Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

Film Essay:

“Perfume: The Story of a Murderer” as an Illustration of

ADHESIVE PSEUDO-OBJECT-RELATIONS

Like the novel by Patrick Süskind, Tom Tykwer’s film adaptation of Perfume: the story

of a murderer (1986) is a gripping horror tale of a fictional eighteenth-century French serial

killer. I believe it is also a grotesque version of those cases of trauma and consequence that

analysts observe in the privacy of their consulting rooms. Perhaps if, as Freud (1933) suggests,

extraordinary pathology can draw our attention to normal neurotic conditions, it may also be true

that extraordinary fantasy may provide insight into those more ordinary pathological states. It

may also be that certain artists, having “turned away from external reality... know more about

internal, psychical reality and can reveal a number of things to us that would otherwise be

inaccessible to us” (Freud 1933,p. 58-59).

Tykwer’s visually sumptuous film version of Süskind’s story is a masterpiece, to be sure.

However, as one intimately acquainted with the book, I cannot help but regret the necessary

abbreviation of the details of each character’s experience, the reduction in the number of events

in the life of the protagonist and the condensation of the passage of years leading to the

development of the murderer that the translation of Süskind’s story into a commercially viable

film unfortunately demands. However, I believe that, in spite of Tykwer’s considerable

abridgement, Perfume (the movie) can be seen as allegory, expressing some basic truths or

generalizations about human existence and as parable, highlighting certain attitudes or principles

relevant to our clinical work.

Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

The film takes us back to eighteenth century France, where we are introduced to Jean-

Baptiste Grenouille (played by Ben Whishaw, the acclaimed young British actor who won

critical acclaim for his performance as Hamlet at London's Old Vic). Unlike the novel, in the

first scene the murderer Genouille is lead, dressed in filthy tatters and bound in chains, from his

cell into the public square where he will be tortured and executed for his crimes before a bloodthirsty

crowd.

Then, all is flashback as we witness the birth of Grenouille (the name means “frog” in

French) in Paris in 1738 on a hot summer’s day. The heat intensifies the putrid odors of death

and decay, life and lust and the fish stall in which his mother (Birgit Minichmayr) stands as she

begins her labor of birth. A voice over (of the narrator, John Hurt) tells us that, just as she has

with the four stillborn and almost born who preceded him, Grenouille’s mother squats down

under the gutting table, cuts the cord with a butcher knife, expecting the newborn thing to be

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shoveled away with the offal and fish heads at the end of the day. However, seemingly

stimulated by the odors that surround him, Grenouille’s cry of outrage does not go unnoticed, as

have those of his more unfortunate siblings, and he is rescued as his cry betrays his mother’s

crime, resulting in her arrest and hanging in the Place de Gréve

Grenouille is taken in by Madame Gaillard, (Sian Thomas) a professional foster mother,

who boards children for her living. The many other children in her care come to fear Grenouille

and attempt to smother him until they finally give up, resorting to avoidance. We are told that

Grenouille does not stand until the age of three, nor speak until the age of four. However, when

he does speak, he uses only nouns for concrete objects that appear to subdue him. (It may be

interesting to note that the word concrete is used in the realm of perfumery to denote ‘a waxy

essence of flowers, prepared by extraction and evaporation.’) It is as if Grenouille sees, hears or

feels nothing -- he only smells. In fact it is as if he encloses himself in smells -- conjuring up a

blissful olfactory experience each time he utters a word -- and this is how he learns to speak.

Abstracts remain a mystery to Grenouille. Only things that smell have meaning. We are

told that language lacks the refinement for communicating the richness of Grenouille’s olfactory

world, and in this instance the imagery of the film excels. We watch as he creates new smells in

his mind by combining those already known to him and he seems able to smell these through

sheer force of imagination. In this way he appears to effectively shut out the world.

In the film, the extent of the trauma that Grenouille endures and the nature of his means

of survival is truncated. While, in the novel Süskind makes it quite explicit that, just as he had

survived his own birth in a garbage can, while in the custody of Madame Gaillard Grenouille

survives measles, dysentery, chicken pox, cholera, a twenty foot fall into a well, and scalding

with boiling water, which has been poured over his chest. He has forgone love in favor of

survival, and survive he does. He has made his decision “vegetatively, as a bean when once

tossed aside must decide if it ought to germinate or had better let things be” (Süskind, 1986,

p.25). In the novel, Süskind likens Grenouille’s technique of survival to that of the tick:

For which life has nothing better to offer than perpetual hibernation...which by

rolling its blue-grey body up into a ball offers the least possible surface to the

world; which by making its skin smooth [and] dense, emits nothing ... makes itself

extra small and inconspicuous [so] that no one will see it and step on it. The lonely

tick,which, wrapped up in itself, huddles in its tree, blind deaf and dumb and

simply sniffs...for the blood of some passing animal that it could never reach on its

own power...the tick, stubborn, sullen and loathsome, huddles there and lives and

waits...for that most improbable of chances...and only then does it abandon caution

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and drop and scratch and bore and bite into that alien flesh...The young Grenouille

was such a tick...encapsulated in himself [he] waited for better

...