Film Essay: “Perfume: The Story of a Murderer” as an Illustration of ADHESIVE PSEUDO-OBJECT-RELATIONS

s 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