1In his review of Jim Jarmusch’s 2014 Only Lovers Left Alive, Chris Nashawaty of Entertainment Weekly espouses what many critics have said of Jarmusch over the years: “And yet, as much as I dialed into the visual flair and louche vibe, it never quite gets past being an exercise in style over substance”1. Nashawaty also makes a common refrain about the film: “Vampire films work best when they are, on some level, allegorical (for sexual repression, drug addiction, the fear of AIDS). Only Lovers Left Alive nods to a tainted, dwindling human blood supply, but it feels thematically undercooked”2.

2Translation: “It was very pretty, but I had no idea what was going on.” This has been an all-too-frequent lament over the career of one of America’s greatest independent filmmakers. But even Nick Pinkerton (a more seasoned film reader than Nashawaty), in his Sight and Sound interview with Jarmusch, says that “In using horror tropes – the zombie, werewolf, or in this case the vampire – filmmakers often feel the need to turn the creature in question into a metaphorical placeholder: vampirism as metaphor for addiction and so on. I didn’t catch much of that in Only Lovers… ”3.

3 Yet there is much evidence to the contrary: Only Lovers Left Alive is not only thematically cooked, it is, in a very American way much how we like our steaks, well-done. The film is as thematically rich as it is visually stunning, and it follows the Jarmusch project of taking American genres and deconstructing them, turning them upside down both to give us a closer look at the genre and to point out their inaccuracies, inconsistencies, and in some cases, their downright foolishness and ignorance of history. Only Lovers Left Alive also draws a straight line to another genre-bender in the Jarmusch filmography, his 1995 Dead Man, one of his best and most successful films. While Dead Man deconstructed the classic Western, Only Lovers Left Alive deconstructs the Vampire film in a similar fashion. In the process, the film has a formalist structure that reeks of its themes while commenting on urban decay and renewal, the state of human frailty, and what may be the strongest thematic current of the film, the film business itself.

4The first order of business should be the business of genre – what is a genre and what isn’t. The Western may be the most clearly defined as a genre, and perhaps Science Fiction and Horror can be classified as such. But all others remain slippery and lacking a center. Vampire films have never been considered a classic genre, but I see them as closer to one than most might think. Historically, they have been seen as a subset of Horror, but recent waves of vampire films have strived to untether themselves from the horror genre and mine their own territory. Vampire films (and I will include the HBO TV series True Blood [2008 – 2014] in that category) have run the gamut from the seminal Nosferatu (1922), to the campy Béla Lugosi films of the early sound era, to the Vincent Price stylized 1960s, to more recent versions that have attempted to put an edge on our beloved Count: contemplative studs, swooning teens, bloodthirsty backwoods bumpkins, and one of the best of the past few years – a wonderful feminist take on vampires in Neil Jordan’s Byzantium (2012). While the films have vastly different content and setting, there are a few common characteristics that we all know so well: the vampires live forever unless killed by one of several methods, such as a stake in the heart, a wooden bullet, tainted blood, or even a repellant such as garlic; even these characteristics are slippery – it seems the only agreed upon method of killing a vampire is exposure to daylight. Nosferatu gave us that – in filmic form anyway, as the vampire was led to his death by a sexual desire. That is our next common characteristic – sex. Sexual obsession, sexual depravity, and psychosexual connection have always been a staple of the Vampire form, and it remains intact here with Jarmusch – to a point. The twist here is that the co-protagonists, Adam and Eve, in wonderfully understated performances by Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston, are monogamous vampires (at least as much as we see). Even though they live apart, he in Detroit and she in Tangiers, they seem like a dedicated married couple, yet still very sensuous and connected whether together or apart. Finally, most vampire films display a sense of invincibility and even recklessness about the main characters, and we see some of that here as well, particularly in Ava’s character (portrayed by Mia Wasikowska). While there may be other common characteristics, these seem to remain constant in vampire films. And these are exactly what Jarmusch deconstructs.

5To get a sense of how Jarmusch goes about the deconstruction, it is helpful to look back at Dead Man as a template, since the Western is easier to define and categorize, and since that film was so elegant and economical in its deconstruction. (The term “deconstruction” here runs the risk of oversimplifying the Derridean notion to mean that the structure is used to question the structure and fold in upon itself. The relationship is dialectic.)

6The classic Western followed a fairly steady set of principles, something I have written about previously in a chapter in Love in Western Film and Television: Lonely Hearts and Happy Trails4: a regeneration through violence, violence that is justified when used by the protagonists but not by others, the white male dominance over nature, the white male dominance over the Native Americans, a patriarchal rule instated by the boys during the move West and in the West itself once they arrived, and a system of law built around the Anglo-Saxon, Protestant hierarchy brought from the East – placing themselves firmly on the side of the good and the right. Films such as Stagecoach (John Ford, 1939) and My Darling Clementine (John Ford, 1946) are classic examples5. Of course this list of characteristics is not exhaustive, and there are other secondary characteristics that are prevalent, but the characteristics mentioned above remain dominant, constant, and serve as a useful starting point for the discussion.

7 Dead Man deconstructs this entire project of the Western and calls all of those elements into question. As Jonathan Rosenbaum notes, it has been called everything from a revisionist Western, to a postmodern Western, to an Acid Western6. Perhaps it is simply a classic Western, yet one in reverse. The film examines most of the characteristics listed here and takes them apart, one by one: the main character William Blake, perfectly played by a Buster Keaton-influenced Johnny Depp, is the antihero-hero: the perfect opposite of the Eastern hero who sets out for the West and tames it. He can’t use a gun, he abhors violence, he is passive while everything happens to him, and he stumbles across the help of a Native American who is more clever, more instinctual, more resourceful, and seemingly more intelligent than he. At the same time, the White patriarchy and those who work for that patriarchy are ruthless, disgusting, and downright moronic. The violence in the film does not lead to any regeneration; in fact it leads to degeneration. The entire journey west for William Blake is one of death and destruction, complete disregard for the environment, misappropriation of the law, and it finally ends in his own death in the Northwest corner of the U.S. (Important because of how the classic Westerns were set in the Southwest corner of the United States.)

8According to Rosenbaum, this canceling out of the Western speaks to Derrida’s notion of “erasure”7. In other words, the film attempts to erase the classic Western and all of the elements therein. Furthermore, as Derrida describes in “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences”8, as we get further away from the center of a thing, the center becomes clearer. The same concept applies to Dead Man – as Jarmusch erases the elements of the classic Western, the more the elements of the classic Western become clearer, and in this case, more abhorrent. We must keep the center in focus as we decenter. In film, this idea translates to keeping the genre elements in sight as we deconstruct them – in other words, we must know the genre to deconstruct and erase the genre.

9Jarmusch follows a similar project in Only Lovers Left Alive. As he charts out a path for the Vampire film, he deconstructs the Vampire film along the way. That deconstruction has a purpose, just like the purpose of Dead Man was to show how the West was really won and what that “victory” really looked like, in all its ugliness, messiness, brutality, and blow jobs. For Derrida, deconstructing the thing was only half the project; the purpose of the deconstruction was the real candy. The deconstruction of Only Lovers Left Alive finally leads us to an allegory for the film industry, and more specifically, the state of independent films vs. the rest of the film industry. More on that later.

10First, by looking at the individual elements, we are led to this conclusion through not only the thematic undercurrent, but also through the cinematic apparatus itself – an apparatus that Jarmusch has so deftly cultivated, and in this particular film, shows a mastery beyond what we’ve seen from him in the past.

11These formal aspects of the film exude a heightened sense of sensuality, realism, and loneliness through the mise-en-scene, cinematography, editing, and sound – languid camera movements, darkness injected with flashes of color, a decided lack of violence or action, long takes that allow us to sit with the characters and feel how slowly time moves for them, richly decorated sets, and a score coupled with diegetic music that evokes funeral dirges as well as the endless circle of time.

12These elements conflict with past Vampire films and more particularly, with most of the more recent Vampire films. These films, such as Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) by Francis Ford Coppola, Neil Jordan’s Interview With the Vampire (1994), the True Blood series, Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark (1987), and even the aforementioned Byzantium, all exhibited either in total or in spurts, frenzied action and a sense of an under-cranked camera. All of these films gave a sense of vampires living in fast forward. Only Lovers Left Alive, simply through the formal aspects, reverses that and gives us a sense of over-cranked lives – slow, languid, thoughtful. Of course, this makes perfect logical sense – if you have been alive for 500 years, you live in a Jarmusch film, not in a Hollywood feature.

13In addition to the sense of time slowed down, we also get a taste of cinematic realism – the deep focus and long takes that were so prevalent in Italian Neorealism, for example – yet it is not a realism that is rooted in the real world, as was Neorealism. It is a realism that gives off a sense of how reality would be and should be for these characters. (This is the perfect marriage of the divergent streams of film form – formalism and realism.)

14The sensuousness of the film comes through in that realism – a dance that brings Adam out of his malaise, naked bodies entwined as they lay sleeping, or even the slow suck of an O-negative popsicle that should raise the blood pressure of many a mortal. The ring of blood tracing their mouths after a popsicle or a blood aperitif are splashes of color in the otherwise drab and colorless world of Adam’s Detroit home as he plays with Eve, signifying their passion and devotion to each other while also pointing out the elements the film is erasing. On the contrary, the other Vampire films I’ve previously mentioned also share a super-saturation that goes hand-in-hand with their fast-forward style. Once again, by inverting those characteristics, Jarmusch simultaneously points to them while erasing them.

15The same works for the lack of action and frenzy in the film. Again, if you were alive for 500 years, you would probably have extremely long stretches of boredom punctuated by quick cuts of action. Jarmusch takes us on a journey that seems more logical and life-like for such creatures, but the interesting part here is that he marries theme and action to highlight exactly how that works. The whole episode when Eve’s sister Ava visits them in Detroit is perhaps the clearest example of the erasure of which Rosenbaum speaks about in Dead Man.

16Ava is the typical vampire figure from Hollywood movies – sexy, impulsive, insatiable, and wild; she exudes confidence, charm, and a carefree attitude that are all common characteristics of the Hollywood vampire. She even lives in L.A., which as Adam sneers, is “zombie central.” The comment is a much-repeated shorthand in the film for mindless humans, and Adam pushes the words through his lips as though he were chewing nails.

17The sequence of Ava’s arrival to banishment is central to the deconstruction of the film and even takes place at the narrative center. Ava swoops in, sexy, insatiable, and impulsive. She convinces Adam and Eve to go out to a nightclub with Adam’s helper/gopher Ian (Anton Yelchin), and they finish the night back at Adam’s house. It doesn’t end well, as Eve wakes up to a dead Ian the following morning. All an incredulous Adam can utter is “You drank Ian!” As she is kicked out of the house, Ava’s last comments to Adam and Eve are telling: “You are both condescending snobs!” and this is probably closer to true than false. Adam and Eve ARE snobs, and they are condescending. The point here is that after being alive for 500 years and watching a civilization in decline, most would be condescending snobs, closer to Adam and Eve than to Ava. Ava disappears into the night, presumably returning to L.A. and rejoining the ranks of the Hollywood vampire.

18Now back to the zombie comments: there are several other levels to this classification. Earlier, Adam tells Eve that he is distraught at the lack of imagination among the zombies. They’ve even poisoned their own blood supply. And then he calls Los Angeles zombie central. He is speaking of the general population, yes, but he is also speaking to the business of Hollywood: they lack imagination, the business has been taken over by mindless monothematic morons who look only at the bottom line, and finally, the only thing they can produce is zombie TV and zombie movies. (And perhaps the occasional superhero movie). In other words, the zombies are Hollywood.

19This episode with Ava, then, injects Hollywood into Only Lovers Left Alive, only to quickly regurgitate it. By inserting this episode, Jarmusch visually provides the center that he has been de-centering since the first frame and continues on to the last. By erasing Ava from the screen, he is erasing the Hollywood Vampire film, fully deconstructing the form in favor of his own ideas of the form. These ideas shine wonderfully through the filmic apparatus.

20The mise-en-scene is as lush and sensuous as the cinematography, editing, and sound. The respective homes of Adam and Eve are both full of clutter, but that clutter that means something to each of them respectively: Eve’s books and Adam’s musical instruments and accompanying gadgets (which speaks to intertextuality – recalling the Tesla discussion from Coffee and Cigarettes (2003)) are both literal and symbolic. Adam’s house is dark and a bit drab with only a faded splash of color; Eve’s world in Tangiers is slightly brighter but no less crowded with her precious books. But the larger aspects of the mise-en-scene are the cities themselves – the sad and lonely Detroit is a city that looks abandoned and left to rot, replete with movie theaters that are now parking lots and pools of acid that provide natural visual effects (unfortunately for Ian).

21 Detroit is a once-proud city that is now taking its last gasps of air. Adam is therefore Detroit’s human form. Tangiers is a city that has rebuilt itself several times and seems to argue that it will do so again when necessary – it has a much more alive vibe to it. Eve is much the same and therefore, she is the human form of Tangiers. These somewhat opposed cities give us another example of the center and de-centering model: Detroit is the city being erased, by Tangiers, but yet, Detroit is still there and a city that may once rise again, as Jarmusch himself has noted9.

22Finally, the music adds to that same deconstructive project by its funerality and its circularity. As Jarmusch himself notes, much of the music has a palindromic structure that ascends and descends in the same chord progression/degression. “[T] hey go up to the center and then they reverse – not tape reverse, but reverse chord progressions”10, once again repeating the scheme of using the structure to reverse the structure. The palindrome is very much a repeating pattern with no way out – the same pattern in which Adam and Eve live their lives, and the same pattern that delivers us an object with a perfect center – the circle. The opening of the film was the first visual example of this: the starry sky spinning in one direction as the camera rotates in the opposite direction, giving us a circular motif, a dialectic between the natural world and the filmic world, and a center from which to depart.

23As we moved away from that center, we’ve proved Nashawaty and Pinkerton wrong. Certainly one of the appeals of a Jarmusch film is the journey, but we also get the candy at the end of the deconstruction here. If we take all the business about zombies, and lack of imagination, and Hollywood being zombie central, we can look at the film as an allegory for the film business and Jim Jarmusch opposed to this zombie-mania. The zombies are the studios, the business giant that is Hollywood, or in general, the movie business. Jarmusch is the vampire; the final shot of the film speaks to Jarmusch either killing us or changing us: our choice. Jarmusch is the independent filmmaker who struggles to deal with the lack of imagination around him. Jarmusch is the one who does not want to give away final cut rights and surrender everything over to the zombie world. Jarmusch is the director who does things his way and has a predilection for the past as well as the present, simultaneously paying homage to the classic genres while deconstructing them. Speaking in terms of film, we could say that Jarmusch is the Only Lover Left Alive.