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