Smell objectification in Perfume

I really enjoyed Tom Tykwer's sensual masterpiece, Perfume(2006). The film is visually ravishing in both a grotesque and genuinely beautiful manner. Of course, one cannot help, but document Tykwer's attempt to convey smell through the celluloid as one of a kind. Ideologically, the film renders an interesting shift of the typical gazesque interpretation of female objectification. It is true that the women are very much objectified visually, by the camera as normal in mainstream cinema, but the sense of smell and the ways sound are incorporated in the cinematic act of smelling in this film are equally, as pedestal placing.

The act of smelling in Perfume is one which comes to be greatly more sensual for the films protagonist than sight. This is an interesting chiding since smell is not exactly the dominate cinematic sense, and smell-o-vision is generally considered a flop. Tykwer does a masterful job of portraying visually smells. He does it by almost using montage editing between lush, beautiful smelled objects, and pristine flaring nostrils. Adding to the experience is the nearly constant audio trope of sniffing. These things combine make you notice every time you sniff during and after the film.

With this in mind, it seems that the way in which women are often the target of smell in Perfume provides a different perspective on objectification. In Berardinelli's review of Perfume he talks about the sexual metaphor brought forward by the film. All the women murdered were virgins (except the prostitute),and they were in no way sexually abused. However none the less something is taken from them. Their essence is stolen. Berardinelli, puts it well, "Jean-Baptiste's crimes are rape and murder, although his raping occurs not through penetration but through distillation ". The protagonist in steeling these women's essences reveals something interesting. A concept, that smell is another social/cultural method by which objectification occurs. Smell objectification demands that there is a normative scent, a stereotypical odor of woman. Even the timeless saying, girls are made of sugar, spice, and everything nice, possibly notes an aromatic aspect of the ideal woman.

Perfume is interesting then, because of a smell dichotomy. On one level Jean-Baptiste, very much idolizes or this normative notion of femininity through odor, but on another level the manner and reality of the smelling boasts something different. Women, smelled by the protagonist are smelled, in well, malodorous regions. Also, being that the film takes place in the hardly sanitary eighteenth century does not suggest an ideal cultural, notion of female smell. yet, what is comparative to their virginity, their essence is stolen.