anywhere out of the world: Only Lovers Left Alive, or When Jim Jarmusch Was Still My Religion

Because the Night Belongs to Lovers

(and to vampires who read Byron and hate USB cables)

I have a problem with love words.
They tend to embarrass me.
Which is why I will talk about vampires instead.

Because the night belongs to lovers — as Patti Smith knew, and as Jim Jarmusch confirms, with the stubborn calm of someone who has already lived several centuries and doesn’t care what you think.

Only Lovers Left Alive tells the story of two vampires.
Which is already funny, because it tells it as if it were not a vampire film at all.

Adam lives in Detroit.
He is an underground musician, which is to say: a romantic ruin with guitars.
Eve lives in Tangiers.
She reads books, dances to forgotten ’60s rock’n’roll, and still believes in humanity — a position far more radical than immortality.

They will never die of old age.
They have seen cities rise and collapse, empires burn, fashions return.
They love each other deeply, but do not need to spend every second together, because when you have eternity, clinginess becomes vulgar.

Adam, however, is tired.

Tired in the way only someone who has known Byron personally can be tired.
So Eve does what any sensible immortal woman would do: she crosses continents to revive his spirit.

Yes, it is a vampire film:

they drink blood
they are dead and not dead
they live at night

But it is also the reboot vampires desperately needed: less capes, more vinyl.

This film is not about vampires.
It is about:

wandering through cities at night with the feeling that you know everything and nothing
the slow decay of matter, which is the human version of destiny
nostalgia as the raw material of art, especially music

Tilda Swinton’s Eve is a luminous vampire librarian.
She wears white, reads literature like oxygen, and dances with more energy at night than I do after three ristretti and a moral crisis.
She treats Adam’s depression with a compassionate yet firm: get over it.

Tom Hiddleston’s Adam is a prog-rock vampire.

Former ghostwriter for the great names of music history (because of course).
He collects antique guitars like reliquaries: Gretsch, Rickenbacker, and existential despair.
With names like Adam and Eve, they have no choice but to be archetypes.

Detroit and Tangiers:
two cities with imperial pasts, cultural density, and glorious decay.
Then — crash. Silence. Ruins.
Two ghost cities for two immortal ghosts.

Jarmusch films Detroit at night like a love letter to abandoned things:
cinemas turned into parking lots, exposed bricks, dying buildings holding on out of politeness.

In Tangiers, the lovers carry blood containers through the night.
And suddenly Jarmusch quotes In the Mood for Love —
another film about memory, impermanence, and wearing sunglasses at night because feelings are bright.

You can almost smell Morocco:
salt in the air, sand in the wind, the Mediterranean breathing nearby.

Ruins are beautiful.
This is not new.
The Romantics knew it. Jarmusch knows it. Adam and Eve know it.
Imagine witnessing the Punic Wars, playing chess with Byron, drinking bad wine with Poe — and still being here.

And suddenly you understand the weight of time.
The uselessness of objects left behind.
The melancholy superiority of immortality, which turns out to be just crepuscular boredom.

Yes, the film becomes heavy with existentialism.
These vampires take themselves seriously.
They are hipsters obsessed with vintage technology, ruin-porn, Orientalism, and Shakespearean plots.

And then — a poem enters my mind:

Our kiss is a secret handshake, a password…
My love for you is the only empire I will ever build.

This is the key.
Only Lovers Left Alive is a film about love as resistance against time’s logorrhea.

Love is building an empire around someone:

time travel, spy fantasies, reincarnations, blood-red mythology.

And then one day, the empire falls.
Because that is what empires do.

After that, there is nothing left to do but wash the dishes.

Adam and Eve are not dead.
They are the first lovers, the ones who destroyed Paradise and created life.
They still love each other even when they mess everything up.
Even when the engine breaks, they miss their connection in Madrid, and still take another flight — because Skype is not enough (yes, there are vampires on Skype).

Jarmusch’s love is watching empires fall and still imagining new ones.

Love is:

thinking you are building a cathedral and discovering it’s a bungalow
living in ruins and finding them beautiful
resisting time
cultivating a garden
being surprised by mushrooms

The film has all of Jarmusch’s signatures: humour, music, culture.
And yet it spins in a void —
like a vinyl looping endlessly,
like the camera circling the lovers’ bodies, asleep and awake, distant and close.

Only love remains.
Only these two lovers survive, carried by Yasmine Hamdan’s Hal,
as if there were no tomorrow.

Only today.
Again and again.
For thousands of years.

Equally lyrical and pop, Jarmusch reminds us:

We own the night.
Because the night belongs to lovers.