Just A Zombie (Thoughts on Only Lovers Left Alive)

 

“Watch Only Lovers Left Alive | Prime Video.” Amazon, https://images.app.goo.gl/vFAAFGsvFMzgJVvD9. Accessed 1 Feb. 2021.

This post contains spoilers for both the film Only Lovers Left Alive (2013) and The Dead Don’t Die (2019). Since this piece discusses both of these films and Paterson (2016) and draws comparisons between them, I recommend reading this post and this post first before reading this new one, though I do summarize some of what I’ve said before below as it becomes relevant. 

            In terms of a straightforward review, I thought Only Lovers Left Alive was very good. Insofar as “objectivity” is even a thing, it is probably safe to consider this film one of director-writer Jim Jarmusch’s good ones. While there are a lot of different elements that contribute to a good film, I will highlight the casting here. The casting is excellent—Tilda Swinton would be my first (and maybe only) pick to play an ageless and beautiful vampire of any gender, and she is absolutely great in the role of Eve. Apparently, Michael Fassbender was going to play the role of her husband, Adam, originally but was replaced by Tom Hiddleston. I could see either of them playing the part, but after comparing pictures of the two for a little, I do think Hiddleston slightly edges out Fassbender for me since he just has a face that I feel is suited to the part of an aging rocker character. With his hair grown out, he looks androgynous in a way that just fits. Mia Wasikowska plays Eve’s sister, Ava, and this might be my favorite performance of hers. She is essentially the film’s antagonist, but she’s not villainous. As is befitting Jarmusch’s low-key and empathetic approach to plot and character, she is actually quite likeable. As I said, she’s not villainous and is equal parts genuinely destructive and bratty and charming. Wasikowska straddles this line exceptionally well to the point that as much as I dislike Ava for her role in driving the plot, I find her really lovable as a character. Her choices about how to live as a vampire are just much different from that of Eve and Adam.

            The visuals, sound, and writing of Only Lovers Left Alive are also great, with some standout stylistic choices punctuating what is otherwise a film that doesn’t necessarily call attention to its component parts. Visually and aurally, there is an interesting if also somewhat nauseating opening sequence where a starry sky becomes a spinning record, and that motion is preserved as we watch Adam and Eve lounge in their respective rooms from above while the song “Funnel of Love” plays and we listen to lyrics that include spinning. Later in the film, the action essentially pauses so that we can watch a performance of real-life musician Yasmine Hamdan’s “Hal” by Yasmine Hamdan, after which Adam and Eve praise her performance. I’ve recently been re-watching some Wes Anderson films (Moonrise Kingdom and The Life Aquatic, specifically), and it’s interesting to compare the more subdued presentation of Jarmusch with the more self-consciously stylish work of Anderson. Only Lovers Left Alive has these brief moments of artistic indulgence, but it otherwise does not come across as excessively artsy in its presentation.

            I mentioned objectivity earlier, as I do not think it is possible to offer a sweeping judgment of film in general but especially not of films like Only Lovers Left Alive. This is absolutely a movie that won’t necessarily appeal to everyone but is good if this is your sort of thing—“this” being a very slow (“slow” in heavy air quotes), character-focused movie with a lot of mood and not a lot of plot. With Jarmusch’s films—or at least the ones I’ve seen so far—it always seems to be a roll of the dice what plot threads will be escalated and which ones will exist only as tantalizing what-ifs. To some extent, this seems like a violation of the rules of effective storytelling: Details should only receive attention that have significance, and failing to pay off a detail is a failure of storytelling from this perspective. And yet, one somewhat artsy and defensible counter-argument would be that these untied plot threads and suggestions of conflict are not failures because a character-focused story benefits from seeing the characters in a variety of settings, even if the events in question don’t advance the plot. These beats just aren’t capital-P plot; they’re about character. A prime example in Only Lovers Left Alive is Adam’s blood hookup at the hospital (Jeffrey Wright), whose suspicions regarding Adam seem primed to result in some sort of fallout later in the movie, only for him to disappear from the plot. However, viewing films only as vehicles for plot is arguably the cause of so much boring blockbuster filmmaking, where character and emotion are less important than whatever active-voice action set piece or big narrative twist the film is driving toward.

            A less defensible artsy take on movies like Only Lovers Left Alive would be that picking and choosing amongst the threads to determine what develops and what doesn’t (with less rather than more making the cut) is closer to realism. On a daily basis, after all, we have encounters and observe information that mean nothing. Not everything pays off in our lives, so fiction that refuses to play by the rules of fiction in this way is actually playing a bit more closely by the rules of the universe—that life is chaotic and without some sort of dramatic endpoint that pays off everything that came before it.       

            Aside from my particular interests in storytelling and character, though, Only Lovers Left Alive also feels like a good film because it has what Jarmusch’s 2019 zombie flick, The Dead Don’t Die, doesn’t have—a fresh take on its monster of choice. Jarmusch’s version of vampires feels unique, in part because it is also refreshingly vague since he doesn’t feel the need to provide explanations for everything, though he does address some classic vampire lore like uninvited intrusion into buildings head-on. (It’s just bad luck, apparently.) However, some things are left to implication. For example, there is a huge emphasis on touch in this film. The vampires seem to have some sort of hyper-sensitivity or special sense in their hands. Eve and Ava both ask if they can take off their gloves in Adam’s house before they do, for instance, and the vampires always wear gloves when they’re out of the house. Eve is able to date a guitar of Adam’s through touch alone at one point, but it’s never outright confirmed whether there’s anything supernatural here.

            Of course, touch is more than a special power in a film about vampires; it’s a key element of regular old human intimacy, and I choose to focus on the touch thing here not necessarily because it is mysterious but because its presence in the movie is about more than lore—It ties in with the intimate and sensual mood of the film. Physical contact, especially between Adam and Eve, is huge in this movie. If you’re touch-starved, Only Lovers Left Alive will leave you ravenous, as the main pair in particular lean into or drape themselves across one another a lot (see the image at the top of this post). There’s no sex in Only Lovers Left Alive, but it manages to be more intimate than a lot of films with sex in them. In bed, Adam and Eve don’t sleep on clearly designated “sides.” Only Lovers Left Alive makes most media portrayals of couples in bed seem positively chaste without ever showing anything beyond mostly implied nudity (with only a single shot of Eve’s bare chest in a nonsexual context). The characters sprawl across the bed and across one another: Adam reclines with his head on Eve’s side so that their bodies form a sort of cross; Eve sleeps normally in the bed, with her legs draped across Adam lying across the foot while he holds Eve’s ankle in his hand. When Christopher “Kit” Marlowe (John Hurt) dies, Eve, Adam, and Marlowe’s student Bilal (Slimane Dazi) all huddle together with the body, and Eve presses the palm of her hand to Bilal’s head in a gesture that might be mystical or might just be a continuation of the film’s heavy focus on bodily contact. It’s intimate in a way that I don’t think I’ve encountered before in any medium.         

            Ultimately, though, one of the most interesting aspects of Only Lovers Left Alive is the way that it interacts with The Dead Don’t Die. First, you could actually look at The Dead Don’t Die as a sequel to this film—Even the titling of the two suggests a certain continuity, and both films are about the end of the world, though it’s further off in Only Lovers Left Alive. They both have beats where a character (Eve and Hermit Bob) comment on mushrooms being somewhere they shouldn’t, which is a particularly specific echo between the two. Otherwise, there is also a general sense of impending disaster in both films. Only Lovers Left Alive prominently features the decay around Detroit, and Eve insists that life will return once the south starts to burn. There is a hint of ecological disaster in there. Similarly, The Dead Don’t Die seems to suggest that the fallout from ecological meddling—polar fracking—is the cause of the zombie scourge.

            Another, perhaps more important, particular connection that jumped out very quickly when I watched Only Lovers Left Alive is the way that the vampire characters use the word “zombie” to refer to humans. When I was watching the movie for the first time and heard them use this word, I became very interested because I immediately associated the word with the story and themes of Jarmusch’s zombie film. Adam has nothing but scorn for the so-called zombies, who he feels have ignored if not outright persecuted scientists and ruined their world and themselves. Marlowe calls Shakespeare an “illiterate zombie philistine” at one point as well, though he seems fond of his student, Bilal, who is a writer. Similarly, Adam feels a certain fondness for the human, Ian (Anton Yelchin), who runs errands for him in exchange for big rolls of cash, but Ian is into music and guitars much like Adam is. Adam and Eve themselves have living spaces completely dominated by their individual artistic interests—Eve’s place is filled to bursting with books, while Adam’s house has music instruments and other bits and pieces of technology everywhere (including the bathtub). Marlowe questions at one point why the two don’t live together even though they need each other, and while the question is never outright answered, I think it’s hinted at by the way that Eve ends up storing her books in Adam’s refrigerator while she’s staying with him. Each of the two has an all-consuming artistic passion, to the point that there’s little long-term space in their life for the other and their interests. There’s a whole sequence where Eve positively labors over which books to take with her to America, and, similarly, Adam’s loss of his instruments and equipment when he has to move in with Eve across the world is a palpable one.

            The implication of all these accumulated details, in the end, is that the artistic and cultured, who also happen to be vampires, are good, while the everyday person (a zombie) is bad. There are some extremely troubling implications here that connect really well to the issues with the messaging I was reading in The Dead Don’t Die, and, in some ways, this film acts as a confirmation of that reading insofar as it suggests a pattern of thought in Jarmusch’s work in the way that he and/or his characters see the majority of human beings on the planet. In short, unless you’re an artist or are cultured, you’re nothing but a zombie, which is similar to the conclusion reached by Hermit Bob, a sort of wise man within the story of The Dead Don’t Die, who essentially says outright that the literal zombies of that film symbolize mankind’s rampant consumerism, which is not a new take on zombies, of course, making it doubly offensive, in a sense, when it’s held up as some sort of great truth in the movie.

            What is troubling about this reading is that The Dead Don’t Die seems to lay the blame for the destruction of the planet at the feet of the average person because they were too busy playing with “Nintendo Game Boys.” My counter-argument in my post about that movie was that the average person has little to no actual control over whether the government or corporations frack and that change can only come from large-scale shifts at the national (and international) level—that blaming people for indulging in creature comforts in the face of existential crises like climate change makes you sound like a jerk. It echoes to an extent the real world criticism that some people will direct at the poor for daring to own a smartphone or buy a latte or eat a nice meal now and then, ignoring the systemic nature of issues like poverty and ecological destruction in favor of blaming the individual exclusively. It’s a frustrating conclusion for The Dead Don’t Die (and now, I suppose, Only Lovers Left Alive) to reach since Jarmusch’s work seems so character-focused and so human. His portrayal of the poet Paterson in his film Paterson (2016) as a man who balances the needs of the world with his desire for creative self-expression seems so understanding of how most creatives have to live (to pursue creativity in their free moments but perhaps to make do with small-scale projects in the face of the necessity of work), but now I have to wonder if, perhaps, the sensitive portrayal is actually only a result of Paterson being a poet and therefore more of a vampire than a zombie. If he’d just been a bus driver and not a poet, I guess he wouldn’t have been seen so kindly…

            (Also, extremely troubling in Only Lovers Left Alive is Adam’s suggestion that humans have “contaminated” their blood. This contamination is never named, but it’s hard not to think of HIV/AIDS, and while there is probably something to be said about safer sex practices (maybe) using this thought, the blanket condemnation of, apparently, people with HIV/AIDS for their condition is pretty disgusting. I wanted to squeeze this note in here somewhere since it’s probably actually more upsetting than the judgment of noncreative people, though that other angle is my main focus. Suffice it to say that the dehumanization and vilification of those with HIV/AIDS, especially, yes, gay men, has had and continues to have very real material consequences. That there’s this condemnatory implication in Only Lovers Left Alive strikes me as really annoying/disgusting.)

            The potential to refute the seeming message of the vampire-zombie dichotomy in Only Lovers Left Alive is right there in the metaphor itself, though. Compared to vampires in our cultural myths, of course zombies are seen as lesser. Vampires are often refined or at least still somewhat human-seeming, with agency of their own, while zombies are often falling apart physically and are mentally incapable of independent thought or coherent speech most of the time. However, the key to refuting the mess of a message lies with another important element of the vampire cultural myth which goes back to its canonical origins in literature—that vampires are associated with the aristocracy. In Only Lovers Left Alive, Adam, Eve, and Marlowe are all wealthy—or at least “comfortable”—and seem to want for nothing. Adam, in particular, produces wads of cash seemingly from thin air, and shots that include the floor of his living space show off dollar bills lying here and there, essentially forgotten they’re of such little importance. Following on from that line of thought, then, the message of the film can be seen as one critical of the vampire supremacy Adam in particular suggests since the vampires, in their living and artistic obsessions, have inherent, unfair advantages over the supposed zombies.

            Of course, vampires can be cultured and know all the various minutiae associated with their interests! They have unlimited time and/or money to pursue those interests, while humans have significantly less. Dropping the supernatural metaphor entirely, most people don’t have the time or money to be consummate artists or “cultured” for reasons completely outside their control. I don’t want to deny all human agency here; it’s true that you could, say, choose to read a book a couple chapters at a time instead of, say, watching VTubers stream on Twitch for hours (not telling on myself at all here). You could choose a culturally-enriching film over the latest CG punch fest to be spewed out by Disney/Marvel on a Friday night. There are lots of small ways that we could all fit little doses of art and culture into our short zombie lives, much like Paterson. Similarly, we could do more for politics and the climate. Voting is a start, but calling our representatives to add our voices to the pile when crucial issues are being legislated in Washington is important. Perhaps even more important is contributing to our own communities (possibly through mutual aid).

            We have agency, but I also take issue with what I see as the extremely broad uncharitable characterization of the majority of people on the planet in Only Lovers Left Alive and The Dead Don’t Die. I think it’s fair to say right now, for example, that the not at all insignificant number of people in America that have been left without government relief in the midst of a pandemic—that has only lasted as long as it has because those with actual power refused to do anything to curtail it—and are suffering shouldn’t be blamed for looking to creature comforts where they can to make their lives more tolerable. There’s something cynical and mean in the films’ dismissal of people that feels kind of at odds with the general vibe that I get from Jarmusch’s work—which is to say, again, that he seems to favor people over plot in his movies in way that you would think suggests empathy.

            In my earlier phrasing, I said “the way that he and/or his characters see the majority of human beings on the planet,” and the “and/or” is critical here because I’m not foolish enough to conflate what characters in art say with what their creator believes, particularly when messaging in art is also not necessarily always thought out to Tumblr-discourse-levels of detail. To temporarily expand my scope somewhat, I genuinely feel that while J.K. Rowling seems outright transphobic that some of the troubling implications of her Harry Potter series especially (like the anti-Semitic caricature suggested by the goblins) is the result of artistic ignorance and oversight rather than malice. My read on the Harry Potter books is that Rowling was just writing whatever she thought was cool, especially early on before the over-arching plot really kicks in, and that some of those choices ended up suggesting things she might not have intended. This doesn’t excuse the implications of what she wrote (regardless of whether she was aware of what she was suggesting), but the point I’m driving at here is that those of us who create can easily screw up without even realizing it. This is why sensitivity readers are a thing, for example.

            To circle back to Jarmusch, then, I don’t necessarily think that he looks down on the average person on the street for not making art. His characters and themes in some of his work might suggest as much, though, when read in this particular way. The biggest issue is that these problematic views are not refuted within the texts themselves. As I wrote before about The Dead Don’t Die, Tom Waits’ Hermit Bob is characterized as something of a wise man in the story, so his assessment of the events, which concludes the film, feels particularly authorial. Meanwhile, in Only Lovers Left Alive, there is also no one who attempts to refute Adam’s views. Eve is gentler and tells him that his blaming of the zombies is ultimately misguided since his suffering is causing him to miss out on all the living that he can do, but she doesn’t tell him he’s wrong either. Without any counter-argument in the text, the statements stand unchallenged as truth.

            To end on a somewhat more positive note, I want to emphasize that this post isn’t an attempt to “cancel” Jim Jarmusch or anything like that. My interpretation of some of his films and their messages is subjective, and there may be other ways of looking at them that refute what I’m saying. (As I’ve been revising and editing this post, for example, I recalled how Adam’s claim about not having heroes anymore is later contradicted by his wall that is literally filled with portraits of people, some of them presumably the zombies he claims to hate, that he seems to revere. Of course, these are all people like Ian who are probably closer to vampires than zombies in their passions and art, but it still stands as a contradiction of what he claims, which introduces the possibility that Adam is not to be believed in general.) Despite my annoyance at the messaging of these two of Jarmusch’s movies, if anything, I actually look forward to watching even more of his stuff. I have Dead Man and Night on Earth behind me right now that I still need to watch, and I look forward to seeing what sort of potential twists they introduce to my understanding. I watched The Dead Don’t Die three times last year, and I’ve watched Only Lovers Left Alive something like twice in the last two-ish weeks (at the time this post was originally written). It’s safe to say that I love Jarmusch’s style—and especially his sense of humor—but I just have to acknowledge the fact that as much as I wish I was an eternal, beautiful, refined creature of the night, I’m just another rotting corpse, like Jarmusch himself, and not standing in solidarity with my fellow rotting corpses and empathizing with them isn’t going to make me suddenly grow fangs.