credit the hours they spend scavenging for cans, bottles, and “the perfectly good” trash that people throw away. One resident celebrates the “free enterprise” system that burgeons among the homeless: the discarded CDs, videos, and magazines that can be turned around and sold to someone else.
In one sense, the choice to abscond from the streets above provides an ironic freedom. There are no bills to pay, but life is accommodated with electricity, television, hot plates, toaster ovens, shelter year round, and – for a time – running water.
In another, this freedom comes with an admission that the outside world has rejected them. “80% are crackheads,” one resident tells us. Another was fed up with being a punching bag for this father. Another is a recovered addict – clean for three years – but keeps himself underground as penance for what he put his wife through and the regret he has for not being able to save his baby daughter. For him, the underground is a refuge and a self-imposed purgatory, where he is surrounded by addicts and relegated to his memories each day, so much so that “sometimes [he] wants to cry.” His underground home is the middle ground between two hells: still in proximity to the perils of addiction, and just below the city he wants to forget.
Singer does not paint this existence with a sublime or a grotesque brush. Rather, he plays in the middle, offering the potential upsides and exposing the obvious negatives, most notably the regression from regulated law and order to clannish imperialism. This juxtaposition is most obvious when Dee – the only woman documented – sits atop a cement wall, watching her shack burn to the ground. “She did somebody wrong and they burned her ass out,” we’re told, but our instinct to press charges against the arsonist are foreign to her as she watches a lone firefighter perfunctorily splinter the remains of her structure. His instinct is not to save her possessions – or even her — but to prevent the fire from spreading and damaging the tracks. She has no recourse, because, despite the community they have built, they are the city’s equivalent of third-world country inhabitants – we know they exist, but mostly as mythologized “mole people,” dehumanized and cartoonified through the very mention of their sobriquet.
This dehumanization is present throughout Dark Days. Singer often cuts between the denizens gather insulation or food and rats doing the same to pad their nests and feed their brood. Here, the comparison between the city’s outliers and the rodents is the most obvious, but something Singer does a bit more subtly is correlatively compare us to the rats as well. As Dark Days moves closer to its end and Amtrak issues eviction notices to each of the subway dwellers, it’s hard to erase the similarities drawn between us and them. Perhaps we’re not all crack addicts, but we share their struggles. We each have some taste of some assortment of family issues, relationship problems, financial difficulties, insecurities, and maybe even a drug dependence – be it alcohol, marijuana, etc. Certainly, we won’t all end up like Tony, Tito, Ralph, or the rest, but Dark Days shines a thin line between our precarious existence and the rock bottom that resides below each of us.
In this way, we are all zoomorphized, forced to think about how close in our respective chains of command we are to scavenging for tonight’s dinner. Today it’s a choice between filet and shell steak, or a Budweiser over a martini, but a financial slip or two could have us wondering whether someone else’s half-eaten sandwich is better than a bag of day-old donuts.
