More Perfume ...


After writing about "Perfume: The Story of a Murderer," yesterday, I took my dog for a walk over Thumb Butte, and found that the story was still working beneath the surface. Having watched Brugh work with pattern level consciousness a few times one thing I've picked up is that the underlying pattern is usually simple, and the complex overlay of metaphor the gift wrapping.

For example, once I was with a group doing dream work, and a woman had a presenting dream about cocks. I think there were five of them but can't recall now. The discussion of this began to range into Phallos, Egyptian motifs, and it kept expanding. I guess that's what art does. It creates from the most basic energies of the body. At some point I asked her how many male lovers she'd had and it was five. She broke into tears and the energy of the dream began to come through.

There are two points to this remembrance. One, of course, is that self-selected evidence of ability is suspect. The second is that sometimes a cock is just a cock. With that in mind:

The pattern of the movie, Perfume, is somewhere beneath the story. Any number of stories can be built over the basic seven patterns. So what is the basic pattern?

I went back to what the movie presented and looked at it as a separate piece of art from the book. I haven't read the book yet but intend to; from what I've read about it, it doesn't begin with the pronouncement of sentence and flash back, but begins with the birth of John-Baptiste in the fish market in Paris. Still, the fish is a symbol for spirit, and what is born has no scent of his own. He takes on all the scents from the material world. He is obsessed with the scent of the female body. At the pattern level this is easily read as the longing of spirit for reunion with matter. But back to the movie:

The first scene is a condemned man who is going to be placed on a cross and have all his joints broken. This invokes the number 13 (major body joints) as well as the cross (to which he is to be secured), and "his eyes to heaven." A pretty good argument here that we are dealing with human sacrifice for the purpose of removing shadow from the community. There is a deeper pattern involving the cross and the Christ mystery at the pattern level, involving the nailing of the man to the cross as symbolic of nailing him to the mother from whom he refuses to separate. It is the cross to which John- Baptiste is to be secured for his horrendous crimes against the community.

The basic pattern beneath the Christ story, or one basic pattern anyway, is the removal of shadow by ritual, which is accepted by the pattern reading psyche in lieu of actual human sacrifice. The reason for having faith in the ritual of symbolic sacrifice is that if it is not done in earnest, it won't be accepted in lieu of the real thing. So the ritual has to be carried out in earnest. The participants have to believe that an innocent man is being sacrificed to take their sins (the shadow) off the group and return it to a state of innocence. This won't last long, so he has to be magically reborn so it can be repeated next year. Repression of basic instincts builds up some very dark propensities. But of course somebody understood the pattern beneath the ritual or they couldn't have designed it.

So there is a basic pattern similarity at the level of using human sacrifice of a spiritual, non human, being for shadow removal.

Now we move to the face of John-Baptiste, and back into a memory of events leading up to this moment. Or do we? Maybe we move somewhere else, to a man who has no scent of his own, and thus is outside of the corporeal. The thirteen joints to be broken are the ankles, knees, hips, shoulders, elbows, wrists, and finally, by hanging, the neck.

Each of the women is killed by a blow, just as the sentence reads each joint is to be broken by a blow with an iron bar. Only the last one, the one who has been taken by the father to a tower, isn't seen to be killed by a blow to the back of the head. She meets his eyes. There is a joining of heaven and earth, a recognition of the deeper connection between predator and prey. The shadow is removed and the innocence returned to the community, which allows a community release of what causes the shadow: repression of instinctual desires. Of course it comes right back again. It always does. Angels don't fuck.

This entire ritual of sacrifice and redemption is there at the pattern level. The perfume of life's mystery is chased through thirteen movements. The perfume is poured over the head as the resistance ends, and John-Baptiste is completely consumed -- eaten -- by the community. Not a trace remains.

While the story may be enjoyed on many levels, I find this pattern satisfies a puzzle the film presents at the most basic level. It is the mystery of transformation of pain. It is the mystery of immediate experience, which smell provides, which touch provides, but which vision does not necessarily provide. Vision can anticipate and remember. Smell and touch and hearing are in the moment. My dog doesn't see very well, because he has developed his sense of smell to the detriment of vision. I have done the opposite, and see in detail and in gradations of color. He knows when somebody's coming before I know it, unless of course it is somebody who has no scent.

This may burn down the house to roast a pig. It might be just a great yarn that I read more into than is there. But I don't think so. There are other symbols I don't even touch on, such as the original perfume sought being "Amor and Psyche," and that perfume is composed of three levels, with four notes. This brings up twelve plus the unknown element, 13. The creation of Amor and Psyche suggests, again, the combining of heaven and earth. And there are the plums, which I read as symbolic of the woman's coming of age and subsequent life cycles, spilled by her untimely demise. I see this as the story over the pattern. At a pattern level the plum is purple, which was the color restricted to use by royalty.

Sometimes I wonder if my mind's working in this way could secure a diagnosis of paranoia. It is after all a process by which one connects seemingly related events to reach an absurd conclusion. Burroughs said that the paranoid is somebody "who knows something of what's going on." I like that description. My connections lead me to compare this structure with that of some other stories which have absurd or illogical events later revealed to be unfolding outside the linearity of materialization.

There are many stories which use the device of someone's death being the beginning of a story which to an external observer would not be visible, or take more than a minute or two. I don't think this follows the structure of the book, but several directors tried and failed to film the book, some pronouncing it "unfilmable." I was struck by the unreality of some of the scenes, such as John-Baptiste's having no scent, and the rather fantastic nature of his distilling essence from the females, whom he seemed to be able to snatch in an almost supernatural way, like a ghost, or spirit.

Stories which unfold partially inside and partially outside of the linear event field include, "An Occurrence At Own Creek Bridge" and "Jacob's Ladder." My favorite is William S. Burroughs' "Where He Was Going," which I have on his "Dead City Radio" album.

In each example, something happens at the moment of execution, or between the moment of wounding and the moment of death. At Owl Creek Bridge the rope broke and the soldier escaped by swimming the river, bullets hitting all around him. In Jacob's Ladder there is a long process by which the soul comes to terms with what it cannot let go of, until the moment of surrender. In the Burroughs' piece it is more subtle, ending with the gangster meeting his denied energy in a Mexican mercado on Dia de los muertos, Day of the Dead, and looking into a pinwheel revolving, as the black spaces in it began to expand ... "and he knew that was where he was going."

Linda's take on the movie was that scent is immediate experience, something outside the linear, cause and effect world we have moved into since we developed a metaphorical consciousness. We have lost the ability to know things directly, by their scent. And yet we live immersed in a chemical process which is more real and more determinative than all the constructions we create to protect us from this reality. And it is the loss of connection with this immediacy of life, the body's instincts, that is the murder of the feminine. By the time we reflect on something it has already happened, and we are missing what is happening during the moment of reflection. So we live in a dream world, chained inside the cave, watching the shadows of reality that play on the walls.

I tried to touch on that in yesterday's post, but I think she put it more succinctly than I did.

Posted: Sat - May 24, 2008 at 11:27 AM