If you’re a certain type of person, Only Lovers Left Alive is gonna seem like the coolest thing in the world. I’m talking about the kind of person who’d love an apartment full of the great works of literature and the world’s best guitars, and a life where you could just jam and read and talk to interesting people and not have to worry about jobs or housekeeping or money.
I mean, I’m that kind of person. To me, Jim Jarmusch’s luxurious vampire mess-around is the coolest thing ever. If that’s the program, I’m with it. Or something like that.
Look, Tom Hiddleston plays Adam, a moody vampire musician who owns truckloads of records and heaps of rare instruments and lives in a rad ramshackle house in Detroit and makes sweet noise rock and does a lot of tech-recycling and has a dude who can get him anything he wants, no questions asked. All of this is cool as hell.
And Tilda Swinton plays Eve, his charismatic, big-hearted lover across the generations, and she owns an apartment in Tangier with walls lined with first editions and leatherbound copies of classic novels and plays and poetry and she wears the best clothes and she banters with Christopher Marlowe every night. Christopher Marlowe. She’s the coolest.
And together they have truckloads of money and it doesn’t seem to matter where it comes from and they spend it on all this rad stuff and they’ve got the kind of dry wit that nobody has and their relationship is so electric and understanding. You want to be these guys. You want their lives. They’re cool.
But why are they cool? The world around them has so many problems and so many more to come, and Adam and Eve are acutely aware of that. Every so often, Adam vents to Eve about the “zombies” (read: us), who value nothing and covet everything and are destroying the world and themselves. Yet Only Lovers keeps that as background to the melancholy and euphoria of Adam and Eve’s highly romantic life. Why?
The film's idea of cool is intrinsically linked to the cultural artefacts the camera lingers on, the writing and music and cinema and philosophy and architecture and design. Adam and Eve, having lived for millenia and witnessed the development of human culture, attach incredible value to beauty, be it Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, Albert Einstein’s theory of “spooky action at a distance”, or the Packard (“the most beautiful automobile in the world”).
The only other thing Adam and Eve value is the blood that they drink to survive, and the film draws an equivalence here. When Adam and Eve drink, a SnorriCam close-up follows their heads as they list back, smiling, swimming in the release. It’s the same ecstatic, blissed-out look they have when they play rare guitars or read volumes of prose. It’s the same euphoria they’re lost in when the opening scene introduces us to them – synchronised bird’s-eye shots revolving around them like a record around a spindle, set to a hypnotic cover of Wanda Jackson’s ‘Funnel of Love’. Blood and culture: equally essential to life.
The way Only Lovers values beauty and creation – and creators – also goes to the film’s motifs of fake identities, creating anonymously, hiding from the world. Hiddleston is magnetic as the artist caught up in his lack of freedom to release as he wishes and his envy of those with that freedom (during one “zombie” rant he tells Eve he “has no heroes”, betraying his wall of portraits of famous artists and thinkers). Hurt as Christopher Marlow, on the other hand, is an artist who has made peace with his own loss of legacy, talking about giving Hamlet to the “illiterate” Shakespeare with a kind of pleasant resignation.
On the other end of the spectrum, Swinton is a marvel, imbuing Eve with an easygoing charm and enthusiasm for the world and all its poetry, prioritising experience over “self-obsession”, “a waste of living” by her standards. And then there’s Eve’s sister Ava, who Mia Wasikowska plays aggressively childish, a party girl who whines and grabs her way through her (after)life. But Only Lovers has less to say about her childishness and more to say about her casually destructive tendencies; she binges on blood like it’s tequila and leaves behind her a trail of broken instruments, shattered records, and a dead dude who could have gotten you anything you wanted.
And that’s why Only Lovers is cool. The film isn’t just about the love of two people; it’s about their love for creation and experience, and the most effective way to get us to buy into that love is to show us, remind us how cool those creations and experiences are. The world of Only Lovers is filled with “zombies” who fight and destroy for selfish gains. That’s uncool. A world of artists, thinkers, beauty, love – that, Jarmusch seems to say, is the cool world. That’s the programme. We’re just not with it yet.
Cover image Mad Man Entertainment.
This content is brought to you with funding assistance from New Zealand On Air.