Only Artists Left Alive: “Only Lovers Left Alive” [Jim Jarmusch, 2013, UK/Germany]

Only Lovers Left Alive is the kind of elegiac "dying world" film that Jim Jarmusch has made throughout most of his career, the kind of film in which an alienated iconoclast upholds, though doesn't quite fight for, the disappearing values of a civilization that is falling into ruin and barbarity. But unlike Dead Man (1995), Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999), or The Limits of Control (2009), the protagonist of Only Lovers is an artist. Not only that, he is a vampire. And beyond even that, he is symbolic of humankind's beginning rather than his end: his name is Adam. (Jarmusch has stated that he named the film's two central characters after those in Mark Twain's The Diaries of Adam and Eve rather than those from the Bible, but the symbolism of the latter nonetheless resonates throughout the narrative.) In the figure of Adam (Tom Hiddleston) Jarmusch melds the myths of the Visionary Creator, the Damned Monster, and the Original Man, and in so doing he offers a haunting self-portrait of the artist in exile within his own culture, the artist who is forced to question the communicative properties of art for an unreceptive audience and yet one who cannot fail to appreciate, and place his waning hope in, art's transformative power.

Jarmusch has hinted at the artistic self-portrait before: none of the protagonists of Dead Man, Ghost Dog, and The Limits of Control are artists, but they all evoke the artistic personality in either name (Dead Man's William Blake) or preoccupation (Ghost Dog's and The Limits of Control's Zen-like esthetes). These characters are also killers, however, and so it's interesting to note that the artist-protagonist of Only Lovers, though a vampire, does not kill anybody. Whereas Adam's predecessors embody characteristics and interests that define the artist, they also directly engage with the world -- even if in a murderous vein -- rather than represent it through creative endeavor. Adam does the opposite: a virtual recluse living in a cluttered Victorian house in Detroit (this city's post-industrial decline is not only a major visual motif but is also explicitly discussed by the characters), he monastically devotes himself to creation and engages with the human world only through Ian (Anton Yelchin), a contact in the record industry who procures for him vintage instruments and who leaks his music to radio DJs and other outlets. Like Eve (Tilda Swinton), his longtime girlfriend who lives in Tangier and eventually visits him in Detroit, Adam doesn't even directly feast on human blood to sustain his life -- because humans have so polluted their bodies with sundry chemicals and diseases, Adam must obtain pure (or purified) blood through a plasma laboratory in a local hospital.

Purity is a significant theme in Only Lovers. Historically, the vampire myth has trafficked in the concept of purity, though usually of the sexual or racial kind -- in Dracula, for instance, Bram Stoker strongly implies that the titular villain must travel to Britain to feast on the blood of a "pure race" now that his Eastern European homeland has been defiled by mixed and less than noble "stock." Jarmusch isn't interested in racial or sexual purity but instead artistic purity, and so the biological toxicity of 21st Century human blood metaphorically represents the toxicity of humankind's decaying culture. (This may be coincidental, but in Hebrew "Adam" contains the word "dam," which means "blood." In Only Lovers Adam remains one of the few beings on the planet composed of pure blood, à la his biblical namesake prior to the Fall.) Just as Adam is forced to avoid direct contact with tainted humans (whom he and Eve derisively deem "zombies"), so does he live as a shut-in to minimize contact with a declining human civilization. “I’m sick of it," he tells Eve when explaining his suicidal ideation. "These zombies, what they’ve done to the world, their fear of their own imaginations." Since humans have corrupted their own imaginative and creative abilities, Adam chooses to work as an artist in anonymity -- he retains an interest in "getting the work out there" (as he says of the trick the vampire Christopher Marlowe [John Hurt] played on the world by crediting his work to Shakespeare), but only on condition that his creativity not be compromised through treacherous dealings and interactions with the culture industry, the vampiric institution man has erected to place art under capitalist control.

Remaining aloof from a civilization of philistines, Adam fashions a totemic artistic sanctuary within his Detroit home: he surrounds himself with his own instruments and other technological devices for the creating, recording, and playing of music, he keeps books in his refrigerator, and he cordons off a section of his house as a shrine to his (and presumably Jarmusch's) favorite artists (Franz Kafka, Iggy Pop, Michel Basquiat, etc.) Here the myth of the vampire as a doomed, solitary romantic fuses with the myth of the overly-sensitive artist who can exist only in an insulated environment that mirrors his own exalted sense of creativity. Such an environment helps retain the artist's "purity" even as it prevents him from communicating through his art -- Adam has been able to get "the work out there," but his societal role as an artist has become almost completely abstracted. Adam's minimization of a public persona through anonymity and seclusion is reflected in the nature of his music (mostly created by Jarmusch's real-life musical project, SQÜRL): lyric-less, repetitious, and droning. (The ouroboros-like sonic quality of this music is visually echoed in the film's opening scene, which cross-cuts between matching rotating overhead shots of Adam and Eve blissing out to his recordings.) It is art in its purist but also its least signifying form, hypnotic art that refers to little beyond itself and that refuses to reflect or comment on present conditions and realities. Here we return to Jarmusch's bittersweet inversion of the vampire myth: just as Adam disengages from his social responsibilities as an artist, so does he disengage from his symbolic purpose as a vampire. Since vampiric attacks are famously symbolic of uninhibited lust, a vampire's rejection of "the thrill of the hunt" functions as the ultimate expression of disdain for mankind -- Adam and Eve are the "only lovers left alive" and thus cannot condescend to "make love" to humans who are barely deserving of their artistic gifts (Eve isn't an artist but acts as a muse and connoisseur of art), let alone their erotic ones.

Jarmusch ends Only Lovers with a restoration of both the vampire's mythic role and the artist's societal role. Forced to leave Detroit when Eve's intrusive and gregarious younger sister Ava (Mia Wasikowska; does this character's name, as a combination of "Adam" and "Eve," suggest her possession of the combined traits of the other two?) feasts on Ian, Adam and Eve escape to Tangier and find themselves without their regular supply of pure (or purified) blood. While starving in the streets of the city, Eve asks Adam about Einstein's discovery of "spooky action at a distance." Adam explains: "When you separate an entwined particle and you move both parts away from the other, even at opposite ends of the universe, if you alter or affect one, the other will be identically altered or affected." They then spot a pair of young lovers in the midst of kissing and -- more out of a renewed sense of purpose than desperation -- decide to feast on but also turn them into vampires: the last shot of the film depicts Adam and Eve baring their fangs as they approach the couple. Adam and Eve recognize that to be in the world -- even as creatures of superior artistic talent and temperament -- is to exist in relation to others, or what Martin Buber described as an "I-Thou" partnership. Even if morally, intellectually, and creatively remote from an alienating civilization that is heading toward oblivion, Adam and Eve are nonetheless "identically altered or affected" by that civilization, and so in choosing existence (or the life of the undead) over nonexistence they accept that society will impinge upon their lives in ways from which no form of insulated seclusion can protect them. The best they can do is to avoid self-obsession and self-pity (two modes in which Eve accuses Adam of wallowing, and of which she believes Adam can relieve himself through the joys of life: "appreciating nature, nurturing kindness and friendship, and dancing") on one hand and to conscientiously participate with the world -- that is, conscientiously decide on the manner in which they "identically alter or affect" the world -- on the other. Thus Only Loves Left Alive ends not with murder but with transformation: Adam and Eve recognize that as artists who wish to break through the unsatisfying limits of representation -- including limits concerning how and with whom art can allow them to connect -- they must change the perception of others (their ability to transform others into artist-vampires) rather than seeking the Real only in isolation as well as the communicative, creative death-in-life it signifies.