Audiovisual Solitude

Works of art are of an infinite loneliness and with nothing so little to be reached as with criticism. Only love can grasp and hold and be just toward them.

—Rainer Maria Rilke, Letter to a Young Poet¹

Though the above enlightening advice from Rilke to the perplexed young Austrian soldier may unavoidably undermine this essay, the reference should nevertheless be made, as Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive serves well as an audiovisual embodiment of the lonely spirit of the pure art form, wandering and awaiting a moment of connection. Jarmusch was born in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, and grew up watching movies and learning about film from his mother, a movie reviewer for the Akron-Beacon Journal. In Jarmusch’s versatile auteurism, Only Lovers Left Alive almost forms a standalone microgenre that envelops the gothic and the quasi-horror, along with the comic melodrama and the documentary. At the same time, Only Lovers Left Alive exemplifies Jarmusch’s contemplative form of art cinema with its allegorical inquiries into the symbolic meanings of life, death, and eternity. The film continues some of Jarmusch’s recognizable signature techniques—what contemporary film scholarship terms “slow cinema.” By way of long takes, medium long shots of deadpan facial expressions, incremental camera movements, and a sparing use of cutting, the film naturally prioritizes a melancholic, pensive, and nearly unaffected viewing experience over an intensive visual impact. Only Lovers Left Alive effuses a nearly indiscernible and yet soulful sensitivity that the episodic events of the narrative do not immediately reveal.

The loosely devised plot follows a vampire couple, Adam (Tom Hiddleston) and Eve (Tilda Swinton). Though together since the Elizabethan era, they now live apart in Detroit and Tangier, respectively. Eve travels to the abandoned, postindustrial Detroit to be with her suicidal and self-obsessive partner. She goes, in part, because of Adam’s aggregating depression about the decadence of human beings—all of whom he curiously categorizes as “zombies”—and the lack of inner connection he feels, as a versatile musician of a variety of genres, with the outside world through music. The healing process that involves sex, conversation, going out for air, and, of course, enjoying the finest blood is interrupted when Eve’s unscrupulous sister Ava (Mia Wasikowska) unexpectedly appears and kills Ian (Anton Yelchin), the only zombie Adam deems as “all right.” The vampire couple now has no choice but to escape the United States to Tangier, where they stay with the “real” Christopher Marlowe (John Hurt), a fellow vampire whose health has been deteriorating over the centuries. Here, Jarmusch does not refrain from voicing his feelings about the historical authorship dispute between Shakespeare and Marlowe. He regards the latter as a true literary master while the former a mere artless zombie. Near the end of the film, having lost a series of dear friends and concerned with the increasingly rarity of the “good stuff ”—that is, the blood of zombies untouched by mundane toxins, both mystical and pervasive—the lovers let their élan vital override their moral code of not drinking blood directly from living humans, and they approach a romancing couple at night.

The woven-together plot becomes even further dispersed and diluted when the camera insouciantly pans, tracks, and wanders, as Jarmusch generously documents scenes with the painterly quality of a still life or the worn-out landscapes of an abandoned, postindustrial city. Although the film is shot in color, a departure from some of Jarmusch’s earlier works, black and white shades remain dominant. Rather than seeing the color palette of the vampiric genre as limiting, the shadows and darkness are essential means of cinematic expression for Jarmusch. It is therefore the night that defines Adam and Eve. This is a recurring, significant component—if not the most significant—in Jarmusch’s oeuvre. In the night, Eva (Eszter Balint) begins to unexpectedly leave her cousin for Cleveland in Stranger Than Paradise (1984); in the night, Zach (Tom Waits), Jack (John Lurie), and Robert (Roberto Benigni) get arrested, escape prison, and form an ephemeral and yet memorable friendship in Down by...