By Shini Meyer Wang

Ben Mullinkosson’s film, The Last Year of Darkness (2023), begins with the rumble of the subway. We are travelling down train tracks in a shadowy, subterranean tunnel, a void next to the fluorescent-lit terminals we pass. The urban infrastructure of the film’s setting of Chengdu, its quotidian landscapes of invasive construction among highrises, doubles as an emotional landscape, where the severity of modern life has been normalised by the city’s unrelenting transformation.

Filmed over five years and edited down from 600 hours of footage, The Last Year of Darkness is shaped around the lives of Mullinkosson’s friends: DJs, musicians, drag performers, ravers and queer youth, who do not conform to China’s hyper capitalism and social conservatism.

Chengdu, one of China’s leading commercial centres, is a city that is being rapidly modernised as part of president Xi Jinping’s ambition to push the country towards technological and scientific self-reliance. Against establishing shots of urban development and the throngs of people circulating the city, the film’s five main characters emerge from the collective hustle.
Together, they haunt a techno club, named Funky Town, situated in the basement of a block that is about to be demolished for the building of a new subway. Next door, the sounds of construction machines intrude, but in the darkness of the club, the five find some relief from the daily erosion of a hyperfunctioning society. They live out of sync with the rhythms of the city, sleeping during the day while kids in school uniforms exercise to pop in courtyards, a countermelody working against the tunes of the day.

Bicurious Russian DJ Gennady Baranov swipes through tinder on two phones, one with women’s profiles, one with men’s, at record speed. Skater/musician 647 copes with his childhood by philosophising over the human condition, getting so inaccessible to some that he prompts his friend at the club to exclaim, “Too deep bro, what the fuck are you even talking about?” The sensitive Yihao receives their family’s and passerbys’ disapproval and disrespect with gentility, contrasted against the expressiveness of their aesthetic and the electricity of their drag performances. The hilariously self-assured DJ Darkle reminisces about the beauty of life, saying, “I feel grateful, I suck a lot of dicks in my life, yeah. I couldn’t even count.”
In the sanctuary of Funky Town, the film’s subjects impulsively hook up and overspill both emotionally and in the literal sense – vomiting. Raw and absorbing in nature, the film feels like a livewire, compelling to watch in its characters who unravel their miseries and revel in their outlets. But because the film is equal parts cathartic as it is exhausting, we begin to question its ethics.

Could the film be considered a kind of misery porn, only centred around traumatic experiences, and if so, what is the value of this? Can the intimacy we see on camera truly be called intimacy when its characters are vulnerable for an invisible audience of thousands of viewers? What does this one-way relationship do to the subjects of the film, who are already vulnerable and overstretched?

The film seems self-aware of the impossibility of facilitating true intimacy. One of the film’s subjects Yihao critiques Mullinkosson’s film:

Ben, I don’t think your documentary can record me or anyone’s real life. I think real life is something you need to feel for yourself. There can’t be editing or dressing up. That’s what shakes people. It’s not political. Nothing. It’s a natural state of being.

Here, reality is defined as a deep sense of connection to oneself, an experiential wholeness that the subjects seem to be looking for. In this sense, the argument made is that there may be degrees of intimacy, but the film cannot get at this real life Yihao refers to precisely because we are not the film’s subjects.

On the matter of the potential harm of documentation, we can look at Kimberly, a guqin player, struggling with a destructiveness that has led her to suicide attempts in the past. Having had suicidal thoughts in the past myself, I wondered if Kimberly’s emotionally dampened way of talking about her suicide attempt, the casual way she noted how her worried friends called an ambulance for her and the humour she found in place of grief in recalling how the paramedics mistook her for someone Korean, perhaps gestured towards a deep sense of alienation. The film’s camera crew actually intervenes when her usual way of sā jiāo-ing with her exasperated boyfriend (sā jiāo is a Chinese word for throwing a coquettish tantrum) becomes worrying when she threatens him with jumping off the building. My question is does the film crew witnessing their squabbles on numerous other occasions exacerbate this sense of alienation, and thus the situation? But conversely, what might have happened if Kimberly had tried to jump and the film crew had not been there to pull her away from the edge? There are too many factors to consider.

It’s in these two moments, the latter and Yihao’s address to Mullikosson, that the illusion of the untouched reality of observational documentary is broken. Mullikosson has expressed that the film is not so much observational as it is a diaristic, where some scenes of his friends are recreations of their experiences, suggesting a kind of participatory confessionalism.

I suppose whether the film is misery porn depends on if you see the subjects’ lives as tragedies or triumphs. I feel them as both. As Mullikosson is friends with his subjects, we bear witness to them, their strengths and weaknesses exposed, their disempowerment, agency and solidarity in looking after themselves and each other made evident. Friends get drunk together. Friends help each other home. Friends watch sunsets on the rooftop.

The ending – in contrast to the void of the subway tunnel where we started – reveals the characters riding the train, looking much more reserved in the calm anonymity of the subway. Though our relationship is parasocial in nature, by the end of the film, all I want is what’s best for these five strangers who now feel like old friends.