In this paper I read Jim Jarmusch’s 2014 vampire film Only Lovers Left Alive as a “landscape of monstrosity” that inadvertently and momentarily recovers Indigenous and African American presence in moments of erasure and absence, as werewolves and ghosts to the white vampire elite and zombie working class. Though this work has productively described the settler colonial conditions of racialized (re)development in the Motor City, it ignores white possession as a process that mythologizes Indigenous history and delegitimizes Indigenous people. Recently, scholars have addressed the ways in which this frontier rhetoric arouses settler colonial desire for land based not just on a notion of black criminality or ineptitude, but also more fundamentally on an assumption of deferred white possession.
Ultimately, the article emphasizes that Jarmusch's film, to a large extent, becomes a warning against the inevitable results of advanced capitalism practiced on a global scale.Īfter a decade of accelerated disinvestment and depopulation, Detroit (re)appeared in the national imaginary as an “urban frontier” open for (re)settlement by (mostly white) creative entrepreneurs. Then, the focus is on the construction of main characters-Adam and Eve, ageless vampires and spouses-who thanks to nostalgic theatricality and performance recon-figure the mainstream monstrosity. " Hence, the article engages primarily with Jarmusch's indie aesthetics that goes beyond easily recognizable patterns and generic conventions and allows the director to emphasize that the arts are rejuvenating forces, the antidote to a commoditized environment. Now entirely focused on the duplication of the same aesthetic codes and signs, Gothic productions conform to the rules of postindustrial culture, enriching entertainment imagery with the neutralized concept of " other-ness.
" By considering Jean Baudrillard's concept of transaes-thetics and Judith Halberstam's writings on contemporary monstrosity, the paper shows that a commodified Gothic mode has lost its older de-constructive functions that operated on the margins of the mainstream.
Drawing on critical theory and the postmodern theoretical framework, the article suggests that the film transgresses contemporary culture immersed in a " culture of death " that has produced a vast amount of cultural texts under the rubric of " Gothicism. A b s t r A c t The paper gives insight into the revaluation of popular Gothic aesthetics in Jim Jarmusch's 2014 production Only Lovers Left Alive.
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