In the few sentences that I've posted about Tom Tykwer's "Perfume: The Story of a Murderer" (just blurbs on my Best of 2006 and Double-Bills lists), I mentioned that the movie was a striking feat of "cine-sthesia," as it were, and that the murders themselves reminded me of Hannibal Lecter's analysis of Jame Gumb in "Silence of the Lambs": The killing is incidental. What does he seek? (In this sense it reminded me of Michael Powell's "Peeping Tom," too -- voyeurism as a form of possession through the senses -- sight or smell.) And, of course, Grenouille (the scentless apprentice) kills because he covets. Jame Gumb wants to possess a woman's skin; Grenouille wants her scent -- and, by extension, all women's scents.
I wonder if one reason I was so enthralled by Tykwer's film (it's gotten mixed reviews: a 54 on RottenTomatoes) is that I'm told I have mild synesthesia, where senses bleed together a bit so that, for example (from the American Heritage Dictionary definition of the word), "the hearing of a sound produces the visualization of a color." That's very much like what the movie does, with color, shape, texture and sound orchestrated to express odors. But doesn't everybody experience this to some degree? My sensations have mostly to do with color, shape, texture and brightness. Sounds, particularly music (and to a lesser extent tastes, smells, even tactile feelings), are always accompanied by colors and shapes. Doesn't everybody know that trumpets are round and red? That violins are long and yellow? That pianos are (generally speaking) ovoid and green? Snare drums are light grey, short and thin and flat, like em-dashes, while cymbals are silvery, shimmery and round-ish but with no distinct edges, like a spray. Those are some of the things I always see in my head when I listen to music. Also: The number two is green, just as surely as the number five is red and seven is blue. (And the funny thing is, that's true for Roman numerals as well as Arabic ones, though the colors aren't all as strong.) I don't know where these associations come from -- if I've always had them or if I made them when I was a kid.
Do you have these experiences? Care to describe them?
Getting back to my first paragraph, I wanted to refer you to a splendid (and splendidly titled) piece by Stephen Romer in the Times Literary Supplement called "Distilled, bottled, and bewildered" that is a combined discussion of Tykwer's film, Patrick Süskind’s original 1985 novel, and a book of historical research and analysis of the "olfactory arts" by Richard Stamelman called "Perfume: Joy, Obsession, Scandal, Sin." An excerpt that I thought was exceptionally perceptive (beware of spoilers):
"Perfume" is a film on the grand scale – the credits roll on for ever, acknowledging an army of technicians and make-up artists. It should certainly be in the running for an Academy Award for costume design, if for nothing else. The director has pored lovingly over paintings by Bruegel, Chardin and Bosch, among others; there are numerous allusions and vignettes, culminating in a homage to Rembrandt’s “Night Watch”, as a flame-lit band of tartsa nd crooks, gathered in the Paris fish market, devour the protagonist in a supremely ironic expression of their “love”. Grenouille is cannibalized on the patch where he was born, flung by his mother on to a pile of fish entrails.Bravo!The description of the fetid stew that was Paris and the evocation of the gutting table are vivid – in particular the splatter of entrails, which foreshadow the dreadful slopping and pasting of fat on to Grenouille’s murdered virgins. His two principal victims, the first and the last, are similar types and similarly beautiful. The poor Parisian plum girl (Katharine Herfurth) prefigures the pale-skinned, chestnut-haired Laura Richis (Rachel Hurd-Wood) who provides the final “note” in Grenouille’s essence, the one that turns his perfume into a substance of baleful power. As the product of wealth and refinement, she is eminently saleable – or in this case, bottleable – as her anxious father, well played by Alan Rickman, recognizes only too well. But the girls’ beauty is incidental; their value is quintessential – a very literal and disturbing abstraction.
Stamelman devotes a section of his compendium to Süskind’s book, and raises the pertinent metaphysical questions, about Faustian-alchemical ambition, the ruthless pursuit of ends with no heed paid to means (Grenouille throws away what he doesn’t need – human lives), the analogy of the drive to create an absolutely pure art with fascist eugenics. But this last comparison with Hitler is difficult to sustain, for surely Grenouille’s malignant hatred is purely non-ideological; rather it stems, like that of Frankenstein’s Monster, from an appalling non-childhood, and from his loveless, autistic state of being-in-the-world. No one ever taught him the language of love or tenderness, so why should he not invent his own, detached from feeling, through the exercise of peerless olfactory power? There is a turning point in Grasse – the first whiff of Laura Richis in the enclosed garden – when the pursuit of perfection becomes murderous, but a long moment precedes it, the autarchic years of solitary perfume-evocation, when Grenouille’s obsession is that of a harmless ascetic. It is, of course, the marriage of acquisitive ambition to obsession that brings tragedy and ruin. And once Grenouille starts on his final bottling spree, once the Monster becomes his own Frankenstein in his “filthy workshop of creation”, then, as the menace and caress of John Hurt’s voiceover nicely imply, there is no stopping him.
More terrific "Perfume"-related links at GreenCine Daily Thanks to David Hudson!
Thanks for your description of your colorful and shapeful perception of music, Jim.
I sometimes perceive shapes and colors, but my brand of synesthesia has more to do with giving numbers and letters human-like personalities.
1 is a woman with a lot of dignity,
2 is a quiet, feminine man who supports 1,
3 is a strong, bulky, muscular, mustachioed man who teams up with
4, which is a shy, precious and simple woman.
5 is a funny, extroverted male partyman,
6 is a serious, small boy who is in love with
7, the beautiful muse-diva of the bunch.
8 is a serious, tall, authoritative male lieutenant and
9 is the wise, overseeing, older male master.
Same with ABC letters, but that would be too long and boring to round them all up here.
Jim,
To me, the letter "D" is blue, but I think only in its capital form. Intelligent people are also blue (most of the time with glasses). Piano players, especially those with a hint of jazz, are a deep red, almost crimson. Uncomfortable bathrooms (undecorated or unclean) are orange. A very light, dull green (like a light shade of a guanabana) makes me nauseous.
For some reason, it seems that my synesthesia has dwindled in the past couple of years. Maybe I've just stopped paying attention to it. I had realized a few years ago that it wasn't as common as I thought either, but recently I've started to accept the notion that it's not unique, so perhaps that plays a role as well. I also listen to a lot less music than I used to, so who knows if that has anything to do with it?
Now I'm really looking forward to seeing Perfume.
Jim,
Your discussion reminds me of a lovely documentary made a few years ago, called "Touch the Sound" which taps into the notion of synasthesia on film (duh, it's in the title!). Did you see it? I talked about synasthesia in my review of the DVD:
http://www.dvdtown.com/reviews/touchthesou/3718
I'm not a synasthetic. I'm curious how someone who is synasthetic would respond to "Touch the Sound."
Jim, as a musician I know exactly what you’re talking about here. I hear most music in colors and people have always thought I was weird when I try to explain to them the beautiful golden yellow of Stevie Wonder (although not all of his music is yellow, “Superstition” is a brick red in my mind). More particularly, as a guitar player I am always on the hunt for the perfect sound, such as Stevie Ray Vaughan’s bold (yet somehow, dark) blue sound, or Edward Van Halen’s deep tan tone, but not the weak pale yellow of Metallica’s Kirk Hammett.
I think a lot of times though that my mind hears a certain sound because of something I associate with that artist. Example: When I listen to Prince, his sound is always different shades of purple to me because that’s the color I associate with him, except on his album “Dirty Mind” which is black & white like its cover photo. Stevie Wonder’s sound is a golden yellow because when I think of Stevie Wonder I think of the cover of my favorite album, his “Innervisions” which is many shades of golden yellow. When I listen to the almost unbearably brilliant Ray Lamontagne’s new album, I think of the weak yellow light inside a cave that the album cover evokes. When I listen to Nick Drake’s albums they bring to mind the rural autumn colors that all the pictures of him always evoke.
However, I don’t always hear colors. And a single artist doesn’t always have just one color that they evoke. The Beatles, for instance, don’t have a particular color, and as I said before Stevie Wonder has multiple colors. Drums are just different brightness levels of white, except the bass drum, which is always black. Cymbals are different brightness levels of gold.
I have heard some musicians say that they chose certain album art because they thought of a particular album as a certain color or a few select colors, and wanted to convey their feelings to the fans by choosing specific colors to represent an album. I think this is a fascinating subject and am always glad to hear about someone like me (although it sounds like you hear everything in sounds, whereas I don’t).
In Scott Mccloud's Understanding Comics, Chapter 5: Living in Line is about the idea of uniting the senses, and provides many visual examples like the ones given above.
Here is a sample from pg 118:
http://img135.imageshack.us/img135/8536/118my9.jpg
Kyle: You bring up several things I have long wondered about, too -- like how the colors of the album cover (or even the label on the disc itself) have affected my perception of the music -- not unlike the lighting in a concert setting.
Our perceptions of Stevie Wonder are remarkably similar. The warm, bell-like tones of the Fender Rhodes on "You Are the Sunshine of My Life" are definitely warm and golden -- as is the synthesizer on "Higher Ground." But "Superstition" is redder -- because, of course, it has trumpets and saxes!
Jim, I only get in the morning, when I'm half-awake, but it's strong then. Typically it involves three phenomena: music, color, and grammar. That last one may seem odd to people, but I study literature, so it's understandable grammar would work its way in there somehow.
What's frustrating is that it makes so much sense when I'm feeling it, so I can understand why some synesthetes (Rimsky-Korsakov, Rimbaud, etc.) tried to develop systems for their connections. Others (Baudelaire) are just content to experience them, but I totally feel for the former. Heck, Scriabin - who probably wasn't a "real" synesthete - devised a complex system of overlapping colors and harmonies, poetic sound, and smells.
When I'm waking up, it's so obvious that a particular musical phrase is yellow because it ends the paragraph. By the time I'm eating breakfast, it makes no sense at all.
I find this to be a very interesting discussion. I too tend to think of music in particular colors, which is sometimes influenced by the album cover.
I'm a big fan of film music, and I recently read a very interesting interview with Oscar-winning composer James Horner. He tends to repeat himself a lot in his scores, using ideas from his other works, sometimes altering them slightly to match a specific film. When asked about this, he responded that he doesn't really see characters, stories, or settings, but rather, he sees colors. He described his score for "A Beautiful Mind" as being "painted with a lot of blue colors", while some of his earlier works like "Star Trek II" and "Krull" had lots of red, and "The Spitfire Grill" a lot of soothing brown. A number of other musicians who tend to repeat themselves to a certain degree also write in this way, such as Philip Glass and John Barry.
I know that I have felt this before--and yet I have no idea what or when. Brad's comment about early morning makes sense to me. I think I should mention too that I'm in my late adolescence and I have a suspicion that I used to associate colours with sounds and smells and touch, but that it decreased gradually over the years until it's almost gone now.
The only thing I can remember for sure is that the number 4 (my favourite number as a child) was purple--because, I think, I had refrigerator magnets and the 4 one was purple. But I'm not sure about that, and the association between the two was stronger than anything else.
Is there a difference between associating different senses very strongly, and actually experiencing them as the same? Are these two phenomena completely separate? It's a given that red is associated with "hot" and blue with "cold," probably because objects glow red and oceans are blue (although, really, blue is a hotter colour than red in that an object glowing blue is much hotter than one glowing red).
Jim --
I teach poetry, and I talk about synaesthesia frequently, both as a medical condition and as a literary technique achieved by describing the experiences of one sense in the words of another. Keats is the all-time master of this, which means Fitzgerald is too, since his style is simply Keats adapted to prose.
I've read that there is a synaesthetic alphabet, meaning that not only do one form of true synaesthetics (who are rare) always see each letters as a particular color, but that every synaesthetic sees them as the same colors, which is fascinating to me. My personal experience of synaesthesia is in the conflation of taste, smell, and sound. I perceive certain scents and tastes as particular musical notes. I love to cook, and when I am developing a recipe, I always think in terms of chords, bass and treble, discord and resolution. But this is mild stuff next to the true synaesthetic.
I mentioned Keats. He manages not only to create literary synaesthesia but to compel the reader into the experience of it, as in this stanza from "The Eve of St. Agnes" (which Fitzgerald borrowed virtually whole in the scene when Gatsby shows Daisy his shirts):
And still she slept an azure-lidded sleep,
In blanched linen, smooth, and lavender’d,
While he forth from the closet brought a heap
Of candied apple, quince, and plum, and gourd
With jellies soother than the creamy curd,
And lucent syrops tinct with cinnamon;
Manna and dates, in argosy transferr’d
From Fez; and spiced dainties, every one,
From silken Samarcand to cedar’d Lebanon.
The true brilliance of this passage is the physical ⎯ the physiological ⎯ effect reading the words aloud (or silently, if one allows one’s mouth to move) has on the reader. A stunning variety of vowel sounds occurs here, and the sequence produces an astonishing effect: the rapid alternation between those which stretch our mouths side-to-side and those which stretch them front-to-back contorts them in ways that reproduce the motions one makes when savoring a particularly flavorful delicacy ⎯ they literally make us salivate. Sound is thus transmuted into taste, creating a conflation of senses.
To experience synaesthesia is one thing; to give that experience to the rest of us -- without slipping us a hallucinogen -- is an astounding achievement.
Here's a film that I've been itching to talk to someone about, but no one I know has seen it!!! Thankfully Jim, there is Scanners.
My biggest problem with criticism for a film such as this, and this one in particular, is when people say that it's impossible to translate the idea from a book to a film, in this the idea of scent. That is ridiculous. When reading a book, how does one properly translate a smell from reality onto the page? They can't literally do it. They can describe it through specifically chosen words, and reactions. So, how is that any different with film? If nothing else it's easier to convey smell cinematically than it is to do it in literature. In film you have not only words, but you have visuals and colors. And, oh, such vibrant colors Tykwer uses to bring to life the idea of scent and smells, and with the looks on his actors faces as they come into contact with these brilliant scents.
As for theme, I enjoyed this passage in the "Distilled" piece.
“A perfume does not impose itself; it must translate a precise emotion. After much groping in the dark, the perfume begins to resemble the image which I had forged abstractly in my mind”. Jean-Pierre Guerlain, creator of “Samsara”. After all that's what "Perfume" is about, the creation of art, portraying abstract emotions in a way that truly affects people. A true artist's attempt to find meaning in the world through his art form, to be seen as someone more than the people around him, to be remembered. The idea of being lived and living through eternity through art. The tragedy in "Perfume" is when the artist realizes he has no scent himself. That he covets something he himself will never be able to attain. It's a photographer realizing he will never be as beautiful as his models, or a writer never as skilled at conversation as his characters are. That's when the madness sets in, when the desire to create becomes obsessive.
Romes writes, "There is a turning point in Grasse – the first whiff of Laura Richis in the enclosed garden – when the pursuit of perfection becomes murderous, but a long moment precedes it, the autarchic years of solitary perfume-evocation, when Grenouille’s obsession is that of a harmless ascetic." I would disagree with this. I don't believe that Grenouille's search for perfection becomes murderous at this point, in fact, it didn't seem he would have killed the hooker if she hadn't tried to flee. I think murderous is too strong a word, too specific a reaction. It's not until he realizes that people don't understand what he's trying to do, that killing becomes his means to an end.
This was one of the most beautiful films I've seen in awhile, not since "Amelie" have I seen such effulgent images. I very much felt like the old blind man Amelie leads through the market and describes all the things he can only smell and hear, in this case Tykwer is showing me what to smell. In fact, I believe "Amelie" came out when "The Princess and the Warrior" was released which was at the same time as "The Devil's Backbone". That was a great summer for me. Now we have "Perfume" and "Pan's Labyrinth" at the same time - another great season of film watching; if only Jeanne Pierre-Jeunet had thrown his two cents in this time.
Neuroscientists are convinced that everyone has synesthesia to some degree. Most are very mild and undetectable, but a few have a more prominent form, like yours. Of course, I'm sure you have heard about LSD-induced "synesthesia". Also, there's a test called Kiki-Babou invented by a neuropsychologist. Regardless of culture or language, people from everywhere in the world associate the sound of Kiki with a sharp and spiky image, while Babou with a round image. You can find information on this topic in popular science magazines.
The movie is successful in producing the effect of "smell", but I feel it deviates from the book in its main theme.
On the other side of the coin, I have been a musician and artist my entire life, singing and playing multiple instruments, and have never noticed any synesthesia. (And I have a good imagination!) I think it would be kind of fun though; is it?
Clark,
Synaesthesia is different from a learned association (like a refridgerator magnet). It is something that the person experiences as a reality, and the color is inseparably attached to the idea or sensation. People in general have learned representational color associations- hot is red because metal glows red when it's hot, and ice looks blue when light shines through it. Synaesthesia colors come from nowhere- the mind, I guess, and are "seen" on a very real plane. They "exist." You can think about it this way: Where where does your hearing happen? In your head? In your ears? Out there? It's impossible to describe to someone who doesn't hear. Same thing with Syn. Until I was in high school I thought that the number 8 was dark green to everyone, and 2 was blue, etc., and was perplexed about our bizarre practice of representing numbers in colors that didn't match their meaning (like those crazy refrigerator magnets!). Come to find out that no one else I knew had a clue what I was experiencing, which came as a complete surprise to me. I still struggle to imagine what goes on in other people's minds, as we all do, I think. It's fun to think about.