Only Lovers Left Alive script

 AUDIO 1
 Adam and Eve are vampires. A married couple that had been living apart until the events of the film. Adam, suffering from depression, has his wife meet him in Detroit to reconnect. Adam has distanced himself from humanity, composing his music in secret and having all his errands performed by a human assistant, Ian, who does not know Adam is a vampire. Eve wants Adam to see the beauty in humanity and in life itself. As vampires, they have so much time on Earth, and they may as well enjoy all of it, she argues. Adam believes that humanity long ago reached its peak and is now on a downward spiral from which it can never recover. Eve believes that there is still time to revive or rebuild the world. Eve is older than Adam, and she has an even longer view of history. She has seen societies crumble into dust and be remade. Adam has not. This explains their differing worldviews. With rare exception, vampire movies require some relationship with the past. Bram Stoker's Dracula spends a substantial amount of time in prologue, flashbacks and remembrance of things past.   
 Dracula is still in mourning over the tragic and entirely avoidable loss of his wife, who flung herself out of a castle when she was mistakenly informed his Dracula's passing. The film follows Dracula's quest to replace his wife with Mina, a woman who the film implies is the reincarnation of the deceased wife – a figurative ghost of the past – a memory – made literal in the body of Mina. Interview with the Vampire is told through the framing device of a vampire telling his life story to a mortal. It is all flashback. Only Lovers Left Alive shows photographs of the past but never flashbacks. We, the audience, are trapped in the present while Adam is figuratively trapped in the past. In fact, Adam is obsessed with the past. His melancholic attitude casts a thick fog over everything that he does. He believes that humans – who he calls “zombies” – have slowly eradicated everything beautiful in the world – art, science, even their blood. Diseases and drugs have polluted the bloodlines of humanity, and with few safe options, Adam relies on a doctor to provide him with clean blood.   
 AUDIO 2
 Adam's unceasing nostalgia for what once was is seen from the onset. The camera swirls around him as if he is circling the drain, while wearing an ancient robe later confirmed to be roughly two centuries old while holding a lute – a medieval instrument no longer in popular use – all to the beats of the song “Funnel of Love” a song released in 1961 but covered half a century later for this version. Past and present crashing together. Shortly thereafter, his human assistant Ian arrives to deliver several guitars – none of them recent models. This one from 1959, the next from 1960 and so forth. Later in the film, Eve remarks that his other guitar is from 1905. When Adam visits the doctor, he wears a stethoscope that the doctor recognizes as being an antique. We later learn it is from 1968. Adam only uses a landline on a practically prehistoric phone. Although he owns a computer, he uses an old television set as its monitor. Adam does not simply pine for the past – he hungers for it. He takes Eve to the Michigan Theater, which he says was built over where Henry Ford made his first prototype.   
 In collecting these objects and making these broad declarations about how much better life was before, we see a vampiric twist on romanticization of the past, especially personal history. Viewing our lives through the good times, no matter how inaccurate. When Eve tells Adam of his heroes, he deflects, saying he has no heroes, but this is not true. His wall is adorned with those humans he admires – but this shrine to the so-called “great men” of the past is a romanticization. Henry Ford was not only an inventor. He was also a Nazi sympathizer. Edgar Allan Poe was a drug addict who married his underage cousin. The film shows us that even a vampire, someone who lived through much of history, can suffer the human trappings of seeing the past as pristine. Adam's brain knows it was not – he lived it – but his heart tells him something else. By re-imagining the past as better than it was, he gains a miserable outlook on the present. Because of this, he stays in one place, as suggested by this visual in which he plays the drugs, sitting in one place, while echos of him move about, unable to escape.   
 AUDIO 3
 By remembering the past one day when it happened altogether differently, people re-write that past. Adam and Eve both know a vampire who is revealed to be historical figure Christopher Marlowe. The film plays us a nonsense conspiracy theory that Marlowe was the true author of Shakespeare's plays. The past is fake. The real mixed with the false. The history is destroyed when thought of inaccurately. Adam's aliases at the hospital include Dr. Faust and Dr. Caligari, fictional characters from old stories. Adam is fake. The real mixed with the false again. When Eve's sister, Eva, unexpectedly comes to visit, Eve and Adam argue over whether or not their previous encounter with Eva was so bad. The past is unclear. Eva, as a vampire, is quite old, but her relationship with the past and personal growth is different from that of Adam. While Adam is obsessed with the past to the point that he becomes depressed, Eva is forever in the present, never growing or changing for either the better or the worse. She is always childlike no matter how old she becomes. Which is more healthy?   
 Remembering history inaccurately – putting it on a pedestal – makes one unhappy about the present. Adam no doubt loves the 1960's, an era of explosive rock and roll, [1] but that was also the time police used hoses and attack dogs to stop children from marching in favor of civil rights. The older generation refers to the 1950's as a kinder, gentler time, but that was also the era of the Cold War, McCarthyism, segregation and lynchings. The 1940's saw the worst of World War II. In the 1930's, one could catch cold, have it turn into bronchitis and die. Today, we have antibiotics. Women didn't have the right to vote in America until the 1920's. If Adam had taken a longer view of history, he would not assume that humanity is doomed. Progress happens. Two steps forward, one step backward. One could argue we are currently in a “one step backward” decade, but that doesn't mean it's over. At the end of the film, Adam and Eve look off into the middle distance, sigh like classic tragedians and declare that humanity is doomed. With the death of their friend, the vampire Christopher Marlowe, it feels as if an entire era has faded away.   
 AUDIO 4
 “Zombies” are obsessed with oil to the point of causing conflicts and soon will be obsessed with water. They speculate that this could be how the world ends. Although not outright said, their conclusion is to start over, to be the new “Adam and Eve” of Earth, turning a young couple into vampires. To be the genesis of a new world now that the old world is breathing its last breath. Earlier in the film, Adam says that the sands of the hourglass have almost gone, to which Eve replies “Time to turn it over then.” This foreshadows the ending as well as points out the core ideas of the film. Adam and Eve are worry about humans only realizing the future is coming when it's too late, but the vampire couple is trapped in the past too. They ignore the future by lamenting the loss of the past. They do nothing to change things and preserve things – they only replace them. By becoming the new Biblical Adam and Eve, they do not look into the future but into the past. They rewrite history as much as the film re-writes history. The past, present and future have collapsed in on itself.   
 All they will try to do now...is survive. Adam's view is that humans have reached their potential and that all that's left is nothingness. Eve disagrees. History is cyclical, like the opening shots of the film. What was once destroyed can be rebuilt. Most of the film takes place in Detroit during a time of an economic disaster. Adam is saddened by this, but Eve is hopeful the city can be renewed. Not long after the release of the film, Detroit did begin to rebound. It is currently reviving itself. Destruction of history or renewal? Both Adam and Eve’s views on human prospects converge in the final scene and provides a punctuation mark to the assessment of both history and the future. When Adam and Eve conclude that they must turn the young couple, the film tells us that – one day – we may have to start over. That is not the say that what he do doesn't matter and that we can always rebuild. Far from it. The film gives us the clear impression that if we want to remake the world, we actually need to act.