Only Lovers Left Alive – Bitch Flicks

Kathryn Bigelow’s ‘Near Dark’: Busting Stereotypes and Drawing Blood

Both brutally violent and shockingly sexy, ‘Near Dark’s influence can be felt nearly thirty years later on a new crop of unusual vampire dramas that simultaneously embrace and reject the conventions of the genre. … Yet among all these films about outsiders, ‘Near Dark’ will always have a special place in my heart for being the one to show me that as a filmmaker, I was not alone in the world after all.

This guest post written by Lee Jutton appears as part of our theme week on Women Directors.

There were many reasons why I felt like an outsider while studying film and television production at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. Some were related to class; I felt as though everyone around me had more money (and fewer student loans). Some were related to my lack of practical production experience; prior to film school, I had never operated a camera apart from a few silly movies starring action figures. Some reasons, I am willing to admit, were inside my own introverted, antisocial head. However, it was my taste in film that really made me feel as though I did not belong at a school with “arts” in its name. I like action movies packed with stylish fight sequences, zombie movies so gory that every frame is splattered with brains, and science-fiction movies crammed with special effects. As a writer and director, I aspired to be Peter Jackson, Edgar Wright, Quentin Tarantino, Guy Ritchie and Robert Rodriguez all rolled into one frenetic package, which makes you feel a bit awkward when everyone around you worships at the art-house altars of David Lynch and Terrence Malick. It’s also a bit awkward when you realize that all of the directors you look up to are men.

When I was in my final year at NYU, Kathryn Bigelow became the first woman to win an Academy Award for Best Director. This was already a big deal, but it was all the more important to me because she had won it for directing The Hurt Locker, a tense, literally explosive drama about a troubled bomb diffuser in Iraq. Here was a woman making films that were dark, disturbing, visually compelling and packed with action — all things I aspired to include in my own work — and getting recognized for it by the Hollywood establishment. Delving deep into Bigelow’s wide-ranging oeuvre, which includes Soviet submarine thriller K-19: The Widowmaker and Keanu classic Point Break, inspired and reassured me while I was struggling to pinpoint my own identity, both as a filmmaker and a woman.

My favorite Kathryn Bigelow film, and the one I feel the most kinship with as a filmmaker, is her second feature, Near Dark. Released in 1987 at the height of a bloodsucker boom led by The Lost Boys, it manages to stand out from the pack thanks to its improbable but incredible combination of the vampire genre with that of the Western to create one weird, pulpy masterpiece. Before watching Near Dark, I primarily expected to encounter vampires in eerie, overcast Eastern European locales filled with fog and ancient history; to encounter them smashing across the broad, sunburnt plains of Texas in a battered motorhome was shocking and refreshing. Near Dark’s vampires are never referred to as such, nor do they have the chivalrous manners and old-fashioned elegance of many of their forefathers. Rather, they’re a marauding band of leather-coated drifters who wouldn’t be out of place in the world of Mad Max, coated liberally with blood, sweat and dirt. Both brutally violent and shockingly sexy, Near Dark’s influence can be felt nearly thirty years later on a new crop of unusual vampire dramas that simultaneously embrace and reject the conventions of the genre.

Near Dark opens with a close-up of a bloodsucking creature, but not the one that you expect — it’s a mosquito, hovering on the arm of farm boy Caleb Colton (an achingly young Adrian Pasdar) until he smacks it away. Driving into town to meet some friends, he spies an innocent-looking blonde pixie of a girl emerging from a shop while licking a vanilla ice cream cone. What follows is an all-American meet-cute laden with vampire innuendo that poor Caleb just cannot comprehend.

“Can I have a bite?” Caleb drawls, oozing earnest Southern charm.
“A bite?”
“Yeah. I’m just dying for a cone.”
“Dying?”

The girl, Mae (Jenny Wright), is not just any pretty girl. She’s a honey trap, luring unsuspecting victims into the clutches of her nomadic vampire family. Caleb behaves as though Mae is the prey, the object to be pursued and hopefully won; little does he know, it is entirely the other way around. When he tries to impress her with a lasso, she grabs hold of the rope herself and reels him in, shocking him with her strength. “I haven’t met any girls like you,” Caleb says, attempting to flatter her. “No,” Mae replies in a tense voice, “You sure haven’t.”

The instant, almost animal attraction between Caleb and Mae is obvious, and they share a long, romantic night driving around the Texas plains before Mae begins to panic that she won’t be home before sunrise. Caleb assumes she’s only afraid her daddy will punish her for being out all night, and coyly asks for a kiss before she goes. What he gets is far more than he bargained for — a passionate, hungry kiss, sure, but one that culminates in a nasty bite on the neck and the sight of his bright red blood dripping down Mae’s white chin as she hops down from his truck.

Soon it is morning, and Caleb finds himself staggering across the fields towards his father’s farm, weakened by the harsh rays of the rising sun, with telltale smoke sizzling up from his slowly roasting skin. Before he can make it to safety, he is scooped up by Mae and her gang in their motorhome. They’re ready to suck him dry — that is, until Mae mentions to the others that she did a bit more than just reveal her true nature to him. By biting him, he has become her responsibility –and potentially, her mate. Furious, the rest of the vampires reluctantly agree that Caleb can stay alive a little bit longer and be given the chance to learn to live like one of them. In other words, to live by the cover of darkness, luring (usually via hitchhiking) and killing innocent people without hesitation in order to survive.

“What do we do now?” Caleb, dumbfounded by his new immortal status, asks Mae.
“Anything we want, until the end of time,” she replies.

During Caleb and Mae’s first meeting, Caleb oozes confidence and plays at dominance, the way most boys do when trying to win over a girl. However, once he becomes a vampire, the reversal of stereotypical gender roles is striking. Caleb becomes entirely dependent on Mae. It is only her attraction to him that keeps the rest of her family from killing him on the spot, and it is only her willingness to kill for him and allow him to drink her own blood that keeps him alive in the days that follow. Caleb needs Mae, and because of this, their intimacy grows in new and bizarre ways. In one particularly passionate scene, Mae bites open her own wrist and clutches Caleb’s desperate, hungry head to her while he feeds, until he almost kills her in his fervor.

Despite his obvious need to consume blood, Caleb cannot bring himself to take a life, whereas the other vampires seem not only to kill to live, but also to live to kill. They’ve survived so long by any means necessary that they don’t hesitate to wipe out the entire clientele of a rundown roadside bar for both food and fun (a scene of creative carnage that rivals the equally deadly tavern scene in Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds). The gang includes Jesse (Lance Henriksen), the charismatic leader who fought for the south in the Civil War; Jesse’s mate, Diamondback (Jenette Goldstein), whose big blonde hair and skintight ensembles can’t help but remind you of another iconic Eighties femme fatale, the android Pris in Blade Runner; Homer (Joshua Miller), who was turned as a boy and perpetually struggles with having an ancient brain trapped inside a child’s body; and the particularly vicious Severen (a delightfully unhinged Bill Paxton), who introduces himself to Caleb by informing him, “I’m gonna separate your head from your shoulders. Hope you don’t mind none.” They all speak in a bizarre, stylized version of Southern dialect that drips in menace and the occasional old-fashioned turn of phrase that comes from having lived long enough to take credit for starting the Great Chicago Fire. But Mae, the youngest of the vampires, is different. She kills to keep herself alive, but she seems to take a lot less sick joy in it than the others, and the more time she spends with Caleb, the more their heartless behavior seems to turn her off. By being with Caleb, she is reminded of what it was to be human — after all, she was one herself not so long ago.

Near Dark doesn’t have much in the way of plot; Caleb is dragged around Texas by the vampires, the timer on his existence counting down faster and faster, while his father and little sister search for him. The pulsating beat of the awesomely Eighties electronic score by Tangerine Dream adds to the urgency. It all culminates in an explosive finale with numerous characters meeting horrific ends via spontaneous combustion under the cloudless blue Texas sky — beautiful, and without mercy. There’s a happy ending that some might think a cop-out, as it goes against traditional vampire lore. Yet, rejecting traditional and expected vampire tropes is one of the things that makes Near Dark such a memorable film. Nothing about it is expected. It breaks all of the rules and makes up its own along the way. This Southern-fried story of young love, lust and lost innocence has as much in common with Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show than any Dracula movie.

Today, Near Dark’s legacy lives on in films like A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, from another promising woman director, Ana Lily Amirpour. In a film described as “the first Iranian vampire Western,” Amirpour brings vampires to another unfamiliar locale — this time, a dead-end Iranian town called Bad City. Here, a nameless bloodsucking girl (Sheila Vand) prowls the dark, empty streets in a chador, using her deceptively delicate and feminine appearance to lure and attack men who abuse women. Like Mae, she is much stronger than she initially appears. Independent film icon Jim Jarmusch also recently experimented in the vampire genre with Only Lovers Left Alive, which stars Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston as an ancient, moody, bohemian couple holed up in rundown Detroit. While less of a direct descendant of Near Dark than A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, ones feels that this sexy, slow-moving story could not have been told without its more frantically passionate predecessor. Here, the horror aspects of the traditional vampire story take a backseat as the film explores how love can be powerful enough to survive enough dark moments to fill multiple lifetimes. The loneliness inherent in being immortal seems to be the one constant among all vampire films, even the most untraditional ones — and yes, even Twilight. Yet among all these films about outsiders, Near Dark will always have a special place in my heart for being the one to show me that as a filmmaker, I was not alone in the world after all.

Lee Jutton has directed short films starring a killer toaster, a killer Christmas tree, and a not-killer leopard. She previously reviewed new DVD and theatrical releases as a staff writer for Just Press Play. You can follow her on Medium for more film reviews and on Twitter for an excessive amount of opinions on German soccer.

Apparently Suicide and AIDS are Real Problems in the Vampire Community: ‘Only Lovers Left Alive’

‘Only Lovers Left Alive’ is vampire romance for grown-ups. It’s the rare vampire film that tries to convey what it would actually mean to live for centuries, questioning the world around you and turning your nose up at everything human and mortal. The titular lovers here are shadowy figures lurking just on the edge of history, indulging in a tortured and eternal love, more believable and sexual than any of the recent rash of tween vampire lore.

The film poster for Only Lovers Left Alive — The film poster for *Only Lovers Left Alive*

Only Lovers Left Alive is vampire romance for grown-ups. It’s the rare vampire film that tries to convey what it would actually mean to live for centuries, questioning the world around you and turning your nose up at everything human and mortal. The story spins out in an intoxicating swirl of music and high-culture; at the centre of it, a couple who can’t live without each other but don’t live together any longer. The titular lovers are shadowy figures lurking just on the edge of history, indulging in a tortured and eternal love, more believable and sexual than any of the recent rash of tween vampire lore.

The film takes ideas we’ve seen in films like Interview with a Vampire , Let The Right One In and Byzantium, and adds commentary on our modern world. What would an elegant immortal being who’s seen it all think of our quick consumer culture and digital devices that allow us to feel to connected to people continents away.

Plus, answers to the question many have wondered. What would vampires think of iPhones? Of Techno-music and videos on Youtube?

Sure to be a cult fav, Only Lovers Left Alive is dark and decadent, saturated by haunting rock music and an unshakeable air of impending danger. Indie-hero Jim Jarmusch wrote and directed this vampire tale, pumped full of wry, intelligent humor and some delightfully silly historical references with a stylized production as rich and decadent as it’s story. The Palm d’Or nominated film chronicles the reunion Adam (Tom Hiddleston) and Eve (Tilda Swinton), beautiful vampires who have been lovers for centuries and married several times. Recently, they have been living apart: him in a crumbling house on the outskirts of Detroit, her, swathed in silks in Tangiers.

A picture taken of Adam and Eve the third time they got married. Eve remarks: “We looked so young”

Adam is your basic emo-rocker. He’s got the long, unwashed hair, shirts unbuttoned to his navel and the distaste selling out, but underneath, he has the face and sickly-sexual comportment of a romantic poet. Isolated in a town where no one seems to live anymore, he spends his days playing guitar and composing music he isn’t ready to show anyone. He only leaves his home to procure blood for a local hospital, where he struggles to control his thirst around bleeding patients. He relies on Ian (Anton Yelchin) to do errands, bringing him instruments and keeping the fans away. As the story begins, he is considering killing himself and asks Ian to bring him a wooden bullet.

Meanwhile, Eve is an ultra-sophisticated vaguely European jet-setter, drawn to exotic locals and excited by life. While Adam has his music, Eve has literature. In a scene any book lover would adore, she packs suitcases full of books for a visit to Detroit. She gazes over the texts, some medieval with woodcut illustrations, some in ancient languages, some modern, her faces enraptured at the beauty she sees. Her close confidant is Christopher Marlowe (John Hurt), the real author of Shakespeare’s plays, he keeps a picture of the bard on his wall to throw knives at.

It’s hard to imagine better actors for the lead roles. Swinton and Hiddleston both appear uncanny and otherworldly, in appearance, in the way they carry themselves and in the way they find they inhabit the film’s world, that they seem like members of some unknown species that includes only each other. Swinton in particular has never looks less human, she wanders around Tangiers like some strange white unicorn trying to take on human form.

It is perhaps too on the nose that they are Adam and Eve, but the names highlight the connection between them. They have a mystical connection that draw them to each other, highlighted by Adam playing guitar in Detroit while Eve dances in Tangiers as if she can hear it. Though they are not the first man and woman, through history they seem to be the only couple that always endures, their relationship only thing that will live on as empires come and go.

Adam and Eve look like an ordinary couple, happy to be together

Adam and Eve are well-developed, each with their own separate but intertwining lives, passions and histories. They seem remarkably real for centuries old vampires, You can easily imagine them roaming around in the dark corners of a dying city. Though they live separate lives much of time, there is a magnetism that pulls them together when they reunite, seeming as if they each want to consume the other, breathe in their air and connect by running their hands along each other’s bodies just to experiences and remember each other. Their intimacy is tasteful and personal, suggesting that on top of sexual attraction, they just want to be near each other and as content to lie beside each other nude as they are to play chess together and eat blood popsicles.

It’s a very romantic tale, both in the modern sense and in poetic tradition. For all his protests, Adam is a romantic hero, lost in a desolate wasteland that mirrors the ravages of his soul. He has isolated himself in the dying city of Detroit, whose loss of the auto industry has made it a virtual ghost town. When Eve visits, he takes her on a tour of its wilderness, showing her where people used to live, taking her to an old gilded theatre falling into ruins. At home, his wall is covered in photographs and portraits of the dead luminaries he has known, so he can never forgot the temporary nature of human life, passing him by.

He is disillusioned with musicians and his old heroes, the scientists, dead and destroyed by the cultures around them. He sees science as destroying human lives, contaminating water with chemicals and blood with diseases and long ago stopped considering himself part of this humanity. He calls humans zombies and decides he can’t be around them anymore, disgusted by their fears of their own imaginations.

Eve is the light to Adam’s darkness, all in white while he’s always in black, yet remains a realistic character because of implied darkness of her own. Swinton plays Eve like an ethereal vision who can’t escape the weight on her shoulders, she always seems struggling to stay afloat. It is this weight and her passionate love for culture, the books she reads through while packing, the Shakespeare volume she sighs after finishing and the rapturous dancing and yen to explore, that keeps her from being a mere servant to Adam’s moods. Eve is so well in synch with the world, that she has slight psychic senses, able to intuit the age of a guitar just by touching it and maintaining a deep connection to the moon. She believes in living and experiencing as much as possible of each era that passes by. THough she is implied to be older than Adam, she is still able to appreciate lie and wax poetic about the lights and color, the dancing and friendship that are all part of the experience.

From her point of view, Adam’s depression is a waste, so she devotes herself to bringing him back into the world, reassuring him that even if the world is destroyed for humans, they’ll still be around. She resents that he treats her like a part in his story, a means to the end, rather than a real person to rely on when in times of need. She feels taken for granted like, he sees her as another one of the transitory zombies who will come into his life and leave it. Despite the specific references to thing like immortality, it’s not unlike the typical conversation between an ordinary couple in any other movies. The supernatural elements added to what is essentially a woman trying to help her depressed partner, serve to make the story larger in scope, more evocative of gothic conventions and tortured love and dangerous.

Adam examines a guitar, showcasing his passion for music

Jarmusch skillfully integrates modern technology into their ageless world experienced as just another culture’s momentary trends. He also includes references to both modern pop culture and ancient history without either seeming shoehorned in. Eve is as taken in with Jack White and David Foster Wallace as Mary Shelley and Marlowe’s ghostwritten Shakespeare plays, while Adam’s doctor disguise includes name tags like “ Dr. Faust ” and “ Dr. Caligari”.

Eve notes all the things she has been through and survived, the different cultures that seemed dangerous that she has watched die around her. She considers modern times no different, an age that any other, with its transitory values that will end and tries to enjoy our technology as part of the experience of this time and place. While Adam uses retro pieces of equipment and hooks his phone up to an ancient TV to talk, Eve is comfortable speaking on her iPhone’s Facetime and interacting with the outside world to make travel arrangements for the pair.

For all his speeches denigrating humanity, Adam has all too human concerns. He is attached to his possessions and secretive about his music, worried about it getting out before it’s ready. As a rock musician, his entire lifestyle and tortured-rocker identity is supported by human fans, ones who his complains about and just wants to leave him alone. While ethereal Eve believes in traveling light and replacing anything tangible, Adam is of the world and tied to his possessions.

After feeding on Ian, Ava’s teeth are extended, making her look monstrous

About midway through and after a lot of anticipation, as Adam, Eve and Marlowe all had dreams about her, Eve’s sister Ava (a spacey-fairy Mia Wasikowska) arrives at Adam’s house decked out like a 60s groupie. Party girl Ava is invasive and impolite, entering uninvited, forcing her way into their dreams and into their house and to Adam’s annoyance, listening to his music without permission. There is a genuine big brother-little sister relationship between Ava and Adam, and as old as she is, she’s a teenager out to have fun, even if it means intruding on an important moment between the couple. She bounces around, jumping on the bed where the couple is sleeping, as if she is their child.

In addition, Ava is an even stronger force than Eve at drawing Adam out of himself. In one scene, Ava is enjoying a TV show that depicts Dracula dancing on psychedelic backdrops. While Eve comes and watches it with her, Adam, perpetually brooding turns off the TV and spoils their fun. In one hilarious moment, the women try to get Adam to go to a club with them. Though Adam insists he is not going to go, the next scene shows the three vamps in dark sunglasses at a hipster bar. Though meant as a joke here, his brooding can become unintentionally humorous at times.

After the night out, Ava bites Ian, killing him and destroying much of Adam’s prized possessions. Ava’s feeding off Ian is played as a clear metaphor for sex, based on the language she uses: “I didn’t mean to do it, but he was so cute. I couldn’t help myself.” It’s suggested that Ava is wild and unable to control her sexuality, and with that it mind it’s a little uncomfortable that she is berated for it. Unlike Adam and Eve, who have figured out ways of constraint, subsisting through hospitals and Marlowe’s connections, she refuses to live by a set of rules and is punished for it when Adam kicks her out of the house.

Scenes of the vampires drinking blood are shot similarly to how scenes of drug use are often filmed, with characters rising in the air and come back down, sighs of euphoria on their faces. This comparison makes a lot of sense within the film as the characters appear perpetually strung out, floating around their environs.

Eve enjoys a dose of blood, drugged by the drink

There’s something dream-like and hazy about the film, like the domestic drama at its core, the basic story of a depressed man and his bon vivant wife visited by her annoying sister at an inconvenient time that causes them to reassess their relationship, is filtered through the mind of someone on a bender. Blood and gore function as necessary ephemeral to a vampire tale, but are never fetishized or allowed to become too much of a focus. The film’s end utilizes feeding to solidify their bond as a couple. In the only real horror shot of the film, we see a close-up of Eve with her fangs full extended and her eyes widening, reminding us that these people are monsters.

I can see how someone might dislike the film’s pacing, as it is often slow and full of silences. Short scenes of dialogue are broken up by what seem like music videos, sequences of actors dancing, driving, pacing, wandering around the city, drinking blood and having sex, while Adam’s curls around them. But it works well, for the hazy, hallucinatory tone of the story, more about characters and feelings than plot. Silences and musical scenes give the characters time to breathe and interact on a deeper level than they could easily put into words, making them feel more alive and complete.

However, there is a certain amount of regression in the relationship between Adam and Eve, who often feel like hipster teenagers looking with distain at everyone who isn’t as cool as they are. They think music sounds best on records, refer to everyone else as zombies and have only ever been friends with people who’s names we know from out history books. At times, their namedropping can begin to feel incessant. I suppose it wouldn’t make an interesting story, but why does every immortal character in fiction travel through the important moments in history like Forest Gump?

All put together for a night out, the lovers are glamorous and ethereal

Strangely, there’s no very much that happens in Only Lovers Left Alive. The only real conflict is Adam’s depression and his contempt for the people around them, who we rarely see. The characters’ fear of contaminated blood, previously a mere quirk of their universe, does become a real conflict, but only toward the end, when they is not much time left to explore it. After much warning that Ava’s going to come and something terrible will happen, she visits for a couple night, kills Ian and is kicked out, never to be see again. Adam and Eve panic about how difficult it will be to hide the body, but accomplish the task with ease and are never caught nor in any danger. Marlowe appears only to impart wisdom, gripe about Shakespeare and die (perhaps in poor taste) of AIDS or some other blood borne disease. There’s no giant battle, no mysterious enemy lurking in the shadows, no finagling their way around the cops and keeping their secret. Instead, it’s a lovely atmospheric meditation on romance, the passing of time, and the impermanence of cultures.

See also on Bitch Flicks: Guest Writer Wednesday: Melancholia, Take 2

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Elizabeth Kiy is a Canadian writer and freelance journalist living in Toronto, Ontario. She recently graduated from Carleton University where she majored in journalism and minored in film.