For the first group, the vampires, this would be entirely in
character. They are the brooding bloodsuckers at the center of Jim Jarmusch’s “Only
Lover Left Alive,” currently playing at Film Streams. One of them is played by Tilda
Swinton, or perhaps simply is Tilda Swinton – I have not been able to determine
if this film is a documentary about the arch, pale English actress. It would be
just like Tilda to lurk about in Tangier like some modern-day Paul Bowles. It
would be very like her to pack for vacations simply by filling valises with
beloved books. And it would be just like her to occasionally dine on human
blood.
Her partner is Tom Hiddleston, an actor best-known for
playing the petulant, frequently campy Loki from the “Thor” and “Avengers”
movies. Here he tamps down his natural inclination to grin saucily and say
something deliciously wicked, which is too bad, really, because how vampiric
would that be? Instead, his version of the nosferatu is a brooding loner in a
shabby chic mansion in a derelict part of Motor
City – which, things being as they
are, is the entirety of Detroit.
He makes droning rock music, letting recordings of his stuff slip out thanks to
his version of Renfield, a wide-eyed instrument dealer played by Anton Yelchin.
Hiddleston takes his friends on nighttime tours of his
adopted city, both agonizing over and enjoying its decay, which is so severe
that pools of toxic chemicals develop in underground parking garages; they are
toxic enough to peel skin from bone. The vampires attend midnight rock concerts
in forlorn clubs, wearing sunglasses, buried in a corner booth, sipping
O-Negative blood from a flask, and nodding their heads appreciatively to the
music.
The film’s primary conceit is that these vampires are the
secret sources of our most valued art – they have slipped their works through
to us through the centuries, penning Shakespeare’s plays and writing minuets
for classical composers. It’s a fun idea, but also well-trod ground. Ever since
the era of the Penny Dreadful, our vampires have been Byronic – mad, bad and
dangerous to know, but also wells of romantic creativity. This film even
name-checks Byron, who Hiddleston is supposed to have been friends with. Hiddleston
has an entire wall of cultural greats, all of whom, one supposes, either were
influenced by vampires or were, themselves, vampires. Endearingly, this wall
seems to include Rodney Dangerfield.
As familiar as this story may be, though, Jarmusch offers a
typically eccentric take on it. The vampiric addiction to blood has been
treated as a metaphor for substance abuse before, and this film visits the same
territory – especially in a long middle-section in which the vampire couple is
visited by an especially troublesome relative whose vampirism is a mechanism
for Courtney Love-styled misbehavior. But Jarmusch extends this, making culture
itself the addiction, with Yelchin’s character acting as a hybrid rock and roll
groupie/drug dealer. He displays guitars the way pot dealers do their wares,
with a clandestine knowingness. In return, he slips Hiddleston’s music out to
the public, unmarked, through back-channels and handshake deals. It is less the
world of music promotion and more the world of contraband.
And so it must be. In the world of the vampire, the most
dangerous thing is being public – Hiddleston is constantly hunted, not by Van
Helsings with stakes, but by rock and roll kids who might dangerously shatter
his anonymity. He really should stop making music, as sooner or later it will
be the death of him. But he can’t, because culture is his drug. He’s the only cinematic
vampire who, arriving in Tangier, hunts an oud rather than a human, and
staggers away, near death from starvation, to a club to hear Lebanese vocalist
Yasmine Hamdan. Blood is boring. Art is the pure stuff.
Speaking of boring, that brings us to our second monster,
Godzilla. Oh, I’m just being catty for the sake of a transition. The new
Godzilla film isn’t boring, precisely. There is a lot to like about it,
including set design directly inspired by a 1960s Japanese palette and a
suitably frantic performance by Brian Cranston, who seems to be the only person
in the film surprised to discover there are giant monsters in the world.
Best still, the film gives us a world in which monstrous
titans have their own agenda, unburdened by the concerns of humanity, which is
mostly to smash each other to pieces, which is a pretty typical agenda in the
animal kingdom. I mean, look at a cat – when they are not asleep, they are
either plotting or rehearsing murder, and we only exist to open cans of tuna
and scratch their itches when they let us.
Godzilla and his foes have even less use for humans than
that. We’re orthogonal to their experience, but for the fact that we sometimes
make things that are full of radioactivity, which is a bit like a tuna can to
these behemoths. So they crash through our cities and eat our nuclear power
plants and all we really get to do is run away from them. There is a plan to
destroy them, but it fails so spectacular that the monsters probably never even
noticed it occurred.
And so the people on the ground are to the monsters as ants
are to us. And it often seems like the filmmakers feel the same way –
characters are perfunctorily drawn in, and frantically go about their business,
and their business is running and hiding.
But the film stays on the ground with these ciphers. We
mostly see Godzilla at a distance or hidden, and if the film’s monsters are
away from our ostensible heroes, we only find out about them from news reports.
It isn’t until the film’s last scenes that we are given a few minutes of
Godzilla duking it out with his foes in a San
Francisco that they have managed to flatten and set
fire to, and it isn’t enough. Godzilla isn’t a minor character in his own story
– he’s the star.
The film needed a director who can choreograph giant monster
action scenes, and doesn’t have it. They just sort of swat at each other, and
Godzilla sometimes spits fire (once spectacularly), but otherwise seems to
forget he has that ability. But film is the staging of action – character is
revealed through action. A well-choreographed fight scene can tell you more
about a character, more honestly, than hours of dialogue. All we learn about
Godzilla is that he is big and he sometimes hits things, and that doesn’t make
him Godzilla, that makes him any monster. Heck, that makes him Tommy Lee Jones
in “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” who, frankly, was more terrifying than anything
shown in “Godzilla.”
Even cats are more terrifying, once you realize that, when
they look at you, sometimes they are wondering to themselves. And what they are
wondering is: What if humans were a little bit smaller, and cats were a little
bit bigger?
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