1. The film "Perfume: The Story of a Murderer", adapted from the novel of the same name by German writer Patrick Suskind, is gloomy and mysterious, and everyone who has seen it will have a feeling of excitement and confusion. The excitement is due to the twists and turns of the plot, which are bizarre and unimaginable; the confusion is because the whole event seems to go beyond people's judgments of good and evil, right and wrong, making moral judgment impossible.
The olfactory genius Jean-Baptiste Grenouille was born in a cold world. The abandonment of his biological mother, the loneliness in the nursery, the oppression of the tannery owner, did not kill him, but kept him tenaciously alive "like a germ." What keeps him alive is not love for life, but hate, "he chose to live out of sheer rebellion and sheer malice". The soul residing in this scarred body obviously has no ability to transcend its tragic situation. What the world has given him, he will still reproduce, even exponentially and extremely. In his consciousness, no one has ever loved and warmed him, and he has no obligation to love and warm others. If he is a mediocre person, he will grow and die silently in this world like other vicious and mediocre people. But he had extraordinary abilities, so he was destined to bring an uproar to the world.
The only meaning of his existence is to satisfy his sense of smell. He wants to smell all the flavors in the world and find the best smell in the world. Under his genius sense of smell, he found the most beautiful smell in the world - the body fragrance of a girl. In order to preserve this scent, he murdered teenage girls one after another, extracting a perfume from the scents collected from their bodies. During the murder, he had no guilt, he indulged in his great work. In comparison, the lives of these teenage girls are nothing. He was pulled by the joy of success.
He was also arrested when his perfume was finally finished. At this time, he has been able to face death calmly, because his great project has been completed, and the meaning of his life has been realized. But there was a dramatic scene. As he stood on the execution stand, ready to be tortured, the perfume he put on himself began to function. When the most fragrant scent in the world floated into the nostrils of millions of people in the square, a miracle happened. In the wonderful enjoyment of taste, what people see in their eyes is not a murderer, but an angel. They worshiped him with infinite joy and affection, and this ecstasy turned into a maddening eroticism, and millions of people indulged in the square, including the archbishop.
Grenouille seems to have foreseen this scene, and he is very confident in his fragrance. In the face of this complete victory, Grenouille was not happy, and even a little disgusted. Because the victory was too easy, his opponent was too mediocre, and the mediocrity made him sick. He came to the world with hatred, but these people met his hatred with infinite love. Moreover, he also knew that the love of the people was not for himself, but for his perfume. For these mentally handicapped people, he has nothing but disgust. It is better to face the sober hatred than to accept these nonsense loves. He has disdain to conquer such a crowd and such a world. In the end, he was swallowed by everyone in the form of self-sacrifice, thereby getting rid of this world.
2.
This bizarre story has brought confusion in people's value judgments, because traditional values have been unable to make analytical judgments about it. Analyzing this film according to the traditional mode of analyzing the contradictory relationship between genius and mortals will lead to some misleading. According to this model, geniuses are withdrawn, they are not understood, and their careers are well understood. Therefore, there is no normal communication between geniuses and ordinary people, so geniuses can only use extraordinary means to communicate with people. There was tragedy, bloodshed and violence. In doing so, all sin will be attributed to necessary factors. Grenouille would be innocent. Those girls were destined to be the victims of Grenouille's great project. But this is obviously not the concept that this film wants to highlight. If it is to defend Grenouille, it does so differently.
It was Suskind's ingenuity to arrange such a story in France, for deviance is typical of the French spirit. Presumably Juskind was deeply influenced by French thinkers, so the whole story was deeply imprinted with the imprint of the French spirit.
When we look beyond the superficial hustle and bustle, we see that the inner thread running through the story is desire. The world that appears in the film is a world of desire. It is the abundance of various desires (the desire for survival, the desire for profit, the desire for power, the desire for honor, etc.) that makes it difficult for "love" to exist. In desire, everyone sees only himself and not others. The mother can't see Grenouille because she wants to make a living; Mrs. Gallard at the nursery can't see Grenouille because she wants to make money from him; the tannery owner can't see Grenouille because he wants Profitable; perfumer Baldini can't see Grenouille because he wants to be rich. Different people have different desires. Grenouille's desire was first to satisfy his sense of smell, and later to control others through perfume to manifest his own power. In desire, others become tools to realize one's desire. Others in people's eyes are no longer beings with divine souls, but are just biological animals, which can be dissected and tested with each other just like animals. "Love" has no place here.
So there is hardly any real love in the film, there is just lust and the love of lust. Grenouille, who was deeply entangled in (his hatred of the world was also a way of coexisting and entangled with it), could not escape this web of desire. His desire is the desire to be recognized by the public. And for the public to admit, it is necessary to have the power to control the public, and perfume is the best tool for him to control the public. He wanted to create perfumes that could harness the soul of the masses. However, the soul of the masses is entirely the soul of desire, so Grenouille's perfume must also be a perfume that stimulates desire and satisfies desire. In this way, his perfumes are destined to be unable to transcend the world of desire. Even if he made the best perfume, it was only one that satisfies the highest desires of men. The popular love inspired by his perfumes can only be sensual and carnal love. Eros on the execution ground is purely sensual. Therefore, Grenouille, who created metamorphic love, is not a real angel, rather, he is closer to the devil. Instead of saving the world he hated and loathed from lust and darkness, he pushed it to the top of lust.
People who belong to this world of desire are destined to be complicit in this drama. In this world, everyone is busy with desires, and the perfumes made by Grenouille can push the desires of people in this world of desires to the extreme and satisfy their ultimate needs. Thus, Grenouille unwittingly became the savior of the world of desire. It makes sense to sacrifice the lives of several young girls for the savior's elixir. The masses thus lost the ability and power to judge Grenouille. So the murderer is transformed into a savior and leader. The original execution ground has also become a carnival. It can be said that Volkswagen and Grenouille created this farce that reversed black and white.
If Grenouille wanted to, he could play the masses in the palm of his hand, kneading them like dough. But in the end he chose to leave. Perhaps he finally found that the perfume he had created was still not at the highest level, it was still stuck in the stage of lower desires. The world he wants to conquer puts an invisible shackle on him. Perhaps only out of this world can a higher level of perfume be made.
III
From this point of view, only by grasping the essence of the French spirit can we make a certain judgment on this film. The French always try to transcend traditional value judgments and cheer for the spirit of romance. However, the weapon with which they broke the shackles of tradition was not something nobler, but a lower sensuality. It is not noble spirit that underlies the works of the French masters, but impulsive desire. Sartre, Lacan, Foucault, etc. Under the slogan of "freedom" that it shouts, what is surging is the undercurrent of desire. In the flood of desire, value judgment becomes impossible. That's why this film makes it impossible to make value judgments.
From the author's point of view, the original author of the book, Suskind, and the film director, Tom Tykwer, seem to be deliberately arranging this result, and the rigorous spirit of the Germans is gradually moving closer to the romantic spirit. While creating this lustful, animal-like world, they unwittingly indulge in it themselves. Involuntarily, they began to defend Grenouille's actions. They seem to want to use this sinful world to find some kind of innocent evidence for people like Grenouille. A sinful society provides some justification for Grenouille's cruelty to achieve his ends. Success and glory in this world by the means of the devil seems unquestionable. The film, intentionally or unintentionally, shows such a tendency that all sins are attributed to society, and Grenouille is pure and great. In the depths of the writer and director's heart, secretly applauding the evil genius of Grenouille. Perhaps in their hearts, there is also some kind of hatred for the world, and they want to use the extreme image of Grenouille to express their potential ideas. If they were to use the film to remind the world that excessive desire and depravity might give birth to such an evil genius as Grenouille, the focus of their criticism would be society, not Grenouille. This latent congruence with Grenoye's mood makes writers and directors complicit in anticipation of that kind of carnival on the execution ground and a taste of the mighty power of the great power that wields the world.
If they consider their actions at a higher level, that is, they want to deal with the question of how people live in an evil world, the answer they give is also clear, that is: push desire in the world of desire to the top.
Therefore, the desire-filled writer and director created this desire-filled film. When the director and the film are caught in the cycle of desire together, the audience will inevitably be seduced by them, so as to join their chorus and carnival.
In recent years, there have been more and more films depicting villains, and more and more playwrights, directors and audiences have treated these characters with sympathy and understanding. However, this kind of sympathy is easy to overflow and go to extremes, so that people lose their basic value judgments. When sympathy reaches a certain point, it becomes approval and connivance. When people fully integrate themselves into the devil's world and become one with the devil's desires, then the devil becomes an angel. Sympathy for the devil is like sympathy for a thief who does all evil. If we mourn and weep over the hardships and sufferings that the robber went through in the course of his wickedness, and thus forgive him for his sins, we undoubtedly become accomplices of his sins. The devil is the devil, he cannot be an angel. It is undoubtedly a concept that lacks depth and height to push the responsibility of evil deeds to the society, the surrounding environment and insufficient education, thereby denying the existence of devil-like wicked people.
If the film has taught us anything, one of them is that the uniqueness of desire makes it impossible to make a clear judgment about it, because the person who judges may be in the desire itself.
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