Only Lovers Left Alive

Great art nev­er dies and nor do vam­pires. Both, how­ev­er, require spe­cial tend­ing to make their pas­sage through time a safe and pros­per­ous one. Only Lovers Left Alive by Jim Jar­musch is a sub­lime cel­e­bra­tion of art and artists which zeroes in on the con­cept of cul­ture as a human neces­si­ty — indeed, its life-giv­ing prop­er­ties are deemed so vital that, along­side food and water, it is the only thing pre­vent­ing us from press­ing a .45 to our col­lec­tive tem­ple and bid­ding good night, Chicago.

Yet this delight­ful con­jec­ture pro­pos­es a melan­choly para­dox, that there is in fact a innate rec­i­p­ro­cal rela­tion­ship between cul­ture and human­i­ty. Humans cre­ate art, then art con­soles humans. The prob­lems remains that art is finite and humans aren’t, so what hap­pens when there’s no-one left stand­ing to appre­ci­ate the sub­lime mas­ter­works forged by those great poets of antiq­ui­ty? Buster Keaton? Neil Young? Rod­ney Dangerfield?

We join Adam (Tom Hid­dle­ston) at a point where that very quandary is front and cen­tre in his mind. He’s a lank-haired, ele­gant­ly wast­ed goth­ic mope liv­ing alone in a semi-dilap­i­dat­ed Detroit town­house which heaves with vinyl records, vin­tage record­ing para­pher­na­lia and antique musi­cal instru­ments. Adam is a rock ​’n’ roll vam­pire who, hav­ing lived and loved through the mod­ern age and bud­died-up with the likes of Byron and Mary Woll­stonecraft, has just about had his fill of the cre­ative boun­ties the world has to offer.

He has placed an order for a sin­gle hard­wood bul­let so a quick and easy escape is avail­able to him. He takes a video call from Tang­i­er. It’s Eve (Til­da Swin­ton), his white ban­shee, his dar­ling, his true love. She sees his utter des­o­la­tion through her iPhone screen and so hops on a night flight (the lit­tle-known car­ri­er, Lumière Air­lines) in order to instil in him once more with the joys of existence.

And this, essen­tial­ly, is the film, a wist­ful roman­tic com­e­dy in which a pair of vam­pires wax Brecht­ian about the good times. Often it feels tru­ly affir­ma­tive and joy­ous, such as the when the pair laze about lis­ten­ing to old South­ern soul plat­ters, suck­ing on blood pop­si­cles and rhubarb­i­ng about a time when fresh corpses clogged up the Riv­er Thames.

Adam and Eve are not evil, mur­der­ous vam­pires con­sumed by the their lust for blood (even though its pres­ence does still pro­voke a cer­tain antsi­ness). Their sus­te­nance comes via crooked pro­fes­sion­als who skim hos­pi­tal trans­fu­sion sup­plies. Although the time­worn cri­te­ri­on of their sur­vival are sim­i­lar, Adam and Eve exist some­where between the sex­u­al­ly vora­cious likes of Count Drac­u­la and the angu­lar, anx­i­ety prone fops of the Twi­light movies.

The reg­is­ter of this film is pre­dom­i­nant­ly fun­ny and flip, and if Swin­ton and Hid­dle­ston were not actors pre­vi­ous­ly known for their com­ic chops, they will be now. Hid­dle­ston deliv­ers every line laced with a per­fect­ly mixed cock­tail of spite and exas­per­a­tion, betray­ing a sense of extreme self-con­scious­ness and expan­sive world­ly expe­ri­ence. His bare­ly-dis­guised mal­ice, huffy sense of enti­tle­ment and poten­tial psy­chosis recall Hold­en Caulfield, only this time the ​“phonies” are now the ​“zom­bies”. Yet his agi­ta­tion is born of a deep sad­ness: who will enjoy all this incred­i­ble art when everyone’s dead?

Adam and Eve avoid mur­der wher­ev­er pos­si­ble, though they both sense that they are liv­ing in the end times. The film’s apoc­a­lyp­tic tone is artic­u­lat­ed via night dri­ves around a des­o­late Detroit, a bro­ken city lit only by the moon­beams. Amid this urban wilder­ness stands a sin­gle bea­con of hope: Lit­tle Jack White’s house. Adam has start­ed to anony­mous­ly record post-rock gui­tar dirges (care of the film’s musi­cal super­vi­sor and long-time Jar­musch col­lab­o­ra­tor, Jozef van Wis­sem). Per­haps he thinks that there are no good bands out there at the moment, and thus isn’t being giv­en a con­vinc­ing motive to want to extend his own life­line any further.

One sequence sees Adam reboot­ing his secret under­floor gen­er­a­tor dur­ing a pow­er out­age, reveal­ing a self-sus­tain­ing con­trap­tion based on the the­o­ries of 19^th-cen­tu­ry elec­tri­cal engi­neer Niko­la Tes­la. While ​“the fuck­ing zom­bies” per­sist with their com­mu­ni­ty ener­gy grid and the mesh­es of tan­gled cables that lit­ter the land­scape, Adam has per­son­al­ly pre­served the ideas of a man who was, in his day, dis­missed as a crack­pot. In the same way, there are those who may cast aside Only Lovers Left Alive as an eccen­tric tri­fle cre­at­ed by a wan­ton icon­o­clast, just as they did Dead Man, just as they did The Lim­its of Con­trol. But like Tes­la, it only takes mem­o­ry, cre­ativ­i­ty and lit­tle per­spec­tive to prove the world wrong.

Tak­ing Adam and Eve as a duel mouth­piece for Jarmusch’s own con­flict­ing and intense feel­ings, the even­tu­al mes­sage the film deliv­ers is that great art is there and is plen­ti­ful for those who are ready to be recep­tive to it. The prob­lem is, maybe there aren’t that many peo­ple who can see what’s right at the end of their nose. At a low ebb and back in Tang­i­er fol­low­ing a vio­lent alter­ca­tion with Ava (Mia Wasikows­ka), a piece of flakey LA jet trash who pays Adam and her big sis Eve a fly­ing vis­it, the pair find momen­tary sal­va­tion in an antique lute and a vir­tu­osic musi­cal per­for­mance at a dive bar. Aside from its fleet­ing plea­sure, it fur­nish­es the pair with a rea­son to mud­dle on.