Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back and Evading the Dark Side

by Christopher Barr

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away….

The Empire Strikes Back is the most soulful adult, mature and philosophical of all the Star Wars films.  It is the darkest as well, which makes it, although science fiction, the most realistic and possibly the most relatable of them all.  The special effects for the time are beyond state of the art.  It’s a beautiful looking film and if you saw it at the theater in 1980, in all likelihood, it changed you for the good, forever.

The film starts out with Han Solo saving Luke Skywalker on the Ice World of Hoth but then it goes full on into battle, between the Rebel forces and the evil Galactic Empire, which usually would take place at the end of an action film.  This film gets it out of the way in the beginning so it can pursue what the story is really about – emotion.  This film is about our own battle within ourselves, it’s about fighting for what we think is right as well as who we are fighting for.

The evil Lord Darth Vader orders that the rebels be all destroyed.  The gigantic AT-AT Walkers advance on the rebel base like dinosaurs as Luke Skywalker, along with a number of fighter pilots battle the imperial armada to what turns out to be a losing battle.  Han Solo, Chewbacca, Princess Leia and C3PO escape on the Millennium Falcon while Luke leaves on an X-Wing Fighter, with R2D2 to the Dagobah system to meet with Yoda, a Jedi master that the disembodied Obi-Wan Kenobi advised Luke to seek out.

“Never tell me the odds.”

– Han Solo

The Millennium Falcon is being chased down by imperial forces.  Han Solo takes refuge in an asteroid field during a moment when you thought that John Williams’ musical score couldn’t get any better and it does.  They hide within the throat of some gigantic space worm before escaping its massive bite.

“Anyone who fights with monsters should take care that he does not in the process become a monster.  And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” 

- Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

Luke crash lands on Dagobah, searching for this so-called Jedi master.  Soon he meets Yoda and begins training as a Jedi.  Here we begin to explore the philosophical elements of the film, the journey into unfamiliar territory one must take before becoming enlightened.  The Buddha sought defamiliarization in order to shake himself out of all that he was used to.     

We are not born necessarily good.  The Force isn’t something we automatically possess.  The Dark Side, the Jungian Shadow, is within us all.  The Force is what the Buddha wanted us all to aspire for, and that is to see our potential, our ability hidden underneath fear, tradition and complacency.       

Most people in the modern world are from the Dark Side, or they are distant components of it.  They labor for it and are living under the illusion of not being part of it.  They might be under the illusion of progress as a form of achievement, they might assume that if they succeed at the stock market that they are winners, they might think if they destroy an adversary they are the better for it.  This is the common attitude of the modern age, where often to win, others must suffer.  This is not true winning; this is rationalization for the sake of justification.

Yoda is right to be skeptical when first meeting Luke, who is passive and uncertain.  Yoda’s all too aware of what real power can do to a person, a motivated, controlling person.  Knowledge from the philosophical sense is ideally used for good, it’s taught to open the minds of those seeking it.  The philosopher has the Force, they possess the intellectual best-intentions when they regale philosophical stories of Plato and Socrates and the ethics of Aristotle.  The business man, the war monger, the politician all possess various degrees of the Dark Side, because they take profit, celebration, and power over the very species they are part of.  Hitler was a Dark Lord that only wanted to overthrow and destroy, dominate and assimilate.  

Luke enters the cave on Dagobah and faces his shadow, in the domain of evil, a place to be tempted by the dark side of the force.  During this test, he faces the darkness within him, he faces death, and he faces evil.  The mechanical man that killed Luke's master Ben Kenobi, is who he must face.  This is an encounter with the Real, an encounter with what’s most scary for Luke.  We face this in our lives when we must grow out of our old ignorant ways and strive toward awaking, doing what Dante did when he entered the Inferno and faced his fears.

Luke defeats him only to see himself in the severed head of Darth Vader.  Luke stares at his own face within the smoky helmet.  We have the potential within us all to be evil, and good is something that requires fighting.  Luke sees himself as potentially someone evil, which in life one must lose everything before one realizes what one is really fighting for.  Luke should have done what Yoda asked and leaved his weapons behind, as Yoda told him that he will not need them.  By taking his weapons with him, Luke has already failed the test because he relies on his accessories and tools rather than the power of the force.  In The Matrix, Morpheus told Neo, while in a training program on top of a building, to not “think” he can do it but rather “know” he can.  Neo has to run and jump off a skyscraper and land on the roof of another, quite a distance away.  Neo runs, jumps and falls to the ground, his problem, like Luke’s, was he didn’t believe in his abilities and in the laws of nature within his particular reality.

This is a psychological acknowledgment that we are flawed, we are often governed, point in fact, we can be bad, or selfish by nature, where we think about ourselves above all others.  This, the Buddha would agree, one must let go in order to achieve a path toward goodness, fulfillment, and purpose.   

Gollum in The Lord of the Rings was a tragic character that was never able to leave the Dark Side once he got there.  He wanted power, he wanted recognition, he wanted to be significant and that’s the dismal state here; often, and sadly, this all comes down to an infantile disagreement, where someone is getting their way and someone else isn’t.

“You must unlearn what you have learned.”

– Yoda

What is it to rise above one self, how is one elevated?  Athletes regularly experience the fruits of ‘knowing’ they can do it.  Plato, in The Republic believed that the physical ability of athletes and the mental capacity of the Philosopher were on different frequencies, different thought processes.  Here Yoda is attempting to join them, clearly in the tradition of the Asian martial arts, but never the less, allowing the strength of mind, body and spirit to co-exist as one.

One must convince themselves that they have the ability to achieve something.  Things don’t just happen; it’s up to the individual to help make them happen, through various forms of effort.  We need to study and train our abilities to advance them further toward an enlightened state of being.

“Do or do not, there is no try.”

– Yoda

Yoda lifting Luke’s X-Wing fighter out of the swamp and moving it to land with his Jedi mind, was a manifestation of what the mind is capable of doing.  It’s unable to actually move X-Wing fighters but it can elevate one to a higher level of being.  It can allow one to leave the petty, selfish, wish-fulfilling attitude behind and see the world as a form of joy and place of constant learning. 

The Millennium Falcon, the fastest hunk of junk in the galaxy, lands in Cloud City for what they believe is a point of refuge from the Empire.  Turns out, Han Solo’s friend, his gambling buddy, the man he won the Millennium Falcon off of in the first place, has sold them out to Darth Vader.

In probably the most emotional moment in the series, Han Solo is frozen in carbonite as a test, so Darth Vader will know for sure if his real prize, Luke Skywalker will survive the freeze.  Boba Fett takes his frozen Han Solo bounty to Jabba the Hutt as Chewy, Leia, R2D2 and a broken C3P0 attempt to escape Cloud City.

“One must shed the bad taste of wanting to agree with many.  “Good” is no longer good when one’s neighbor mouths it.  And how should there be a “common good”!  The term contradicts itself: whatever can be common always has little value.  In the end it must be as it is and always has been: great things remain for the great, abysses for the profound, nuances and shudders for the refined, and, in brief, all that is rare for the rare.”

– Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

Luke arrives at Cloud City and faces off with Vader, while Lando Calrissian redeems his betrayal and helps get Leia out safely.  Luke at this point has clearly advanced in his training because he doesn’t fear his adversary as he once did.  The Lightsabers come out for a spectacular swordfight, Lord Vader during their epic battle, attempts to recruit the young Skywalker to come to the Dark Side.  Luke fights any desire he might have toward the dark side.  The symbolic battle between good and evil unfolds in the viscera of Cloud City, where Vader severs Luke’s left hand.

“Luke, I…am…your…father.”

The Empire Strikes Back is left with uncertainty, it was left with our heroes, save Han Solo, intact and safe, but it left us with a grim outlook for the future of the Rebellion.  Luke was wounded and still struggling with letting go of how he sees the world versus how the world truly is.  This is preventing him from becoming a full fledged Jedi Knight but he has learned that the journey is long and hard and will take time.  It took the Buddha six years to find his place calm and wake up to the realities of existence.

The mediocre Return of the Jedi is a throwback to the simpler times of the first Star Wars film, with all the wonky aliens and hip culture.  Return of the Jedi is a good film, especially the first quarter, but if we are to be honest with ourselves we could easily see that they bailed on Kerschner’s vision, big time.  Lucas pulled it back to the 12 year old crowd, turning it into a farce of sorts, where Han Solo is comedy relief.  What makes Return of the Jedi awesome is Luke’s growth, that’s the film, Luke finally stands up to his father, while the Ewoks help the land rebels defeat the imperial army. 

Empire will always be the favorite; it will always be the brightest part of that galaxy so very far, far away.  The film never has a dull moment whether it’s all the incredible chase sequences with Han Solo’s Millennium Falcon out smarting, out maneuvering the tailing Empire, the amazing lightsaber duel between Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker (the best in the series) or one of the biggest twists in movie history when Vader reveals that Luke is his son.

May the Force be with you.

Lucy and Surviving the Brain's Cerebral Capacity

by Christopher Barr

Lucy is a Sci-Fi movie of oddly rare proportions; it was dumb to the point of insulting, filled with eye candy and trite action sequences that we’ve all seen many times before.  It is a movie that went beyond asking its audience to suspend their disbelief, and that’s even in today’s standards of alien abductions and superhero movies.  It’s also a rip off of Limitless and some of 2001: The Space Odyssey and The Tree of Life, and not for the better.

Lucy was about a young American student living in Taipei, Taiwan while attending school there.  Lucy is roped into a drug deal by her dubious boyfriend, whom she’s only known for one week.  The film cuts between meaningless ethereal National Geographic shots of strong animals chasing weaker animals, as Lucy is brought up to a hotel room and forcibly made, by Asian gangsters, to transport a plastic bag filled with a blue powdered drug in her abdomen.  The powder, it turns out, is a synthetic drug isolated from a naturally occurring chemical composite, that mothers pass along to their fetuses in order to create a jumpstart of sorts during a curtain stage of development.  

After being kicked repeatedly by one of her captors for not allowing him to feel her breasts, the plastic powdered substance in her stomach breaks open and leaks into her bloodstream.  This causes her to access more than the so-called normal amount of 10% of her brains cerebral capacity, and thanks to the exposition of the great Morgan Freeman, we are to take this theory of brain accessibility to be true.  The resulting effect is she has the powers of a superhuman, with the ability to alter matter and brainwash people.  She is able to absorb information instantaneously and move objects with her mind.  She also no longer feels pain or suffering and pretty well all other human, naturally occurring discomforts.  She is able to access her very first memories after birth, she can feel everything in her body and as a consequence she is able to discern her own impending death, which gives her a day at best to find the men responsible for doing this to her.

One of the glaring problems, other than the absurd pseudoscience which I’ll get to later, is the fact that she is unbreakable, she can’t be hurt, and she pretty well has no emotions or concerns about anything.  Generally good drama is designed around conflict; the main character needs to be in danger, or threatened in some way.  Here Lucy has not only alienated herself from her own human connectivity but she has alienated the audience from caring.  When are all the chips down for her, when do we grip our seats, worried that she might be in danger if she’s all seeing and all knowing?

She becomes cold and calculating and ultimately immaterial and that may work for villains like The Terminator or the Predator but not for the hero.  We need the Sarah Connor’s and the Kyle Reese’s so we can experience empathy, because without it, there is no magic trick.  This is an essential key to storytelling and it still surprises me to this day that Hollywood is still shilling out CGI crap that may look cool, but is lifeless.

Is that the state of things today in our technological savvy society of pseudo-connectivity?  Has the organic connection to people and the world around us become as cold as the stainless steel table at a mortuary?  Are we that far gone that this type of fair passes as a ‘smart’ person’s base entertainment?  If that’s the case then this is truly sad indeed.  The movie was about elevated brain capacity but yet it presented its own mythos using lowest common denominators.  They made a stupid movie under the deranged conclusion that it was for, and about smart people.

Astronauts went and saw the magnificent and fascinating film Gravity, knowing instantly that the science was off, but not by much.  They knew the filmmakers had to take a little bit of artistic licence because they were trying to tell a story, that just so happens to have taken place in space.  With Lucy, it’s clear that the filmmakers had no regard to the science and the understanding of the brain as neuroscientist’s understand it today.  They had no regard to evolution and quantum physics or applied mathematics.  They stepped all over pre-Socratic philosophy and post-structuralism like they were just new wave theories with their ink still wet.

Lucy contacts a well-known scientist and doctor, Professor Norman whose research, conveniently paralleling her current conditions, could be the key to saving her.  In an earlier lecture to of group of students and colleagues, Professor Norman outlines his theories on the development of the human brain and its actual potential.  He does this quite seriously, possibly allowing the naïve and ill-informed to buy into this gibberish because it’s being feed to them out of the mouth of Morgan Freeman.   An actor long respected as a truth bearer, a man known to be trusted and believed.  This cinematic trickery was used just earlier this year in yet another scientific unbelievable story in the disappointing movie Transcendence.

Speaking of earlier in the year, Bill Nye the Science Guy and Creationist Ken “human’s rode on the backs of dinosaurs” Ham, had a religious debate where Nye spelt out that science can explain most questions we as a species wish to know about the fundamental nature of existence.  Ken Ham explains that the Holy Bible is the true, one and only scientific book.  I bring this up because I’m wondering if the filmmakers got a supply of the same contaminated Kool-Aid that Ken Ham’s been drinking for years, so they can understand science through the eyes of a creationist.  A form of science where one can just make up any old crazy theory and say it is true, without actually supplying evidence to substantiate those claims.

Neuroscientists are well aware that the 10% myth is a false claim; they know that the entire brain in the healthy human being is operational at all times.  We use different areas of the brain when we are doing different activities like walking as oppose to sitting and watching TV.  It’s possible that this myth derives from our desire for a higher level of consciousness and not for some secret area of the brain, once turned on, allows us to fly or something.

This all goes back to people not wanting to put the actual work in, required to elevate one’s consciousness to a more responsive level.  We know that there are stupid people everywhere; we see them when we go to work, we see them all over the local Wal-Mart and for some of us, unbeknownst to ourselves, we see them in the mirror.  We also know that there are smart people out in the world too; they’re the ones that can’t believe that there are so many stupid people in a so-called technologically advanced society.  So we know there are different levels of understanding but we often confuse this with different levels of cognitive ability.  Unless you’re Einstein, everybody’s brain works the same, the dumb guy in McDonald’s asking for a Whopper has the same brain capacity as the philosophy student studying Hegel’s Dialectic.  The issue here isn’t capacity, it’s nurturing, the student is ‘applying themselves/their brain’ to what it is they want to understand, where the guy in McDonald’s has never been given the opportunity, or chooses not to take a chance at learning something new about a subject outside of a two block radius of his house and trash reality TV.

One of the problems in The Matrix is Morpheus taught Neo that the path to enlightenment is a path that can be shown to him, but it is up to Neo to walk it, the journey is the point.  He taught him to wake up to the realities of the world but he also had him ‘jack-in’ to their computer programming and had skills and knowledge simply ‘uploaded’ into Neo’s brain.  This process saw Neo, not learning anything but rather arriving at knowledge, waking up with programmed skills.  The problem with living in a fast-food nation is we want everything now; we actually don’t want to earn our way.  We want a pill like Bradley Cooper’s character in the suspiciously similar Limitless or we want the skillset of Bruce Lee without breaking a sweat.  We have become a society of spoiled brats that just want everything our way and rarely ever want to have to work for it.

After a boat load of silly ass-kickery, Lucy gets her hands on more of the Blue powdered drug and intravenously takes it all, promising to share everything she now knows with the Professor, once each cell in her body is controlled.  She then creates a supercomputer while her incorporeal self goes on an ‘acid trip’ through time (square) and space, from the beginning to the end of life, she then fills the computer with all her knowledge, essentially approaching the idea of Singularity, before vanishing and becoming “everything”.

The movie ends on an odd note of ‘what did I just witness, did she just say that, huh?’  Lucy’s last words to the audience, “Life was given to us a billion years ago.  Now you know what to do.”   In all likelihood and for the sake of one’s own sanity, it’s best to look at this movie as disposable, fun, forgettable and disposable, because to wrap one’s full cerebral capacity around it’s intricate simplicity, could kill one’s brain cells to the point of 1% capacity. 

Only Lovers Left Alive and Taking Back the Vampire Film

by Christopher Barr

“Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.

Her lips suck forth my soul: see where it flies.

Come, Helen, come, give me my soul again.”

- Christopher Marlowe

Some spoilers ahead.

Only Lovers Left Alive is an infectiously moody film by Jim Jarmusch, about two vampire lovers that live their undead nocturnal lives hidden away from the humans, the living that they call “Zombies”.  Adam is a depressed, Kafkaesque, musician that lives in a dilapidated house in a deserted area of Detroit and his wife Eve is a blithe, optimist that lives in Tangier, Morocco.  The film is a welcomed relief from the vampire craze of the laughable Twilight Series and any number other versions on the mythology.  The non-glamorous bloodsucking films like Kathryn Bigelow's Near Dark and Abel Ferrara's The Addiction are but only a couple of ambient, somewhat forgotten films that this film echoes.

The Poet is a kinsman in the clouds

Who scoffs at archers, loves a stormy day;

But on the ground, among the hooting crowds,

He cannot walk, his wings are in the way.”

 – Charles Baudelaire

Eve meets up with an older man who supplies her with high-grade blood, the ‘good-stuff’.  This old man is none other than the 16 century Elizabethan tragedian playwright, Christopher Marlowe, a man that was believed to have had died young.  In the film, Marlowe was the actual hand that held the quill behind William Shakespeare’s famous tragedy, Hamlet, among others.  Some theorists, that I don’t advocate, believe that when Marlowe died, he actually didn’t, he faked his death because he became the target of an investigation as a result of being a heretic, an atheist and a possible government spy.

Adam, a recluse, has become a bit of a music underground sensation, in spite of the fact that he wishes zero attention for his talents.  He’s been alive for hundreds of years so he’s acquired substantial amounts of scientific knowledge and has built contraptions to power his house and his Jaguar car, all technological designs pioneered by Nikola Tesla; he has also developed great skill in a number of music instruments.  His living room in his derelict house is his recording studio, where he records himself playing all his instruments separately and then syncs them up later.  He has this young man, Ian that comes over and sells him various recording equipment and instruments like rare vintage guitars.

Adam is self-loathing and suicidal which is why he gets Ian to acquire him a bullet made out of densely hard wood so he can shoot himself.  Adam is deeply disheartened at the direction the zombies are living their lives, bled of all inspiration.  He’s disappointed with people for ruining what they have for superficial reasons like greed, power and religion.

Adam goes to the hospital periodically to purchase a supply of blood from a resident doctor.  He dresses like a doctor, wearing a name tag that reads, Dr. Faust, as he slips in during the graveyard shift to get his blood to feed his addiction.  Like Eve and Marlowe, Adam takes his supply to the comforts of home and pours some blood in a high Port glass, opens his mouth and lets the red thick liquid spill onto his tongue and cascade down his throat, causing warmth, relaxation, a pleasant rush, and euphoria.  Very clean and quite civil, unlike most other films about vampires, these ones are refined creatures.

Eve decides to leave Tangier and come to Detroit and console her husband’s declining outlook on life.  She packs two small suitcases mostly with books as she struggles with which ones to bring.  As she sorts through her vast selection of literature, she speed reads through a number of books with an arrangement of different languages.  She reads them with such ease as she neatly packs her top choices as if they were all romantic lovers.

Here we begin to see that Eve has a unique sensory ability, where she can touch something and that something speaks to her heavily about when it was published, it communicates the story of the actual book through tactility.  Most interested, curious people have this ability but for Eve it has been delicately nurtured for many centuries.  This makes her hyper-sensitive in a way that most of the living would never and could never experience during their lifetime.  

Eve arrives in Detroit after flying only at night and meets up with her husband.  After an interesting threshold ritual into Adam’s house, she looks around his place.  Eve and Adam then drive around the deserted streets of this long forgotten neighborhood.  They pass by old car factories and then arrive at an old famous Michigan theater that has since been decadently transformed into a parking lot; all now part of an industrialized necropolis of decadence.

This is where the film’s brilliance explores, subtly, the theme which is; these two have a unique prospective of the decline of civilization.  They have lived through the best of times and the worst of times, but here and now during our time, they see what we have done, they see how mankind has fallen in on itself.  They see the failure of the program that promised that if we give our all and work hard we will gain wealth and prosperity.  

“One of the first signs of the beginnings of understanding is the

 wish to die. This life appears unbearable, another unattainable. 

One is no longer ashamed of wanting to die;

one asks to be moved from the old cell,

which one hates, to the new one, which one will

only in time come to hate.”

– Franz Kafka

Eve and Adam go back to his place and listen to old vinyl records and talk about what’s bothering Adam, enough for him to want to kill himself with a wooden bullet.  Here we see that Eve is clearly the more spiritual one of the two, she’s of-the-earth and as a result she sees beauty where Adam can only see darkness.  He looks at the world on a more scientific level and what he sees is how, the religious right have sabotaged scientific growth, whether it was Pythagoras, Galileo, Copernicus, Newton and Tesla or how most of the Zombies still don’t fully except Darwinism.

"I don't care that they stole my idea, I care that they don't have any of their own." 

- Nikola Tesla 

Truncating the progress of science has unfortunately been one of mankind’s deepest downfalls.  This is what’s been bothering Adam for a number of centuries, we can be so much better and more advanced than we are presently, but yet we failed.  Fear has paralyzed mankind, causing us to avoid change to the detriment of its progress.  Nikola Tesla was a prodigal genius, a man that was one of the most gifted men to ever have walked the Earth.  On January 6, 1943, Otto Skorzeny, a Nazi assassin and bodyguard to Adolf Hitler, with the assistance of his fellow Nazi Reinhard Gehlen, suffocated Tesla to death.  Skorzeny and Gehlen, after killing him, stole all his blueprints and papers from his office.  Otto Skorzeny claims to have helped Hitler escape to Austria in a plane flown by a female pilot, Hanna Reitch, and the Americans kept it a secret because they were worried that the truth might anger the Russians.  Skorzeny then moved to America under CIA protection as part of Project Paperclip, where many Nazi scientists ended up working for NASA, the CIA and other US secret services. 

Tesla remains a forgotten figure in the world of popular science, only Leonardo da Vinci could hold a candle to the brilliance of Nikola Tesla, a man murdered for defecting to the United States and inventing a technology, alternating current, which could supply the world with free endless energy.  The Bankers at the time couldn’t have an inventor ‘give away’ electric power to the world, thus cutting in on their profits.

This is what I think is at the heart of Adam’s depression, how innovation can be destroyed by greedy old bastards, how lies compound more lies to the point of an ever distant truth, that lies at the bottom of an abyss at the military and corporate industrial complex.

Eve looks at a wall of framed photographs of Adam’s artistic heroes, in spite of reminding Eve that he doesn’t have any.  Tesla is up there along with Sir Isaac Newton, Franz Kafka, Oscar Wilde, Edgar Allen Poe, Charlie Baudelaire, and Mark Twain to name a few and of course a portrait of Christopher Marlowe.  All misunderstood men, all feared men, for their ideas could have negative effects on the status quo that was being projected by the oligarchy during all their respective times.  Adam sees himself among these men, he sees himself as an intelligent man surrounded by zombies.

“Thought is an idea in transit, which when once released,

never can be lured back, nor the spoken word recalled. 

Nor ever can the overt act be erased All that thou Thinkest, sayest, or

doest bears perpetual record of itself, enduring for Eternity.”

 - Pythagoras

Eve only wants Adam to look on the brighter side of existence, and she’s right to encourage this, if only for the purpose of avoiding the alternative - suicide.  Life can be dismal and it’s up to us to create our own silver lining to carry us through the day.  That’s where strength comes from; it comes as an after effect of courage.  Eve uses dancing to lighten the load of dismay, she remembers their many previous weddings, she stays attached to the emotional connection she has with her literature and her music.  Essentially, she’s doing a better job at living forever as oppose to Adam’s existential deterioration.

Eve is the light bringer, the yang to Adam's ying; she is filled with fascinating pieces of information about the world and the Universe like a diamond in space the size of a planet.  Both of them are filled with so much knowledge that they acquired through copious amounts of reading over the centuries and from actually living through them.  Adam partied with Lord Byron and Mary Wollstonecraft, which begs the question of whether or not it was Adam that inspired their little contest of who can write the scariest story.

To Adam’s dismay, Eve’s sister, Ava, a flamboyant immature vampire, arrives uninvited at his place, blasting his music and ultimately destroying his and Eve’s idyllic desolation.  Adam is defiantly the type that doesn’t like anyone touching his records except him.  Ava convinces them to go to a night club where a band is playing hard rock on stage.  Ava, Eve and Adam all sit around a table wearing dark sunglasses with Ian next to Ava.  Adam is unsettled; clearly he and Eve spent centuries perfecting their survival skills.  Adam knows that an open space with other people is a recipe for disaster, or possibly just one for temptation.  They drink their blood in a glass and not from the neck of a living person, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they never did that.  I think one of the reasons for their self-imposed solitude is so they don’t have to be around their food while it’s still beating in the hearts of living people.

Ava still has a teenage attitude after all the centuries she has lived.  She’s someone who did not ‘seize the day’ and built a better, knowledgeable, more intellectual tomorrow for herself.  She still appears to be riding ‘it’s cool to be a vampire’ train and is thus, in Adam’s eyes, dangerous.  Ava is the type of person that is an attention seeker; I’m sure it’s a miracle, not lost on Adam, that she is still alive.

Ava, later at Adam's house, kills Ian and Adam kicks her out so he and Eve can deal with her mess.  They drive among the industrial wasteland, alongside silent hollow buildings fading in and out of darkness and finally find a place to dispose of Ian's body.  They leave Detroit as they now believe that they have worn out their welcome and head back to Tangier.  There they discover the supply of blood they were hoping for has been contaminated; this comes as bad news as they are both are suffering from blood-withdrawal. 

Throughout the film there have been warnings of bad blood, contaminated by the decadence of civilization itself, by drugs from in front and behind the counter as well as within the veins of the cities themselves, the alleyways and crack houses, all poisoning their very life force with chemicals.

There is a wonderful scene toward the end where Adam walks over to a bar in Tangier and watches a beautiful woman sing a song.  This is where the magic of magnificent, heartfelt music can be seen, it ignites the spirit of humanity, no matter where in the world it is performed.  It is the true universal language of emotion where mathematics is the universal language of science.  Instruments are the musical vessels that are used to breathe life from sounds.  For those that can make wonderful music purr from an instrument, soon develop the desire for the best tool to help them express what’s actually playing in their head.

Only Lovers Left Alive is about the realities of existence and often its futility.  It’s about everlasting love that does exist but is as rare as a planet made of diamond.  It’s about friendship and companionship, learning how to live with another person, co-habitat with them.  But like in the last moments of the film, Only Lovers Left Alive is about what we must do when our very livelihood is threatened – survive.

“I have absolutely no pleasure in the stimulants in which I sometimes so madly indulge.  It has not been in the pursuit of pleasure that I have periled life and reputation and reason.  It has been the desperate attempt to escape from torturing memories, from a sense of insupportable loneliness and a dread of some strange impending doom.”

 – Edgar Allan Poe