Melancholic Modernism in Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive
Melancholic Modernism in Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive

Summary/Abstract: The essay explores Adorno’s notion that modernist art is a dialectic between the ideal andthe spleen in relation to Jim Jarmusch’s 2013 film, Only Lovers Left Alive. The film tracksbohemian vampires who map onto the idealist and splenetic as modernist aesthetes,setting a mood of gothic melancholy. Retreating from modern capitalism and consumerism—the zombie world in the film—the characters illustrate the film’s succession of binariesin an attempt to retain their purity and manage their concomitant melancholy. Ultimately,they must compromise, and their pragmatic negotiations are telling. The essay exploresthese concepts concerning the main characters, Adam and Eve, the prominent locationsDetroit and Tangier, and the main dialectical concepts of the splenetic and the ideal. Jar-musch’s film extends Adorno’s insightful pairing and updates it for an artistic and socialmilieu quite different than the one that Adorno wrote from, while Adorno’s concepts drawout the philosophical content latent in the film. Melancholy is expressed as a necessarycondition for an adequate post-industrial aesthetic, but it is insufficient for aesthetic sur-vival.

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