In Search of the Mole People
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In Search of the Mole People Customer Reviews
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♥♥♥♥♥ |
Fascinating.
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In Search of the Mole People (Viktor David, 2000)
The opening titles of In Search of the Mole People, Viktor David's illuminating, unsettling documentary on the homeless who live in New York's subway system, briefly sketch out the story of Jennifer Toth, whose book [[ASIN:155652241X The Mole People: Life in the Tunnels Beneath New York City]] inspired the filmmakers and, according to the film, forced Toth to flee New York after she received death threats for exposing this secret world to the normals who live above-ground. That may seem confusing at first, especially as Toth, who gets a decent amount of screen time here, never really refers to it herself. If you're paying attention, though, in one of the interviews the filmmakers conduct, one of the mole people makes a passing reference to why: "there were a lot more of us [before the book was written]." Can one sociological study destroy an entire way of life?
David and his crew don't answer that question (though it would certainly warrant a follow-up film in, say, 2010), but there's definitely a pall over the events here. Still, they do manage to conduct extensive interviews with three of the remaining mole people, and each, though no doubt greatly edited, gets enough screen time to make it worthwhile. And if the third interview tends to reinforce the stereotype that the homeless-by-choice are all mentally unstable, the first two do their best to smash it. In fact, the woman (one of, she claims, only two who had lived in the tunnels for any length of time at the time the interview was conducted) interviewed in the middle portion of the film lays claim to veteran status and a college degree. Not to say that college graduates and veterans aren't mentally unstable, but nothing about her comes off that way, save a (forgivable, given the sanitary conditions of her surroundings) touch of obsessive-compulsive disorder.
I've used the word "fascinating" way too much in this batch of reviews, but once again, it applies. The three interviewees give riveting accounts of living outside the grid, while the crew, almost as an afterthought, are intercut giving their impressions of travelling through the tunnels. (And, as I mentioned before, there are also intercuts of Toth giving her impressions on what she had discovered during her sojourn to the tunnels a decade previous.) Most interestingly, I rarely felt pity for the interviewees. (The last of them, who in non-technical terms was totally round the bend, was the exception, but a qualified exception; there was no indication of whether he was crazy before he moved into the tunnels, or whether a decade and a half spent underground had eaten away at his sanity. He never tells us; I doubt he knows. Certainly no one else would.) While it may not be the case, they certainly give the impression that they have carved their niche out of the world, and are content with it, if perhaps a bit less than they were before the publication of Toth's book.
This is not an easy video to find these days, and to my knowledge, it has never seen a DVD release. But it's worth hunting down. There is a world beneath ours; it is a small world, but it is worth understanding. *** A
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