Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive ruminates on the haunting of genius past, while presenting the horror of an unexamined life. Vampires are rendered not as monsters, but keepers of prophetic wisdom. Revisiting the vampire film in context with Jarmusch’s most recent zombie horror flick, The Dead Don’t Die, a knotted thread of Jarmuschian undead pessimism emerges. In advance of the Walker Cinema’s Halloween night screening of Only Lovers Left Alive, we unearth truths scarier than any ghoul.
What is the scariest fate of all? Wasted potential, at least in the eyes of one very cool vampire couple dreamt up by none other than art film darling Jim Jarmusch. In his film Only Lovers Left Alive (2013) we follow the long-distance relationship of Adam and Eve as they reunite in response to Adam’s growing malaise over the state of humanity. The two are polar opposites: Eve, an energetic and curious optimist, relishes in the riches of cultural objects and ideas, whereas Adam plays the part of reclusive tortured artist who languishes in the “zombie” fear of imagination. For Adam, zombie refers to the living who blindly follow capitalist routines and manipulation without question of their exploitation or its larger implications. They lack dream and vision; instead, they drive toward insatiable immediate gratification regardless of their awareness of the consequences these desires implicate on themselves, society, and/or ecology.
Aside from feeding off blood, although largely sourced from a hospital blood bank rather than the warm necks of the living, the couple is relatively normalized for vampires. Many of the common motifs are surpassed; there are no mirrors, bats, nor nightmarish hauntings of the living. We look into their world without suspense as they struggle, in their own way, through life. Having seen centuries, Adam and Eve offer an expanded experience of human time and human knowledge. This elongation of life reflects through an unconventional soundtrack. Rather than the sharply struck pierce of organ music, Jarmusch, with his band SQÜRL, and Dutch lutenist Jozef Van Wissem created a droning soundscape. The music’s structure encapsulates both a vampiric scale of time (finding a resonant energy between modern electric and ancient acoustic instrumentation) and the film’s overall mood and pace. This elongated, droning time points toward a different kind of haunting: one in which the thoughts, memories, writings, inventions, theories, and art—some of which promised a different and perhaps better future—roam the Earth as the material undead spirits of those past.
In 2013, when Only Lovers Left Alive was released, it was met with criticism for its “aesthetic aristocracy” and “creation of a grand artistic mythology.” Certainly, it is easy to critique Adam and Eve’s love of culture and view of humanity with an eye toward classism. That they seemingly have endless monetary streams that allow a distanced flaneur-esque lifestyle with all the comforts of first-class seating indicates their opinions of humanity as pretentious. They are only too quick to point out all the ills of the world and zombie lifestyle without attempting to enact change. It’s possible Jarmusch is pointing at western tendencies toward wasted breath, bureaucracy, buying the way to a greener future, and the smoke and mirrors of scarcity economics, rather than actually solving anything. There are also hints at the need to stop material production, that the continued production and consumption of new objects is killing us. This plays out through Adam and Eve’s archival memory and collections of objects. They tend to reuse and care for existing material culture as opposed to buying and creating anew. And what more perfect archivist of human culture than a vampiric memory?
Circles, both in the opening scene’s camera movement and the mention of Detroit’s eventual comeback, allude to a superhuman knowledge that can only be remotely possible with the ability to remain animate for centuries. Having lived through the rise and fall of many civilizations and states of power, their centrifugal perspective allows them to look beyond the time-space structures and knowledge of mortal humans. Seen from the fringes, Adam and Eve offer an almost geologic- or celestial-scaled account of our history, and in particular the Anthropocene. This experience of time repositions humankind, and it is from here that we are able to see the fear of imagination: rather than almighty, it is a destructive force within a larger ecology of life on Earth unable to aid even itself.
Jarmusch’s newest film, The Dead Don’t Die (2019), takes destructive insatiable “zombie” desire to its inevitable end. Early on, and throughout the film, we hear, “This isn’t going to end well,” and it doesn’t. Humanity has pushed past the point of no return, and still it cannot see outside of immediate desire. At one point the protagonists, still alive, acknowledge as they are in the car awaiting a zombie mob that they are in a movie reciting the lines of a script as though to metaphorically tie to our real-world inability to steer ourselves toward a different future, despite seeing the iceberg ahead. We should all be reciting the line: “This isn’t going to end well.” Of course, this begs the question of who we are as the audience. Will we play the zombie, the not-yet-but-soon-to-be-zombie, or align with Tom Waits’s Hermit Bob, a recluse hiding in the woods outside of capitalism’s death-grip? This seems to be the question reflected to us, even if inflected with all the pessimism of the horror genre. For what is horror if not the musing of our collected fears?
Imagine the frustration Adam and Eve must face after centuries of disappointment. The very objects, memories, and ideas of genius past laid to waste will forever haunt them as they watch human civilization burn. As they show us the acute site of our demise (fear of imagination and disregard for the creations of those who dare to imagine), they also reflect back the shame we feel in our inability to change. We are caught in a vicious circle, desperately gasping for air we already attain.
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