Ecology,Place and Home

The NY Times Sunday magazine (April 24) ran an interesting piece by Edward Wong in their You Are Here page. Wong covers the use of former "Air Defense Basements" as living quarters underneath the city of Beijing. The practice has been going on since the late 90's and Wong states that nobody has a firm grasp on just how many people live there. These are the manual workers who cannot afford to live above ground. The spaces are cheap, cramped, lacking most amenities and may soon be banned by the government. Until then people adapt to living in crowded urban areas, exploiting spaces most people would never consider as "liveable". Wong points out that these spaces have been granted to "landlords" by government officials. These are arrangements for profit.

All this brings me back to our examination of how a film like Dark Days (2000) explores similar issues. In this film, which we examine in our text Ecology and Popular Film:Cinema on the Edge, the homeless have found a way to live and survive in the tunnels of New York City's train lines. The living is not pretty, but proves that humans will readily adapt to the safest and most secure shelter they can find under extreme conditions, and exploit it to the fullest in order to make their lives bearable.

Finding living spaces underground is a long standing habit of human beings and the building of train tunnels in major cities, beginning in the 1840's, immediately attracted the homeless. It was far better to endure the dark tunnels than to try and exist outside. Dark Days succeeds in showing us how people down on their luck have found ways to be new kinds of homesteaders. They are determined, clever, communal and able to live off the "land". They find ways to acquire water, electricity, food and "trash" that they are able to recycle for money. It is a grim life, but it is better than being helpless, as one man points out.

Dark Days was Mark Singer's first effort and he produced a film that is hard to forget for all the right reasons.