Fantasies of Immortality, the Good Life and Romantic Love in Only Lovers Left Alive and Groundhog Day

Only Lovers Left Alive is a modern-day vampire fantasy film. The film represents an artistic response to the continuing 21st century dominance of blockbuster fantasy films among U.S. movie going audiences. Director Jim Jarmusch believes that watching formulaic, action-oriented blockbuster fantasy films impedes the imagination of individuals and decreases the likelihood that they will be inspired to develop new approaches to solving the urgent problems of post-industrial society. Instead, Only Lovers Left Alive provides a thought-provoking perspective on how to use film fantasy to stimulate imagination. He offers a vision of the relationship between reality and fantasy in film that emphasizes the utopian potential of the medium. Jarmusch portrays a relatively plotless and slow-moving fantasy world that is the antithesis of blockbuster fantasy films. Only Lovers Left Alive also uses the device of practical vampire immortality in order to raise important philosophical questions about what constitutes a good life. In so doing, it shares certain features in common with Groundhog Day (1993) and both films contain elements of Cavell’s comedy of remarriage genre, which I use to analyze the thematic structure of these films.