Let's start with the Wikipedia entry for it, which says
"Perfume: The Story of a Murderer is a 1985 literary historical cross-genre novel (originally published in German as Das Parfum) by German writer Patrick Süskind. The novel explores the sense of smell and its relationship with the emotional meaning that scents may carry. Above all it is a story of identity, communication and the morality of the human spirit."
So a story of a murderer - the clue is in the title - isn't about a lunatic murdering virgins and abusing their bodies to distill scent from them, but is about nice, fluffy things like identity, communication, and the human spirit. Is it really?
Imagine an advertisement for a film. It promises to feature the casual murder of 20 virgins - and the emphasis of their sexual status is Suskind's, not mine - followed by an orgy and scenes of cannibalism. The bodies of the murder victims are abused by the murderer in some fetishistic way to distill "perfume". What kind of film would you expect - an exploitative torture porn video nasty, or something literary and sophisticated.
I appreciate the case for the defence will be that I shouldn't take this too literally - despite Suskind's determined focus on making each scene as real as possible by his focus on the senses throughout the novel - and that this is magical realism, where the brutal slaughter of young women is a metaphor for.... - what exactly? This case is laid out, for example, in the dozens of laudatory reviews on Amazon, for example this one:
"I came to this book expecting to find a crime novel, or a thriller, about a serial killer. Instead I found a beautifully written and deeply researched novel about a young Frenchman with an unusual sense of smell and a unique gift for the art of the perfumier. In fact, the murders of young girls, so emphasised in the film, take second place to the marvellous descriptions of how perfume is made, and the way in which Grenouille gradually infiltrates the profession, becoming a master perfumier due to his prodigious gifts"
The murders of girls takes second place to the descriptions of how perfume is made? Really? I don't give a stuff about the technical detail as to how perfume is made, but I am pretty sure it doesn't involve murdering virgins. grenouille may have been a skilled perfumier, and I am sure Hitler could whip up a nice cheese omelette, but talk about missing the point.
To be as clear as possible, it is not the literary treatment of murder that I find objectionable - that would preclude me from appreciating large sections of world literature, including Shakespeare (Titus Andronicus, anyone?). Murder can be used to shock, to amuse, or to make any other number of points. It can even be handled in a way that is hard to stomach (for example, American Psycho). But the idea that women's bodies contain within them an essence that can be found as long as you kill enough of them, and that this is some way legitimises their killing, I found nauseating.
I am aware I have not made the case for the prosecution compellingly here - it is hard to define the offensive, even when it is staring you in the face. Equally I accept no-one else seems to have a problem with this novel and its treatment of women. But I found it nasty, brutal, and disturbing. If that was Suskind's intention, fine, but why is everyone else pretending this is a high minded dissertation on identity and the like?
PS. I started this blog entry using voice recognition - and this is what came out!! How sad he had a terrible chocolate!
"I found the misogyny in Patrick siskins perfume quite disturbing this is a lot of about a person who is has a terrible chocolate and grows up to become massive history skin is creating perfume and this instance decides bizarre me to create perfect from the dead bodies this is presented as being workable months of something or invite be quite sympathetic wants".
Sorry, this might get long. I haven't read the book. I got here by looking for feminist reviews of the movie to see if there were any responses focusing on the treatment of women. I began watching the movie; I liked the dark, creepy, detail-oriented style, and I enjoy a good dark story here and there, but I had to get up and leave after the first murder. The other feminist-type review I've read via googling says something like "these murders aren't eroticised" which to me is pure bs. Though this is just based on the very few minutes of footage I actually watched, I was really revolted by what I was watching-- close-up, lovingly rendered shots of him unbuttoning the dead girl's dress, sliding it down her body, rubbing his nose on her chest... ugh I feel sick and panicky just thinking about it.
ReplyDeleteAn acquaintance asked me later why I left early and I said I couldn't handle watching eroticised depictions of sexual assault/violence against women, and his response was "well he didn't rape her, he just smelled her." No, sorry, he didn't "just smell her." You don't get to tell me what I'm allowed to be uncomfortable with. I don't particularly care which body parts he used to violate her, I'm really not interested in watching that in hi-res macro shots for the sake of your ~artsy~ moral ambiguity.
As I understand it, the rest of the film goes on to include such fantastic topics as murdering a sex worker, leaving naked women's bodies strewn around the city, and stalking a teenage girl in order to kill her, before ending with the father of said teenage girl (and also the whole world) adoring and embracing the perpetrator. Wonderful. I'm not necessarily saying that this is a story that shouldn't be told (but hey let's think critically about how necessary it is to put even more depictions of remorseless violence against women into the world before just going ahead with it), but can it maybe not be filmed in such an eroticised triggering way? I can't imagine that many other sexual assault survivors have been able to sit through this movie without flashbacks or panic attacks.
Ugh, sorry for the novel. I was really bothered by this and by the lack of anyone else seeming to feel the same way. Hopefully the first murder in the movie is the worst one and the protagonist is thoroughly vilified after that, but somehow I doubt it.
p.s. I've looked through your blog a bit and see that you enjoy finding similarities between books. May I direct you toward the Roald Dahl story "Bitch," of which "perfume" strongly reminded me. I'm assuming you haven't read this or you might have mentioned it. That story and the book it was published in (Switch Bitch) are all kind of sickening/thrilling sexual taboo stories, all of which I enjoyed for the writing craft but all of which featured rather questionably assumed consent, not least "Bitch," which to my mind glamorizes forced sex in a totally unquestioned way (without exception, the women love and welcome it), but it was written for playboy, after all.
ReplyDeleteGlad it's not just me that thinks this story is just a thinly veiled excuse to eroticise and justify the killing of women, who are afforded no personality or feelings and who are just depicted as tools for a man to use.
ReplyDeleteWhy is violence against women used as entertainment, time and time again? From porn to films like this - why can people not see all of this for what it really is?