Perfume: The Story of a Murderer


This is a movie Brugh Joy showed at our recent gathering where we pursue higher consciousness, lower consciousness, and lamb chops with red wine. Most of the movies Brugh uses to show pattern levels of the psyche I'm familiar with -- Breaking the Waves; The Hitcher, Silence of the Lambs, Basic Instincts, Sacred Blood -- but this one I'd never heard of. What a ride it is!

First of all Brugh warned that he's had at least one person who was furious with him for recommending the film, presumably because of the serial killing and orgiastic sex. As with most movies which reveal something very deep in the psyche, it is appreciated only if it is read in the way one reads dreams. To look at it literally and with the moral judgements of the communal mind is a waste of good liquor.

I don't want to go through the movie as a series of events, or scenes, because that's what the Wikidpedia entry does. What fascinates me is the beginning premise, which is that the story of John-Baptiste Grenouille is lost to conscious memory, because it was contained in sense of smell, something delicate and ephemeral, something which dissipates and can't be remembered with reason.

That is like life itself, which is demonstrated in the first killing, when the perfumer lingers over the girl's body trying to hold on to the scent of her, until it has gone away. How many of us, I wonder, have lingered just this way over a lost love? Like the perfumer, John-Baptiste, we follow desire but cannot possess her, and when we try desire slips away, and we follow with our perfume bottle and skills of seduction.

But the essence of scent is so much deeper than analogy. It is the chemistry beneath the analogical mind. It was arguably the rate of decay of an identifiable odor which allowed early mammals to develop a mental construct for movement in time, and thus, abstraction. The animal which matches the scent can be imaged in the brain, and the strength of the scent can move the image along a distance line, or time line. The predator smells the prey and sometimes, vice versa. Sometimes not fast enough.

Scent is the interaction of chemicals we don't even consciously know about most of the time. We have receptor proteins which unlock specific odor molecules. And like John-Baptiste, who precedes and announces Christ Consciousness, we are instinctual in our first phases. During this time John-Baptiste works in a tannery, curing animal hides. But like any alchemist, he is in search of the ineffable perfume of consciousness, the connection to the abstract.

While he assembles the perfume of the divine, he works with the magic number of 13. There is one unknown element where the energy can shift. Judas, for example, was the place in the Christ mandala where the energy shifts. In John-Baptist's mixture there was the essence of 12 virgins and one prostitute. The prostitute had a dog, and the dog knew her scent in its essence. A dog in a dream is often the instinctual body. "Run Toto!" I would see that as the element where energy from outside the mandala can come in, reserving the last kill for the transcendent consciousness. The others he killed from behind. We don't see her killed. We see her and John-Baptiste look at each other, the unification of the opposites.

When I read the Wikipedia entry about the novel, it is more detailed of course than the film, and relates that Grenouille spent seven years alone in a cave until awaking from a dream of being disgusted by his own odor, to discover that he had none. He made an odor for himself out of cat shit and vinegar and cheese, so that he would be accepted into society. But he had no scent of his own, it was all the creation of what he took into himself from outside himself.

I don't intend to try to tell you what the movie is about or what it means, because that would be, in my estimation, like trying to tell you what a David Lynch film is about. It isn't designed to yield easily to the receptor proteins which unlock the odor molecules. It is rich enough that it can stimulate a lot of different archetypal images and patterns, like the olfactory sense itself, and so it expands and grows like a rug on a loom.

The only person in the film I recognized was Dustin Hoffman, the perfumer to whom Grenouille was apprenticed and from whom he learned the secrets of manifesting essence.

The place where I found myself puzzled in my interpretation of the film was comparing to the review of the book on Wikipedia, where the assumption was that the girl he killed last was the source of his powers over those assembled to sacrifice him to heaven. My reading of the pattern level was that his perfume was the instinctual love, which we continually try to sacrifice to reason and order, but which finds a way to reassert itself as primary. It comes from nature, which is in essence feminine (mother nature).

In my view the perfume he had at his transcendence was the completion of the mysterious process suggested by 13. It was by analogy the moment at the peak of our powers when we can bestow grace. There was a similar moment in The Last Temptation of Christ when Jesus raised Lazurus from the dead. Heaven and earth are unified as the repressed energies of love for the body are released from the bondage of reason's authority. Then there is the decline of powers, until they are spent. And in the end, Grenouille is devoured. There is no trace left behind.

And ain't that just the way the river flows ...

Posted: Fri - May 23, 2008 at 03:12 PM