Only Lovers Left Alive (2013)




“I’m sick of it—these zombies, what they’ve done to the world, their fear of their own imaginations,” laments the vampiric Adam (Tom Hiddleston) via videophone to his similarly succubal, Tangier-dwelling lady love Eve (Tilda Swinton) early in Only Lovers Left Alive. Zeitgeist be damned, nevertheless it’s fitting that the predominant pop-cultural ghouls of the time be set up as the opposing poles of Only Lovers’ moral universe (even if one of them is here only figurative), as many of the motifs once associated with bloodsucking undead – infection and disease, death and decay—have passed on to the flesh-eating walking dead. How and why that transfer occurred would require a tiresome pop-cult exegesis, so for the moment let’s just suggest that one of the reasons might have to do with the nature of the beasts’ respective hungers. If vampiric bloodlust can be all-consuming, it’s also controllable once sated; the craving does not crowd out culture and civility. Zombified hunger, by contrast, is endless and mindless: it is constant consumption, consumption as the sole drive of a once-human vessel emptied of absolutely everything else. As good old George A. Romero’s use of the shambling ghouls for a leftist critique of rampaging capitalism and middle-class apathy has evolved, in this fast-zombie era, into a stealth right-wing vision of the revolt of the underclass hordes, the less overtly political vampire genre has more and more made vampirism a marker of cultural elitism; to paraphrase Orwell on Graham Greene, vampirism seems a sort of high-class nightclub, entry to which is reserved for the culturati only.

Andrew Tracy - CINEMA SCOPE

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