Movies into Film.com

Down Here Below

Beneath the Neon: Life and Death in the Tunnels of Las Vegas

By Matthew O’Brien

Huntington Press, 2007

Photo credit: Danny Mollohan

At its best, Matthew O’Brien’s Beneath the Neon: Life and Death in the Tunnels of Las Vegas conveys a sense of strolling through a chiaroscuro netherworld – through the city’s dank, graffiti-scrawled storm drains, a place where a surprising cross-section of humanity seeks refuge from the world above. O’Brien, in exploring these catacombs, writes with a “You are there” immediacy. His deceptively casual storytelling entwines tragedy and mystery, eeriness and respect, particularly as he listens to his first encounter down below, a male drug addict who spins a plaintive tale of a mother’s suicide, a rapidly squandered inheritance, and this laconic admission of grief, “All the women in my family are gone.”

Soon thereafter, in his nocturnal perambulations, O’Brien meets Lawrence, a 54-year-old poet and gambler who composes impromptu, Edgar Allan Poe-inspired verses on tunnel dwelling, and who delineates the rise of homelessness in America with eye-opening clarity. This section is exceptionally poignant and, in its own way, beautiful. The well-spoken Lawrence describes his stay in the drains as “a temporary situation,” although he’s lived underground for five years. Photographer Danny Mollohan’s accompanying image, a grainy shot of a man perched on a bed that’s elevated to remain dry during flooding, evokes Dorothea Lange’s Depression-era portraits.

The voices that emerge in these interviews are acutely perceptive, and O’Brien reproduces them with a chilling verisimilitude.

O’Brien, an editor at the alt-weekly Las Vegas CityLife, initially enters the storm drains to understand the mind of a killer, TJ Weber, who eluded arrest for a time by traversing the tunnels. Yet when O’Brien uncovers a murder mystery, he backs away. He receives a tip from a crackhead – “You know that little girl Rose who got killed? It was a big story at the time. There are people on the streets who are high and need money. If they have to commit a murder or whatever to get it, they’ll do it. You know what I’m saying?” – that should have raised his journalistic dander.

Sometimes, the author’s tone is excessively jocular; O’Brien kids around too much when the real strength of his book lies in its serious reportage of what drives a person to so dire a setting. Even so, he’ll surface with such Didionesque details as a heroin addict filing a missing persons report for a methadone addict, or his wry observation that, “It’s not uncommon in Vegas for younger women to use older men for drugs. In fact, it’s an art-form in the city.” Indeed, Beneath the Neon draws much of its tension from O’Brien’s status as both outsider and insider: an Atlanta transplant who’s covered Vegas politics for several years, he not infrequently seems to share the drain dwellers’ disdain for the glittering city that’s just overhead. – NPT

July 2007

Movies into Film

npt [at] moviesintofilm [dot] com

Home