“I’m in the food business now,” Dark Days director Marc Singer told an interviewer in 2011. “I have a company that sells very nice garnishes—garlic, cherries, onions, anything that you’d find in an alcoholic drink.” Aside from the rather hair-raising suggestion of taking garlic with one’s aperitif, it’s nice to know that Singer has established a successful alternate career for himself since the film’s release in 2000.
Isn’t it a shame, though, that he never built upon this remarkable debut—an intimate, grueling docu-fairytale about a group of New Yorkers living in subway tunnels—with a substantial filmmaking career? Or is it instead apposite to the legend of his sole work that he, like Charles Laughton (The Night of the Hunter), Barbara Loden (Wanda) and Wendell B. Harris (Chameleon Street) before him, remains a great, enigmatic one-and-done of American cinema?
I’m tempted by the latter option, partly because I’m given to such romantic formulations, but more specifically because Dark Days, from its curious provenance onward, suits its mythical status. In the mid-1990s, Singer, a Brit in his teens, decamped to the States, and wound up enjoying life as a model-cum-party boy in New York. Like many young dreamers of an artistic bent, he became fascinated by life on the other side of the tracks. Yet instead of making like Jack Kerouac and taking to the open road, Singer plunged vertically into the subway system—he’d heard about a community living in the Amtrak tombs, and decided to join them.
After a few months of claustrophobic immersion, he decided to make a documentary about his new friends, and their surprisingly domestic set-up. Its initial aim was to raise awareness of their plight—and help them financially—but the end result was anything but a worthy social-issue piece. While the world was fretting about the potentially hazardous tech effects of the much-vaunted Millennium Bug, Dark Days, with empathy, compassion and grace, emerged to expose viewers to a group of people for whom corrupted data storage was a non-issue.
Though the sub-ground-level status of Singer’s characters is clearly a pungent, potent symbol of the dramatic extent of urban American wealth and class disparity, Singer avoids even the slightest hint of polemicizing. He absents himself from the narrative, and refrains from moralizing via voiceover (a pitfall of so many social-issue docs). Singer’s restraint proves wise: it safeguards the film from any suggestion that the director is slumming, while his nonjudgmental approach effectively constitutes a political statement in itself. His unvarnished portrayal of the community—comprised of complex, troubled, lively figures—definitively situates Dark Days outside of the mainstream media’s typical representation of the homeless population as desperate, agency-free victims. By the time Amtrak officials step in and threaten to remove the group from the life to which they’ve become accustomed, it’s impossible—unless you have a heart of granite—not to be deeply emotionally involved.
A refreshingly collectivist vibe is embedded into the very fabric of the text. In a decision born equally of inspiration and necessity, Singer made his cast a crucial part of the production process. They assumed crew duties, quickly learning how to use the 16mm camera with black-and-white film, and rigged up lighting and Steadicam dollies. The result is a stark, singular aesthetic success: an arresting mélange of F.W. Murnau’s expressionistic chiaroscuro with the chilly industrial throb of David Lynch’s Eraserhead. Equally crucial to the film’s uncanny atmosphere is the spacey, reverb-heavy score by California DJ/hip-hop producer DJ Shadow, who was then operating at the peak of his powers.
Dark Days, though a sui generis work by any standard, is also plugged into a lineage of countercultural artistic product. I’ve already mentioned its vaguely Kerouacian origins, but with its collection of drugs n’ booze-addled—and often extremely funny—oddballs shooting the breeze in an enclosed space, it also works as an off-kilter successor to Shirley Clarke’s The Connection, a heroin-boho curio with off-Broadway roots. Elsewhere, it plays like passages from Ralph Ellison’s classic novel of African-American fringe living, Invisible Man, come to life. It’s hard not to think of Ellison’s resourceful, unnamed central character when one garrulous gent enthusiastically boasts of siphoning electricity to illuminate his austere existence.
With a depth and replay value that belies its brisk running time and modest origins, Dark Days stands up as one of the greatest documentaries of the new millennium. Furthermore, it feels particularly relevant in 2015, when the number of men and women sleeping in New York’s streets and shelters is reportedly higher than since the Great Depression. Singer may be busy with his garlic and onions these days, but it’s unlikely he’ll ever conjure another cocktail as intoxicating as this one.
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