Only Lovers Left Alive

There are two readings In Jim Jarmush’s title. (i) Only lovers are still alive. To the centuries-old passionate vampire couple everyone else is a zombie. Or “an illiterate philistine zombie” like Shakespeare, according to vampire Christopher Marlowe (John Hurt), the true author of the canon and the first immortal we see die. Not to be able to love is a form of death. (ii) Our vampire couple are the only lovers left alive. The creeping impurity of blood gives even their immortality a shelf life. Adam (Tom Hiddleston) and Eve (Tilda Swinton) evoke the first humans but embody the last. Their last drink, that closes the film, is only a temporary respite, before the contamination dooms them as it did Marlowe.

The pallid palette and the ruined ghastly Detroit and crumbling Tangiers cityscapes suggest this film is an elegy to a dying — if not already dead — humanity. To cite two of Eve's books, our vampire couple are the Quixoitic dreamers struggling against civilization’s Endgame. (The third, David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, links infinity and suicide.) As Adam observes, we’re so obsessed with our dwindling and contaminating oil that we’re unaware of the greater imminent lack of our most pervasive element, water. There the human and the global merge. This is the first vampire film coloured green.

Eve’s equally palindromic sister Ava (Mia Wasikowska) personifies another kind of contamination, an unthinking, destructive selfishness that places everything around her as well as herself at mortal risk. She casually destroys the Gibson guitar that Adam prizes with religious as well as antiquarian and artistic devotion. He values so much, she nothing. Adam and Eve appear to have lived so long they have learned everything, to wit, their Latinate flora and fauna. Lacking their dedication to their world, Ava lives only to indulge her moment. She can't love her Ian, only mortally drink him. A palindrome can be either complete self-absorption (Ava) or a continuous loop (Eve).

     Adam’s purity extends to refusing to publish his music. But somehow it slips out against his wishes, against his protectiveness. That prefigures the futility of the lovers’ attempts to survive, the last purity in a growingly contaminated world. Adam too “is too good to be famous.” But as the corruption in science and humanity spreads Adam finds his summary metaphor in a technology even older than his antique stethoscope: “I just feel like all the sand is at the bottom of the hour glass or something.” The lovers’ longevity as well as their love makes their passing all the more tragic — and symptomatic.