Review of Only Lovers Left Alive (2013)
Seen in 2019.
Leaned-back vampire horror. I like the Detroit setting, where the old Packard plant represents the lost artistic glory of humanity! I like the allusions to climate change as an encroaching threat that seems obvious to the vampires, driving “Adam” to environmental despair. I always like Jeffrey Wright and there are occasional successes in 1990s Gothic vampire motifs according to Jarmusch. It’s very Vampire: The Masquerade.
Whereas Vampire postulates that vampires lose the spark of real artistic genius, Jarmusch’s vampires do not, which is fine. However, inexplicably, they attribute authorship of their work to living people. This makes no sense and has no natural relationship with the stupid Marlowe–Shakespeare conspiracy theory which intrudes upon the practice. Youtube is referenced repeatedly, so these people should release their work anonymously on the Internet, if they want to publish and do not want to risk exposure.
In addition to his artistic genius, Adam is also a technical genius who builds a generator that gets electricity out of the atmosphere, through a couple of arm-length indoor antennas that have nothing to do with lightning. This is a fantasy even if you ignore the internal contradiction that he leaves this generator behind in the escape, without fear of discovery. Similarly, it’s silly to refer to the white dwarf BPM 37093 as a diamond gong.
These motifs imply that the repeated references to Einstein, entanglement and “spooky action at a distance” should be interpreted as quantom woo, despite Adam saying, quite correctly, that entanglement is proven science, and despite his mistaken belief that Newton was somehow forced out of science into alchemy. Consider how Adam’s studio wall is covered in egg cartons. A brilliant physicist-engineer-musician like him would know that egg cartons for acoustics are a myth: A new one from his perspective. He would use better materials, as when he somehow finds a giant pool of acid, unprotected and ready to dissolve poor Ian in seconds.
Pair this internal contradiction with martial-arts moves at miraculous speed, Eve’s magical ability to read the age of objects, and the various traditional vampire limitations (sunlight, wood through the heart, drinking a certain number of times to cause turning etc.) and you get an awkward mix of ancient and modern superstitions and fantasy tropes.
To his credit, Jarmusch got the tone right, but in his strong emphasis on tone he missed simple script-level problems with continuity and credibility. These go beyond the axioms, into Adam and Eve’s unmotivated fear of discovery by the police. There’s also the problem of Tangier, which is where they finally escape. It’s got the “Thousand and One Nights” café, every guy standing around in the streets says he’s got a special deal just for you, and sexual immorality is so prevalent that the hospital’s blood banks are useless. Alas, this is orientalism, another symptom of Jarmusch’s laziness.