Only Lovers Left Alive (dir. Jim Jarmusch, 2013)
Only Lovers Left Alive has vampires as its protagonists, but I struggle to call the film horror except perhaps in the way that anything can be a horror story. While they are unaging, Adam and Eve are burdened with challenges that any human being can relate to. They struggle with depression. They face a future that they fear they will not be able to adapt to. They try to live ethically, but it’s only thanks to their privilege that they can, and when that privilege is lost, the choices they must make are horrible.
What’s that Dorothy Parker line? That in billions and billions of lives, not a single one has ever had a happy ending? Just because you live for centuries doesn’t make that any less true.
Adam (Tom Hiddleston) is a reclusive musician living in Detroit. His longtime partner Eve (Tilda Swinton) lives separately in Tangiers. If they weren’t undead and required human blood to survive, you’d think of them as a pair of independently wealthy cosmopolitans. Not that they aren’t that as well. Their homes are reflections of themselves and their passions: vintage musical instruments and electrical contraptions, books and artworks. As this is a vampire story, Adam and Eve have known everyone in the worlds of art and science, including their fellow vampire Christopher Marlowe (John Hurt), who is on his last days as the world’s raggedest looking 29 year old and secretly the author of Shakespeare’s plays as much as Adam gave his compositions to Schubert among others.
This is the part of the Only Lovers Left Alive that I have difficulty with while otherwise quite liking it on the whole. There’s an elitism to the conception of art in the film. I mean, that’s part and parcel with vampires, but there’s still a suggestion that the only reason anyone here has been able to be creative is due to being above the “zombies” as Adam refers to mortal human beings who he’s grown cynical about through centuries of seeing history firsthand. And regarding Marlowe? Anti-Stratfordians are just snobs who can’t get past the fact that Shakespeare didn’t have an Oxbridge education
There’s a piece in The Onion I think about all the time. I even have a screencap of it on my phone: “Find The Thing You’re Most Passionate About, Then Do It On Nights and Weekends For The Rest Of Your Life.” This applies for the overwhelming majority of people on the planet, and part of the fantasy of these quasi-immortal beings is that they are not bound by that. Of course, the horror is that they aren’t immune to boredom or despair.
The solace from that comes from the connection between Adam and Eve. There’s the suggestion in the film that their connection across centuries and continents allows them to keep going, and Eve uses the metaphor of quantum entanglement in physics to describe that relationship. It’s quite touching even if they are, you know, parasites feeding on the living.
October 19, 2018
oliveresque 