Note: the following article on time and meaning in Only Lovers Left Alive is a modified excerpt from my article “Reconfiguring the Garden of Eden: Suspended Temporality in Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive”. The Eternal Return: Myth Updating In Contemporary Literature. Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics. 40.2 (2017): 123-134.
For a list of my other academic publications, see here.
Arguably one of the most pivotal moments of Only Lovers Left Alive comes when Adam, the male vampire protagonist, utters with despaired surrender that he feels as if “all the sand is at the bottom of the hourglass”.
He expresses his misery at the realization that every experience worth having has already been had and, as he believes, the future holds nothing better. Eve, his loyal partner who is much more of an optimist by nature, tells him to simply turn the hourglass over; to reset time.
In effect, the core problem of Only Lovers Left Alive is indeed related to time, particularly in the context of experience and progress: If perfection is already achieved (the archetypal paradise of the Garden of Eden), is the only way forward through loss and suffering? And, perhaps more importantly, to which extent is the human experience intrinsically connected with this grand paradox of time and progress?
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