Only Lovers Left Alive - 2014
by Jim Jarmusch
A worthy to mention inference straight from the in-Film, to start off:
Eve [Tilda Swinton] turns to her lover [Tom Hiddleston] and
- touching the silky surface of his gown with reverence -
points out his robe is at least a century old. An outstanding
craftsmanship, fruit of a top-dog tailor of a time past, surely.
That gown - and I add here, redundantly,
that to vampires, every gown is a nightgown -
represents, in a way, the myth itself and its devir.
For the Vampire myth - and its relation in literature to the
many generations through which it survived - is an allegory,
functioning as a pair of spectacles redefining not only as much as the object being seen but the eyes staring at it.
A vampire story is, before anything else, a story of a shadow, as in "figure" or "light-less projection" or, better yet put, an absence being noticed. But bear also that it alludes just as well to a shade, as in "resting spot away from the sun light where one seeks refuge". It's a dark pleasure, a morbid peace.
For a Vampire is, in practical terms, - and that discrediting most of its pre-1950 literary sources - a limitless - and very cool looking - avatar to a pack of painfully restrained ideals:
1) the idea of complete alienation from the body of humanity,
as the rest of humanity could never grasp the depths of ones sufferings.
2) the idea of eternal youth,
as in an individual necessity to preserve charm and beauty from the touch of time as opposed to everyone else.
3) the idea of a perfect compensation for the pains of the human condition, as in promoting a justifiable/causal explanation to it. - which, in turn, leads narratively to a perverse but pleasurable retaliation, in the shape of indifference and sadism.
That's to say that, being as Shadow and Shade,
Purpose and Appearance, a vampire - much alike 'a pair of spectacles', which not only redesigns what is being looked upon but also the very looks of its user - is the fabricated alter-ego of mankind's own suffering ego, and it too, as the magnificent gown of Adam, resists in beauty and in anachronism, both as in style and in function.
The Vampire Adam - in his version of a Louie-like* vampire Lestat* (Anne Rice's most famous vampire characters) - watches the decay of his world in despair.
His recounting of the facts, his references, his musical and literary building blocks are that of a shallow, near deep intellectual thinker;
well intentioned but with a far outdated mind, idolizing suchs as Tesla, ostentating indie discourses such as the allusions to pre-rock n' roll unappreciated artists - to be listened in a vinyl player -, the very crediting of a Shakespearean conspiracy theory, its cry for the fall of suchs like Iggie Pop and his claiming of having learnt the essence of the world with Lord Byron - a personal friend - and other lines.. inasmuch that if Adam is to be read as a metaphor to something, then this something must possess a romantic mind, as maybe an artist or an intellectually self-made teenager.
In that thought process we may add that Eve is - virtually - old enough to mother Adam, which leads us to, also, consider that her love for him isn't a romantic one per se - as in Romeo and Juliet -, it's rather one of a much more mature depth, one that resonates more to a protective lioness saving an innocent puppy from an evil not fully understood by it, than to your classical idea of a love that bears servitude to its possessors. Eve, rather, suits and soothes her love, primarily. (and I mean Love itself, not necessarily a lover)
It seems, therefore, that "Only Lovers Left Alive" is to be read as a film of esthetics - however presumptuous that may have sounded -. And that its historical [non]accuracies and poetic licenses are completely irrelevant in a attempt to discredit Jarmusch's work. For the picture is and functions as the very pair of spectacles its characters so pompously use. Serving the exact same functions as the here mentioned object: Dimming the light cast by reality as to fit a darker mood, bearing servitude to a romantic longing for a collective mindset now past, but that left those who experienced it - as intensely as Adam - in a state of unbearable emptiness, regardless of the practicality of such mindset on a day to day bases. In this particular sense, it - the movie - is almost like a knife to the wound; a fierce criticism on the functionality of the voluntary maintenance of such longings as one would undoubtedly point out the pointlessness of using shades at night.
For it's not the airplanes or the hospitals fault
- with its white hygiene lights, casting shadows away, 360°- ,
but the spectacles' themselves.
It's also funny to think of Eva - [Mother] Eve's teenage sister [Mia Wasikowska] - and the crucial exposition to ridicule of the practices and mindset of Adam she forcibly provides. They simply cannot coexist; Eva's lightmindness is such as to compromise Adam's constantly frabication of his mood and, therefore, "she must go", as the rest of things Adam has already detach himself from, such as blood types already cross out of his list or the cities he avoids. For Adam, the atmosphere must perdure over all.
-
Jarmusch's directing hand is yet as unique as ever. A magistral arrangement of light playing and rhythmic montage with enough room to experiment in ways never yet explored with quite as much success - vide the blood-drinking sequences. The overall sensation is that Jarmusch dialogues with his own generation, in a collective hug or therapy session between contemporaries, while asking us all to remember this sequence above all - precisely the closing one - , in regards to what current life has to offer to one of those Adamites scared world wide [and I recap it, my way]:
"We have just what you want, just what you want."
said a man on a dark viella.
Adam - then taking of his par of spectacles,
Adam - then taking of his par of spectacles,
as one takes off his hat or shoes - replies:
- No. Not what "I" want.
Teeth. Fade Out. End.
by T. Augusto Pereira
