1

CARSTEN STRATHAUSEN

The Relationship between Literature and Film: Patrick Süskind’s Das Parfum

Abstract:

The relationship between literature and film is studied both from a

methodological and an interpretative point of view. The main

argument is that the currently reigning semiotic and Marxist

approaches should be supplemented by a physiological approach,

one that (again) recognizes the bodily dimension of aesthetic

criticism. The second part of the essay outlines the premises of

such an aesthetic with reference to recent studies in the

neurological and cognitive sciences. Finally, a comparison

between Patrick Süskind’s novel Das Parfum (1986) and its recent

cinematic adaptation by Tom Tykwer (2006) is offered. How do

book and film differ in their attempts to render the sense of smell

palpable to their audience? I argue that Süskind’s novel is more

successful than Tykwer in representing smell, not in spite of, but

because of, the sensual-semiotic poverty of words as opposed to

images and sound.

I

The debate concerning the relationship between literature and

film is as old as the cinematic medium itself. Considered a low-

level form of mass entertainment, early film sought to increase

its cultural reputation by drawing from the already established

arts such as music, theatre, and literature. Hence, cinematic

adaptations of literary works or motifs became increasingly

common, particularly after the bourgeoning film industry

shifted its focus from documentation to narration, that is, after

the end of what Noel Burch considers the “primitive mode of

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representation” before 1909, as opposed to the “institutional

mode of representation” and its spectator-oriented approach

thereafter (Burch 186).1

Given this constitutive intertwinement between film and

literature, there have been (and continue to be) numerous

studies devoted to both the empirical and the systematic

analysis of the relationship between the two media. Of these

the least interesting and methodologically least refined are

studies that focus on narrative and plot differences between the

original book and the later film version. Termed “fidelity analys-

es” by Eric Rentschler in 1986, these normative studies usually

stand “in the service of literary studies, more often than not

forgoing cinematic specifics and slighting both historical and

institutional considerations” (2). Although one of the major

goals of Rentschler’s anthology was to break the hegemony of

fidelity studies, there can be little doubt that most comparisons

of film and literature today still follow what Robert Stam calls

“adaptation criticism.” The latter, Stam argues, features an

“elegiac discourse of loss, lamenting what has been ‘lost’ in the

transition from novel to film, while ignoring what has been

‘gained’” (3). Another editor of a recent collection of essays on

German literature and film arrives at the same overall

conclusion as Rentschler and Stam: “Not surprisingly, analyses

of adaptations… predominantly focus on the absence and/or

presence of similarities between the narrative of the novel and

the film, i.e., on the ‘fidelity’ of the adaptation” (13), and she

rightly exhorts critics to pay more attention to the technological

and institutional specificity of the cinematic medium as it

“translates” a literary narrative into a film.

This is not to deny the existence of numerous studies that

aim to demonstrate the influence of film upon single authors or

selected literary texts. In the German context alone, we find

analyses devoted to the importance of film for Hofmannsthal,

Thomas Mann, Kafka, Brecht, Döblin a.o.2 Apart from present-

ing biographical and archival information, these studies gen-

erally focus on formal questions regarding literary style and

cinematic technique, as they outline the importance of film for

a particular writer/period/text. The net result is a series of dis-

jointed close readings that strive to establish structural affini-

ties between particular literary features (such as changes in

narrative voice or flash-backs) and certain visual patterns (for

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example, montage) which are considered to be cinematic in

essence and origin. Having established the link, these studies

often go on to conclude that a certain author (say, Alfred Döblin

or Alain Robbe-Grillet) should be considered a “cinematic

writer” who pursues “a cinematic style of writing,” etc. How-

ever, given the biographical scope of these analyses as well as

their formalist perspective, there remains a palpable lack of

theoretical or methodological conclusions about the general

relationship between literature and film. Instead, these author-

focused studies culminate in long enumerations of cinematic

features used in literary texts (or vice versa), without ever

addressing the significance of this comparison within the broad-

er context of cultural modernity.

A far more sophisticated approach toward comparing film

and literature was provided by the German media theorist

Friedrich Kittler in his ground-breaking work on discourse net-

works, published in the mid-1980’s. Kittler contends that there

has always been a profound media competition between the

two signifying regimes, regardless of their changing narrative

capabilities as outlined by Burch, Elsaesser, and other film

historians. For what matters in this comparison is not the nar-

rative coherence, but rather the visual transparency of the

different sign systems under investigation. Using Foucaultian as

well as Lacanian terminology, Kittler argues that literature and

film belong to different historical epistemes of representation:

one renders real what the other could only imagine. “Media are

real,” he insists, “they are always already beyond aesthetics”

(Kittler 10). In other words, cinema’s actual projection of “real”

images on the screen exposes and renders superfluous

literature’s old-fashioned, and far less spectacular, attempt to

conjure fictional images in the mind of the reader. Thus, if

sometime around 1900 literature willfully abandons its previous

ambition to depict reality, and instead embraces the materiality

of writing—as happens in Surrealism, Dadaism and other avant-

garde movements—this is due, according to Kittler, to

literature’s increasing competition with the superior medium of

film and the latter’s ability to present “real” rather than merely

“imagined” pictures of the material world. “Letters become

numbers—that is the language crisis around 1900,” as Kittler

later summarizes his central idea (Kittler, “Bild” 83; my

translation). The reason why letters become numbers is that

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the arrival of film exposes them to have been inadequate

images from the very beginning. It follows that treating letters

like numbers, or as obscure marks on white paper, remains the

only way for literature around 1900 to defend its claim of

aesthetic independence in the face of technological change.3

In spite of his trenchant critique of the history of modern

signification, however, critics have aptly noted that Kittler

neither discusses the historical relevance of his own work, nor

reflects upon its political ramifications.4 Instead, he succumbs

to a rather “obvious technological determinism” (Winthrop-

Young and Wutz xxxiv) that simply disregards any historical

changes that cannot be assimilated into his epistemic model. In

Kittler’s early work of the 1980s, media either emerge at a

particular point in time due to the ingenuity of human engin-

eering, or are simply always already “there” to begin with.5

Lacking a differentiated discussion of the larger socio-

economic-political framework that informs (his own critique of)

the media, Kittler’s analysis, therefore, focuses mainly on

analyzing the epistemic and material differences between them.

In terms of the discursive networks of 1800 and 1900, this

means that Kittler ultimately (mis)identifies the aesthetic

nature of both film and pre-20th century literature as consisting

of a shared ambition towards visual transparency. Put

differently, his strong focus on semiotics prompts Kittler to

short-circuit the relationship between literature and film,

without grounding it in a broader, more complex historical

framework.

In the German context, the need to reclaim this larger

ground is evident, for example, in the so-called Kino-Debatte,

that is, the heated debate among German intellectuals

regarding the aesthetic quality and nationalist value of cinema

as it began to infringe upon the traditional domain of high

culture, including literature. In Germany, film not only

threatened the bourgeois model of subjectivity and its aesthetic

forms of self-representation, as Anton Kaes has argued. It also

undermined the constitutive myth of the German “Kulturnation”

considered by many as a bastion against the corrosive effects

of modern technology and civilization. The Kino-Debatte thus

mattered not only aesthetically, but it also resonated on the

socio-political level during the Weimar Republic. We need only

recall that the German Ufa was founded by a consortium of

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military, industrial and political forces for the specific purpose of

supporting the nationalistic-propagandistic use of film during

and after WWI, meaning that German autocrats were forced,

paradoxically, to embrace a modern medium as a means of

defending their anti-modern views.6

Yet none of this matters in Kittler’s discursive networks,

where literary and cinematic signifiers collide and mutually

determine each other regardless of the larger socio-political

universe in which they continue to operate. So, in spite of his

detailed analysis regarding the aesthetic changes that

accompanied the switch from 19th-century print culture to the

20th-century “society of the spectacle” (Guy Debord), Kittler’s

intriguing media theory inadvertently endorses what I want to

call the semiotic account of the relationship between literature

and film. Semiotic critics frequently draw examples from the

Romantic as well as the Realist period of the 19th century in

order to support their central thesis that “good” literature

always and inadvertently conjures up images in the reader’s

mind. All good literature, in other words, anticipates the arrival

of film; it is, by definition, cinematic. “If you ask me to give you

the most distinctive quality of good writing,” Sir Herbert Read

wrote in 1945, “I would give it to you in this one word: VISUAL.

Reduce the art of writing to its fundamentals and you come to

this single aim: to convey images by means of words” (Read

61). In its most radical form, this line of criticism endorses

what André Bazin, in a short essay from 1946, called “the myth

of total cinema.” “The cinema,” Bazin contends,

is an idealistic phenomenon. The concept men had of it existed so to speak fully armed in their minds, as if in some platonic heaven, and what strikes us most of all is the obstinate resistance of matter to ideas rather than of any help offered by techniques to the imagination of the researchers. […] The

guiding myth, then, inspiring the invention of cinema, is the accomplishment of… an integral realism, a recreation of the world in its own image…. (Bazin 23; 26)

For Bazin, the art of cinema has always already existed, if only

as a dream in somebody’s head. Moreover, this constitutive

myth of total cinema continues to be productive even today

because every new technological development contributes to

and thus makes “a reality out of the original ‘myth’…. In short,

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cinema has not yet been invented!” (Bazin 27). Thus the

invention of the cinematic apparatus in the year 1895 repre-

sents just one more intermediary step in a centuries-old

aesthetic tradition whose goal has always been the truthful

representation of reality, whether in painting, literature, the

arts, or film. Although Bazin’s historical points of reference do

not predate the modern age (i.e., the 16th century), there is

nothing in principle to prevent semiotic critics from extending

this myth of total cinema backward as far as Greek antiquity.

This is precisely what happened in the 1970’s, when Jean-Louis

Baudry and other theorists of the cinematic apparatus

considered Plato's cave, along with the Greek epics, and even

medieval painting, to be pre-cinematic events that express

humanity's ancient longing for the art of moving pictures.7

The analytical shortcomings of this abstract and over-

theorized position have been exposed by a number of

historically more astute critics, including Noel Carroll’s blistering

attack in his Mystifying Movies from 1988. Likewise, David

Bordwell considers this idealist approach deeply flawed because

it projects onto cinema an “aesthetic essence” along with a

particular “medium-specificity” (Bordwell 31) that cannot be

verified historically. Instead, Bordwell advocates a less theo-

rized and more empirical approach toward film style, one that

acknowledges the irreducible multiplicity and heterogeneity of

the art of cinema, as well as its incommensurability with the

other arts. Steeped in close readings of particular scenes, Bord-

well’s astute historical analysis provides an important

counterpart to the abstract semiotic approaches of the 1970’s.

By and large, however, Bordwell’s approach was precisely

the route many politically interested critics did not want to take

over the next decade. Instead, they went in a diametrically

opposite direction, moving further away from empirical detail

and toward an ever more abstract analysis of language and

cinema. Many cultural critics claimed that what was missing

from the semiotic approach was a more comprehensive

historical-materialist account of the media relationship between

film and literature. What was missing, in other words, was

Marxist theory. With the rise of Marxist cultural criticism in the

early 1970’s (evident in the work of Fredric Jameson, Terry

Eagleton, Raymond Williams, a.o.), a consensus emerged to

reject as “naïve” or “positivist” any straightforward empirical

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comparison between film and literature. The basic argument

was that such a direct approach, regardless of whether it

operates on the semiotic or the stylistic level, could not possibly

do justice to what the French philosopher Louis Althusser had

called the “overdetermined social whole”—a structural field in

which everything, including culture, is governed by economics

“in the last instance.”

The prevalent Marxist approach during the 1980’s and early

1990’s considered modernist forms of montage in both

literature and film to be artistic reflections of urban shock sen-

sations and the fragmented mode of perception imposed by

capitalist societies around 1900. Instead of explaining one

medium in terms of the other, cultural critics pointed to the rise

of modern means of transportation, the construction of huge

warehouses, and the conveyer belt as the socio-historical

foundation for the cinematic perception encountered in 19th-

century literary texts. Commenting on the psychological effect

of the train ride, for example, Wolfgang Schivelbusch alludes to

the new cinematic medium as the artistic correlative to this

cultural experience: “He [the traveler] perceives objects,

landscape etc. through the apparatus with which he is moving

through the world.” The world outside was thus converted into

a tableau, a complex of “moving pictures” (Schivelbusch,

Railway 61).8

It follows that the so-called “cinematic writers” of the 20th

century did not simply copy the aesthetics of film, nor did early

film-directors just transpose ancient literary-aesthetic patterns

into a new medium. Rather, both cinema and literature,

independently from each other, mirror the socio-cultural frag-

mentation and new modes of perception that characterized 20th

century modernity in general. According to Alan Spiegel, the

reason for the undeniable stylistic parallels between Flaubert,

Dickens and other 19th century writers, on the one hand, and

film aesthetics on the other, lies primarily in the fundamental

changes inaugurated by European modernity that affected

(and continue to affect) our “philosophical attitude and

cognition” (Spiegel 186). Similarly, Joachim Paech explicitly

rejects the attempt to extend the origins of cinema beyond the

constitutive process of industrialization and urbanization that

characterized the 19th century:

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The montage-form shared by literature and later film stems from changes that affected the life of people during the 19th century in general: with its factories, machines, railways and new metropolises, the process of industrialization has created

new forms of perception that found their expression in literary and finally cinematic forms of montage. Authors belonging to 19th century bourgeois Realism used formal means of expres-sion resembling those of filmmakers in the 20th century not because they wanted to anticipate the cinema, but because they perceived reality in comparable terms as film-directors did later on. (Paech 69; my translation)

Whereas Bazin still insisted that the “myth of total cinema”

amounted to a complete “reversal of the order of causality,

which goes from the economic infrastructure to the ideological

superstructure” (Bazin 23), Paech’s comments fully vindicate

the basic principles of historical materialism, because he insists

on the priority of socio-economic forces over their aesthetic

effects in modern media.

This Marxist model still remains the most ubiquitously

accepted perspective on comparing literature and movies, for

the single reason that it is based upon a socio-historical

understanding of modernity commonly shared by most

humanists today. This understanding of modernity includes the

belief that human perception is determined culturally rather

than biologically. This is to say that perception has a history,

and that this history has been accelerated by the rise and fall of

the bourgeoisie over the last 300 years or so.9 “The education

[Bildung] of the five senses is the laborious result of all of world

history so far,” Karl Marx wrote in his economic-philosophical

manuscripts from 1844 (Marx 191; my translation). Some fifty

years later, Sigmund Freud and Georg Simmel described the

psychological and behavioral processes by which the modern

city dweller tries to cope with the onslaught of sensory

stimulation s/he encounters in the metropolis.10 Drawing from

all these sources, Walter Benjamin, in 1936, summarized the

Marxist perspective on human perception in his seminal art-

work essay as follows:

During long periods of history, the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity’s entire mode of existence.

The manner in which human sense perception is organized, the medium in which it is accomplished, is determined not only by

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nature, but by historical circumstances as well. (Benjamin, “Art-Work” 222)

It is difficult to disagree with this conclusion, because Benjamin

avoids granting priority to either side of the nature/nurture

debate. Instead, he simply posits a profound interrelation (“not

only…, but… as well”) between the physiological and cultural

factors that underlie human perception. Yet he did open the

door for humanists’ increasing preoccupation with the latter at

the expense of the former: everything becomes historical and

thus—at least potentially—subject to deliberate socio-political

change. Fredric Jameson’s famous exhortation—“Always

historicize” (9)—both epitomizes and sanctions the current

credo of much of contemporary criticism: where nature was,

culture shall be.

II

Today, however, this position has become as problematic as

the one it originally sought to replace. Given the amazing

advances in neuroscience and gene technology, there can be

little doubt that the precise relationship between biology and

environment, between our neurological “hard-wiring” and our

cultural “software” remains unclear, to say the least. I agree, of

course, that there is no “innocent eye” as postulated by John

Ruskin and other high modernists towards the end of the 19th

century. “The ‘eye’ is a product of history reproduced by

education,” Pierre Bourdieu rightly insists (1810f.). But this is

not to say that our entire perceptual apparatus is completely

rewired at the physiological or neurological level every few

decades or so. This is certainly not the case—a fact most

emphatically defended by Benjamin experts such as Susan

Buck-Morss, who rightly insists that “the senses maintain an

uncivilized and uncivilizable trace, a core of resistance against

cultural domestication because “they remain a part of the

biological apparatus” (6). For Benjamin, of course, the

biological nature of the senses remained a given; it was the

very basis upon which his history-of-vision theory was formu-

lated.

It follows that the historically changing relationship between

the biological and the cultural level of perception remains in

question—most obviously with regard to new media art and

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aesthetics. Why? Because digital art often deliberately works on

the physiological-neurological micro-level of the body rather

than on the philosophical-cognitive macro-level of the

(“critical,” “self-reflexive”) subject. In order to “understand”

many a digital work of art, it is crucial to acknowledge its un-

conscious, neurological effects upon the body, precisely

because these effects are the major raison-d’étre of this art.

One of the avowed goals of many new media artists is to use

digital technology as a means to manipulate these physiological

effects electronically.11

New media art forces critics to refocus their attention on the

physiological mechanisms that determine our affective response

to art. In this sense, the arrival of new media aesthetics—what

we, paraphrasing Kittler, might call the discourse network of

2000—is also beginning to change the critical parameters of the

century-old investigation into the relationship between film and

literature, by once again emphasizing the affective (rather than

the exclusively “critical”) dimension of aesthetic discourse.

Given technology’s increasing influence upon the very makeup

of our bodies and our perceptual system, this affective dimen-

sion can no longer—nor could it ever—be separated from tech-

nology. This is why media critic Mark Hansen refers to the

“body-in-code,” by which he means “a body submitted to and

constituted by an unavoidable and empowering technical deter-

ritorialization—a body whose embodiment is realized, and can

only be realized, in conjunction with technics” (Hansen 20).

Film critics, however, all too often simply repeat the

Benjaminian history of vision argument without updating it to

the 21st century.12 Unless we start renegotiating the relation-

ship between the cinematic and literary representation of

reality from a more body-oriented perspective—one that in-

cludes the question of how our physiology is influenced by

contemporary technology—we will remain stuck with the mere

repetition of the abstract history-of-vision thesis rather than

being able to scrutinize its relevance for aesthetic theory today.

In practical terms, this means that we should no longer

compare literature and film in semiotic and sociological terms

only, but should do so in neurological-physiological terms as

well—for example, by relating the verbal and the visual to a

third sense alien to both of them, namely smell. What, I would

ask, are the decisive similarities and differences between books

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and films as they try to describe or conjure the most ‘primitive’

and most embodied of our senses? The apparent ‘oddity’ of this

question quickly disappears if we approach it from a physio-

logical—instead of a strictly semiotic—point of view.

Film critic Laura Marks has pointed out that, even before the

arrival of the talkies, film directors such as D.W. Griffith and

Marcel Pagnol experimented with adding smell to the cinematic

experience by burning incense during the screenings of

Intolerance (1916) or Angèle (1934) respectively. She also

notes that “the cinema viewing experience, taken as a whole, is

already multisensory” given the constant presence of food

smells and perfumes in the cinema auditorium or the inadvert-

ent physical contact with your seat neighbor, the ringing of cell

phones and babies crying across the aisle etc. (Skin 212). John

Waters’ “Odorama” stands out as the most deliberate and

notorious attempt of cinema to move beyond its audiovisual

register. In his film Polyester (1981), Waters wanted viewers to

smell what they saw on the screen by using what he called

"scratch and sniff" cards, that is, small strips of paper coated

with an odorous substance that could be released through

rubbing or scratching the paper’s surface. Waters’ “Odorama”

had actually been inspired by a technique called “Smell-O-

Vision” used only once, in William Castle’s Scent of Mystery

(1960). The idea was to release up to 30 different smells from

underneath the audience’s seats at different times during the

show. The release mechanism was fully automated and

controlled by the film’s soundtrack. By contrast, Waters’ “Odor-

ama” relied on the spectators themselves to release the scent

of individual smell cards (numbered 1-10) when instructed to

do so by a flashing number on the screen.

In light of this history, then, it would be unwarranted to

claim that books have a more genuine connection to smell than

do films. Although we do touch books and inhale the various

smells (dust, mildew, cigarette smoke, etc.) that they may

have absorbed over the years, a number of related sensuous

experiences exist in the movie theater as well—a similarity that

increases if we compare books with DVD’s or videos, all of

which are physically handled and perceived by the viewer as

material objects (as opposed to what Christian Metz called

“imaginary signifiers” on the movie screen). A comparison of

the two media with regard to their material properties alone

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thus inevitably leads to a dead end. It must be supplemented

by a more detailed account of how films and books try to

represent smell on the abstract level of signification, and how

this signification is affectively registered by the human body.

Marks, for instance, rightly points to the biologically determined

cooperation between our sense of smell and our audiovisual

register, citing neurological studies which prove “that we are

better able to remember smells when there is a linguistic or

symbolic cue associated with the olfactory cue” (Touch 122).

Vivian Sobchack, too, insists that “body and language… do not

simply oppose or reflect each other. Rather, they more radically

in-form each other in a fundamentally nonhierarchical and

reversible relationship that, in certain circumstances, manifests

itself as a vacillating, ambivalent, often ambiguously undiffer-

entiated, and thus ‘unnamable’ or ‘undecidable’ experience”

(73).

Hence, our overriding goal in pursuing the literature-film

comparison must be to avoid the epistemological fallacy of

reducing both words and images to some allegedly shared

“essence,” be that an essence conceived in semiotic terms (i.e.,

their supposed striving toward visual transparency as outlined

in Bazin and Kittler), or in socio-historical terms (i.e., their

supposed reflection of modern shock sensations, as described

by Marxist critics), or in terms of some other abstract principle

of “equivalence” between the two media.13 For doing so would

shift attention away from the affective register of human

perception, and thus return our inquiry back to the very

argument (over the history of vision) that we are trying to

update.

But there is another, less obvious assumption that must be

avoided as well, namely, the belief that words and images

constitute two fundamentally distinct means of artistic expres-

sion, whose relation is entirely conceptual rather than

perceptual. When Lessing first published his Laocoon in 1766,

he sought to delineate the allegedly exclusive perceptual

registers of painting and poetry, claiming that whereas (static)

images operate in space and as space, the language-based arts

cannot but unfold in time and as time. Rudolf Arnheim later

tried to apply Lessing’s approach to the new medium of film in

general and to the talkies in particular. In his “A New Laocoon”

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from 1938, Arnheim reiterates Lessing’s strict perceptual

separation between words and images:

Obviously, it would be senseless and inconceivable to try to fuse visual and auditory elements artistically in the same way in which one sentence is tried to the next, one motion to the other….. On this (lower) level of the sensory phenomena…, an artistic connection of visual and auditory phenomena is not possible. (One cannot put a sound in a painting!). Such a

connection can be made only at a second, higher level, name-ly, at the level of the so-called expressive qualities. A dark red wine can have the same expression as the dark sound of a violoncello, but no formal connection can be established between the red and the sound as purely perceptual phenom-ena. At the second level, then, a compounding of elements

that derive from disparate sensory realms becomes possibly artistically. (Arnheim 203)

Art, in other words, succeeds in combining on a conceptual

(that is, structural or expressive) level that which must remain

“complete, closed, and strictly segregated at the lower or

primary level” of immediate visual perception (Arnheim 204).

On the basis of this alleged ontological incommensurability of

words and images, film critics such as Dudley Andrew have

concluded that a meaningful comparison between literature and

film must take place on the level of narration, rather than that

of signification or perception: “The analysis of adaptation [of

literature to film] then must point to the achievement of

equivalent narrative units in the absolutely different semiotic

systems of film and literature. Narrative itself is a semiotic

system available to both and derivable from both” (103; my

emphasis). Andrew’s point is clearly shared by most proponents

of “fidelity” studies today, who continue to argue that narrative

remains the only viable means of comparison between other-

wise incompatible semiotic systems.

However, it is precisely this absolute distinction between

images and words, between (lower) forms of perception and

(higher) forms of cognition that has been called into question

by much of recent neuroscience and cognitive studies. In a

seminal paper, entitled “What the Frog’s Eye tells the Frog’s

Brain,” a group of scientists, including the renowned Argentine

neurologist Humberto Maturana, concluded after a series of

experiments that “the eye speaks to the brain in a language

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already highly organized and interpreted, instead of trans-

mitting some more or less accurate copy of the distribution of

light on the receptors” (Lettvin et al, 254f.). This means that

each group (sheet or layer) of neurons charged with a

particular operation—for example, to observe the movement of

edges in a given retinal image—provides the brain not just with

a digital array of spatial points and numerical values; instead,

each group projects a congruent space that maps the entire

retinal image according to the specific operation it is

programmed to record. It follows that “every point is seen in

definite contexts. The character of these contexts, genetically

built-in, is the physiological synthetic a priori” (Lettvin et al,

257).

One important consequence of this research is that

Arnheim’s and Andrew’s crucial distinction between perception

and cognition becomes questionable, since the process of

image processing is spread out over the entire visual system

and does not only take place at one central location. In

modification of Descartes’ famous dictum, we might say that it

is both the mind and the eye that sees.14 For there are at least

32 distinct regions of the brain that contribute to visual

perception, meaning that there is no absolute center, no “Grand

Demeaner” or “Cartesian Theater” that authorizes meaning, as

the philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett puts it.

Rather, Dennett argues, “at any point in time, there are

multiple ‘drafts’ or narrative fragments at various stages of

editing in various places in the brain” (Dennett 113). Since

there is no single place or time at which this material becomes

bundled and conscious, we are faced with a “multitrack process

[that] occurs over hundreds of milli-seconds, during which time

various additions, incorporations, emendations, and

overwritings of content can occur, in various orders” (Dennett

135). The same holds true for our other senses as well. As

Marks point out, smell depends even more on the “lower”

functions of our cognitive systems than do sights or sounds,

because the “olfactory bulb is already ‘thinking’ when smells

activate certain receptors” at the very beginning of the

perceptual process (Marks, Touch 119).

This means that our classical aesthetic distinctions (between

words and images, between perception and cognition, between

affect and sense) are arbitrary and conventional rather than

15

absolute. For, at the neurological level, all of our sense percep-

tions break down to a complex array of electrical impulses

across a interconnected field of dendrites and axons, at which

point it makes no difference anymore whether the original

stimulus was a sight, or a sound, or a smell. Although Arnheim

was right to argue that “one cannot put a sound in a painting,”

he was wrong to conclude that we can establish a relation

between the senses only on the cognitive level of abstract

thought. On the contrary, this relation is always already present

at the neurological level of human perception. And this, in turn,

gives us license to pursue more daring comparisons between

diverse media and different senses, comparisons that delib-

erately violate Arnheim’s common-sensical exhortation to

respect the “natural” or “ontological” boundaries that allegedly

separate them.

Let me be clear: all boundaries are constructions and thus

arbitrary. But the need to construct such boundaries is not.

Although culture (i.e., technology) can intervene at any single

point of a given boundary and thus change its “nature” (by

using various chemical, electronic, or behavioral techniques), it

cannot instantaneously alter the present configuration of an

entire system, nor can it eradicate the epistemological neces-

sity of creating distinctions and boundaries in the first place.

For this is precisely what cybernetics and systems theory—

which were themselves were influenced by the neurological

sciences—have taught us:15 regardless of where exactly one

draws the boundary (between culture and nature, between film

and literature, between analog and digital media), the crucial

point is that one cannot not draw one, because no thought is

all-encompassing. There simply is no thinking without

distinctions.

To return to our comparison of film and literature, my

overall goal is simply to be mindful both of the arbitrariness of

distinctions, and of their inevitability. Which is to say that

Jameson’s motto—“Always historicize!”—must be supplemented

by Spencer Brown’s maxim: “Draw a distinction!” The reason

why I emphasize the affective dimension of aesthetics is not in

order to reintroduce some fixed (i.e., ontological or ahistorical)

human quality ostensibly impervious to rational critique, as

postmodern or deconstructive critics often charge. Rather, my

goal is simply to augment contemporary cultural criticism by

16

showing how the various levels of (semiotic, socio-economic,

and physiological) criticism outlined in the first two parts of this

essay interact, or supplement each other, when applied to

specific texts and films. The film version of Perfume provides an

excellent opportunity to pursue this approach.

III

Tykwer’s film attempts to stay very close to Süskind’s original

novel—most notably by introducing a narrative voice-over that

quotes verbatim from the text. Still, there exist a number of

differences between the two: the film cuts out the entire

episode concerning Marquis de la Taillade-Espinasse and his

fluidum lethale theory; and, instead of being a repulsive,

disfigured misanthrope, Tykwer’s Grenouille (played by Ben

Whishaw) is a handsome young man whose first victim

succumbs to an unfortunate accident rather than to a carefully

executed murder. During the great orgy that replaces what

should have been his execution, Grenouille even sheds tears on

her behalf, while fantasizing about what might have been had

he not accidentally killed her. Whereas Süskind repeatedly

compares Grenouille (French for “frog”) to vermin, such as a

tick, a bacterium, a maggot, a roly-poly, a spider, etc., the film

depicts his overall behavior, and his obsession, as being

distinctly human—in fact, Tykwer refers to him as “a tragic hero

of loneliness” who personifies the “myth of the unrecognized

genius” (Tykwer in Arte; my translation). For Tykwer,

Grenouille deserves sympathy rather than condemnation.

On the other hand, the book and the film share a number of

important stylistic characteristics that are most evident in their

postmodern playfulness with respect to earlier aesthetic

patterns. Regarding genre, for example, Süskind’s story brings

us back to the early 19th century form of the Novelle (from

Latin novus, meaning “new”) in Goethe’s sense of the term,

that is, the “unerhörte Begebenheit” that found some of its

finest literary expression in the work of Heinrich von Kleist.

Indeed, the parallels between Süskind’s Das Parfum and Kleist’s

Das Erdbeben in Chile (1807) on the level of plot (in this case,

the dissolution and reestablishment of a class-based society)

are as obvious as Perfume’s connection to the central theme of

E.T.A. Hoffman’s detective story Das Fräulein von Scuderie: in

both cases, a murderer is depicted as a special kind of artist.

17

Stylistically, however, Süskind updates this history of the

novella by using a kind of rhetoric of excess and repetition

reminiscent of Thomas Bernhard. Here is an excerpt from the

first page:

Zu der Zeit, von der wir reden, herrschte in den Städten ein

für uns moderne Menschen kaum vorstellbarer Gestank. Es stanken die Straßen nach Mist, es stanken die Hinterhöfe nach Urin, es stanken die Treppenhäuser nach fauligem Holz und nach Rattendreck, die Küchen nach verdorbenem Kohl und Hammelfett; die ungelüfteten Stuben stanken nach muffigem Staub, die Schlafzimmer nach fettigen Laken, nach feuchten Federbetten und nach dem stechend süßen Duft der Nacht-

töpfe. Aus den Kaminen stank der Schwefel, aus den Gerberei-en stanken die ätzenden Laugen, aus den Schlachthöfen stank

das geronnene Blut. Die Menschen stanken nach Schweiß und nach ungewaschenen Kleidern; aus ihrem Mund stanken sie nach verrotteten Zähnen, aus ihren Mägen nach Zwiebelsaft und an den Körpern, wenn sie nicht mehr ganz jung waren, nach altem Käse und nach saurer Milch und nach Geschwulst-

krankheiten. Es stanken die Flüsse, es stanken die Plätze, der Handwerkgeselle sowie die Meistersfrau, es stank der gesamte Adel, ja sogar der König stank, wie ein Raubtier stank er, und die Königin wie eine alte Ziege, sommers wie winters (Süskind 5f.)

Neither Goethe nor Kleist or Hoffmann could possibly have

written in this hyperbolic, postmodern style. The same plethora

of thematic connections and stylistic quotes is present in Tyk-

wer’s film, meaning that the latter is as intervisual as the

former is intertextual. For example, the scene in which Laura

and Grenouille gaze at each other beyond the edge of the

frame [1:44:40] is reminiscent of a key scene in Friedrich

Murnau’s Nosferatu: Hutter’s feverish wife calls out for him in

despair, but succeeds only in attracting Nosferatu’s attention a

few thousand miles away, as he looks up from his victim and

turns in her direction. This exchange of glances continues to be

hailed as a seminal moment in film history, one whose

ingenuity rivals that of Griffith’s parallel and Eisenstein’s dia-

lectical montage. Similarly to Murnau’s, Tykwer’s montage

establishes an almost metaphysical connection between the two

protagonists—this time, however, insinuating the olfactory

rather than the acoustic sense. In another scene, Grenouille

18

relinquishes his fragrant handkerchief and lets it sail above a

sea of outstretched arms and hands trying to catch it. This

appears to be a direct quote from Fritz Lang’s 1927 film

Metropolis (i.e., the scene when Maria steadily beats the alarm

in the flooded city while hundreds of children stretch their arms

trying to reach her).

In addition to this shared intertextuality (or intervisuality),

both film and novel share the basic overall theme, which is to

provide not just a colorful picture of 18th century life in France,

but also to depict French society during a period of profound

socio-economic change that led to the great revolution of 1789:

the utter disregard of the ruling class for the lives and well-

being of the poor; the clash between the ancien régime’s belief

in a divinely consecrated cosmic order (represented by Baldini)

and the social mobility caused by the rising influence of enlight-

ened entrepreneurs and small shop owners (represented by

Richis and Madame Arnulfi respectively). Indeed, all of the

novel’s major characters are defined by their selfish economic

interests as well as by their rational calculation of how to

pursue this interest most effectively, and all of them exploit

Grenouille’s remarkable skill and physical endurance in order to

further their selfish economic interests. Yet, in the end, many of

them (i.e., Grenouille’s mother, Grimili, Baldini, the Marquis,

and Richis) are either killed, or suffer a severe loss, because of

their intimate contact with Grenouille. In the book, the people

who survive are precisely those who trusted their gut instinct

(i.e., their nose) and who forgo potential monetary gain,

preferring instead to get rid of Grenouille (for example, the

midwife Jeanne Bussie, and the monk Terrier).

The reason why Grenouille upsets the socio-economic order

is because, in contrast to everybody else, he harbors absolutely

no monetary or materialistic motives of his own—except, of

course, for his effort to sample and store in his memory each

and every smell he has ever encountered in his life. But smell is

the most fleeting of our senses, which means that Grenouille is

in fact trying to materialize and preserve precisely that which

altogether defies materiality and preservation. Thus,

Grenouille’s actions are both paradigmatic for and subversive of

the society in which he lives: paradigmatic in so far as he, too,

seeks possession of the thing he loves (for him, it is smell; for

his fellow men, it is money); but also subversive, insofar as he

19

renders this principle absolute, and thus unleashes its

destructive potential. Given the intricate dynamic between

economic rationality and instinctual desire at play in Süskind’s

novel, critics have aptly situated Perfume within the dialectic of

the Enlightenment, arguing that Grenouille, with his uncanny

sense of smell, symbolizes the repressed Other of modern

civilization.16 This point is revealed most clearly in the scene of

his failed execution. At the precise moment when the entire city

of Grasse has gathered to witness the state-sanctioned

restoration of social order, Grenouille unleashes a Dionysian

bacchanal that not only dissolves all class distinctions, but the

physical boundaries of individual bodies as well: “Die Luft war

schwer vom süßen Schweißgeruch der Lust und laut vom

Geschrei, Gegrunze und Gestöhn der zehntausend

Menschentiere” (303f.). Grenouille, the animal, has succeeded

in transforming his fellow humans into animals—

“Menschentiere”—as well.

Tykwer, however, pictures this seminal moment very

differently. Less animalistic and more angelic, the spellbound

people of Grasse form an almost idyllic community that exhibits

progressive (heavenly) rather than regressive (hellish)

tendencies. This shift is indicative of Tykwer’s sympathetic

treatment of Grenouille, who appears as a proxy for, rather

than representing the antithesis of, the other characters.

Although Tykwer clearly retains the theme of monetary greed in

his movie, he presents Grenouille as being simply a victim of

the economic order and thus as deserving of our sympathy and

support. Süskind’s Grenouille, however, is not just a lonely in-

dividual in need of love, but also personifies the modern

condition. This is why he lacks a personal smell and remains

opaque throughout the novel. In fact, Grenouille’s manifest

yearning to be venerated and loved actually aims at a different

goal, namely that of being able to recognize exactly who he is

and how he smells. Put differently, Grenouille’s most important

characteristic in the book is precisely his lack of individuality—

the very individuality Tykwer’s movie simply presumes as a

given. Süskind’s hero, by contrast, desperately tries to develop

a distinct smell (and thus a distinct personality); and, once he

realizes that this ultimate goal remains unattainable, everything

else becomes unimportant as well:

20

Wenn er wollte, könnte er sich in Paris nicht nur von Zehn-, sondern von Hunderttausenden umjubeln lassen…. Er besaß die Macht dazu. Er hielt sie in der Hand. Eine Macht, die stärker war als die Macht des Geldes oder die Macht des

Terrors oder die Macht des Todes: die unüberwindliche Macht, den Menschen Liebe einzuflößen. Nur eines konnte diese Macht nicht: sie konnte ihn nicht vor sich selber riechen machen. Und mochte er auch vor der Welt durch sein Parfum erscheinen als ein Gott—wenn er sich selbst nicht riechen konnte und deshalb niemals wüßte, wer er sei, so pfiff er drauf, auf die Welt, auf sich selbst, auf sein Parfum. (316; my emphasis)

The idiomatic sense of the German expression—daß “er sich

selbst nicht riechen konnte”—means, of course, that Grenouille

does not like himself—indeed, that he “cannot stand himself.”

And the reason for this self-abjection is the fact that he can

“never know who he is” because he has no smell, and hence no

identity.

Using structuralist terminology, we might say that Süskind’s

Grenouille represents the empty master-signifier that both

guarantees and threatens the stability of the entire social

order.17 Like the empty signifier, he ceaselessly wanders about,

yet in the end always returns to his place (the fish market in

Paris). And it is precisely Grenouille’s lack of self-identity that

increases the self-assurance and self-identity of everybody else

he meets. The less he seems to be there, the more he allows

everybody else to feel superior to him (Baldini, the Marquis,

Druot, Richis, etc.). This negative reciprocity between

Grenouille and the other characters has been lost sight of in

Tykwer’s film, since the director apparently considers

Grenouille’s lack of identity to be the lamentable—because

(allegedly) preventable—result of society’s amorality. Indeed,

Tykwer appears unwilling to recognize that this lack is society’s

constitutive zero point, that is, he denies that the (signifier)

Grenouille of the novel represents the inevitable structural

effect of any social order, and as such cannot be eliminated

without at the same time—however briefly—suspending the

social order itself. This is precisely what happens at the end of

the story, when Grenouille is eaten alive: cannibalism, after all,

is humanity’s strictest, most fundamental taboo.

Either because he is unaware of this underlying dynamic, or

because he refuses to accept it, Tykwer gives a humanist twist

21

to the novel’s structuralist insight. Although the film’s narrator

quotes the above passage from the novel almost verbatim, he

changes one crucial phrase, thereby altering the reason why

Grenouille in the end abandons his own perfume: not, as

posited in the novel, because of his inability to smell himself

(which in turn means that he cannot recognize who he is), but

simply because of the fact that “there was only one thing [the

perfume] could not do: it could not turn him into a person who

could love and be loved like everyone else” (2:13:50). In this

way, any reference to the fact that Grenouille’s obsession

revolves around self-love [self-acceptance?] and self-

recognition [self-assertion?] is deleted, while the central

problem is re-defined in terms of (the impossibility of) loving

relationships between himself and others. Yet, as depicted in

the novel, Grenouille’s dilemma is that he cannot ever be

himself, because his existence is but a structural effect of the

being of others.

This difference between the film and the book decisively

influences how each deals with the sense of smell. To be sure,

both Süskind and Tykwer deliberately highlight the contrast

between the (enlightened, aloof, noble) sense of sight and the

(primitive, instinctive, abject) sense of smell. The latter takes

over when the former goes blind, not only for Grenouille, but

for all other characters in the novel as well. There is one scene

in particular that encapsulates this inverted relationship

between the two senses, namely the sequence during which

Baldini, who is temporarily unable to smell anything following

his initial testing of “Amor and Psyche,” instead gazes

appreciatively at the view of Paris from his open window:

“Frische Luft stömte ins Zimmer. Baldini schöpfte Atem und

merkte, wie sich die Schwellung in seiner Nase löste. Dann

schloß er das Fenster. Fast im gleichen Moment wurde es

Nacht, ganz plötzlich” (Süskind 85).

Tykwer, too, thematizes the relationship between sight and

smell from the very beginning. The opening scene of the film

depicts the dimly lit prison cell in which Grenouille awaits his

sentence. Similarly to what Laura Marks calls haptic cinema,

the lack of a clearly defined picture leaves the spectators

grasping for non-visual clues in order to understand what they

see.18 But whereas haptic cinema prolongs this visual uncer-

tainty in order to force the audience to rely on other senses,

22

Tykwer quickly fills the visual vacuum with a crystal clear close-

up: Grenouille’s truncated nose slowly emerges out of the dark

into the spotlight, flares its nostrils twice and then withdraws

again, indicating to us that he has already smelled the

imminent arrival of the guards who enter the room just a

second later. During the sentencing that follows, Grenouille’s

face becomes visible, but his eyes always remain in the dark

(unlike those of other characters in this scene). Throughout the

film, there are numerous instances where Grenouille closes his

eyes so as to heighten his sense of smell.

The opposite, of course, is true for us as viewers, since

Tykwer constantly needs to show us what his hero is able to

smell. The question of how to do this remains at the center of

the movie, and so far there is little agreement among reviewers

as to whether Tykwer has succeeded in his effort to translate

smell into sight.19 Tykwer himself is confident about his

success; in one of his interviews, he states laconically: “The

book did not have a smell either” (Tykwer in Berliner Zeitung;

my translation). Yet most reviewers agree that the film,

beginning with its opening scene, operates mainly with a

baroque-like excess of the visual. It often works metonymically,

trying to present the sense of smell by shining the spotlight on

the organ itself: “The hero of the novel ‘sees’ with his nose. In

the film, all we get to see is the nose of the hero,” as Katja

Nicodemus of Die Zeit has aptly noted.

Tykwer pursues this ‘nose-aesthetics’ mainly with the help

of certain well-known cinematic techniques that appear again

and again throughout the movie: a disorienting, extremely agile

camera fully immersed in the scene it depicts; a quick

succession of bold zoom shots featuring extreme close-ups, and

often only partial views, of a particular object,thereby

undermining its visual apprehension; zooming in and “entering”

Grenouille’s nose or another smelling (smelly) body part; a

dark and gloomy setting in which Grenouille (and thus, by

extension, the spectator) follows his nose in order to navigate

diegetic space, etc. These visual elements are always fortified

by acoustic ones. Throughout the film, Tykwer relies on

different musical leitmotifs to render Grenouille’s sense of smell

palpable to the audience. Co-written (like the script) by Tykwer

himself, the film score (performed by the Berlin Philharmonic

[Orchestra] under Sir Simon Rattle) includes many minimalist

23

themes reminiscent of the ambient sound of Scandinavian

composer Arvo Pärt—most notably, an ethereal-sounding

chorus of female voices that acoustically supports the visual

representation of smell.20 Apart from music, sound in general is

omnipresent in Tykwer’s film, whether it is barely audible (as in

the opening scene of Grenouille in prison, where we hear the

faint murmuring of the crowd outside) or deafeningly loud

(when he is being presented to the public shortly thereafter).

The scene at the fish market is paradigmatic, because it

employs all the audio-visual stunts described above: the frantic

swirling of the camera interspersed with the sound of

Grenouille’s breathing, the slicing of fish along with the sniffing

and chewing, squeaking and barfing that goes on wherever the

camera carries our gaze (0:06:03 to 0:06:31). Referring to this

scene in particular, one critic even charged that Tykwer

“visually rapes the viewer” (Speicher; my translation). There is

some truth in this harsh verdict. For what is repulsive about

these images has little to do with the smell of rotting fish.

Rather, it stems from the sensory overload caused by the

continuous barrage of audio-visual effects. Opulent scenes like

that of the fish market occur too fast and too frequently to

remain effective. Like most big-budget productions in the

American style, Tykwer’s Perfume overfeeds, and thus ends up

numbing, the audience. Adding the narrator to the audio-visual

grandiosity of Tykwer’s film further exacerbates the problem,

because it throws yet another level of signification over this

already dense web of sensibility. At worst, all of these

elements—the narrator, the mobile camera, the chiascuro and

intense color schemes, the leitmotif-technique along with the

numerous sound effects—vie with one another for the viewer’s

attention and thus undermine or cancel each other out (for

example, during Grenouille’s stay at Mme. G’s). At best, they

all work together to create an intensity as rich and repugnant

as too much perfume.

Let us take, for example, the scene in which Baldini first

smells Grenouille’s freshly mixed perfume (0:44:30 until

0:45:05). As Baldini closes his eyes in bliss, the camera slowly

moves around him in a 360-degree arc, during which the walls

of his laboratory are transformed into a beautiful pergola with

flowers gently swaying in the wind, and a gorgeous young

woman approaches him from behind to give him a kiss on the

24

cheek as she whispers “I love you.” Although technically well

done, the scene suffers from its uncanny similarity to the Nivea

and Oil of Olay advertisements familiar to us via TV. And

similarly to most commercials for laundry detergent, Baldini’s

moment of bliss is announced acoustically through the seraphic

sounds of violins, children’s laughter and birds’ chirping, well

before it is being visualized as a Garden of Eden. The scene is

too rich—but not in the Benjaminian sense of “shocking” us.

Rather, it is “over-coded,” so to speak, because its aesthetic

elements have become so habitual that they end up

anaesthetizing instead of stimulating us. As if acknowledging

this connection himself, Tykwer abruptly cuts from Baldini’s

blissful face to his hand slamming coins on the table as he buys

Grenouille from Grimal—a deliberate reference to Baldini’s

overriding economic interests, and one that, albeit

unintentionally, also comments on the profound

commercialization of the very images Tykwer has just

presented to us.

Another example is the scene right after Grenouille has left

Grasse to follow Laura (1:44:18 until 1:44:48). After he has

reached the top of a mountain so as to pick up her scent again,

Tykwer lets the camera swoop up and whirl around him before

it flies off with amazing speed and slithers through the hilly

terrain. This, to be sure, is a digital gimmick intimately familiar

to every sci-fi fan or video-game player. By contrast, the

landing of Tykwer’s camera is quite innovative. As it

approaches Laura, the camera slows down and hovers right

above and behind her, unsure whether or not it is really she

who dashes away in full gallop several feet below. But while our

gaze continues to zoom in, her hat flies off, and her red curly

hair flutters in the wind while she turns her head in slow motion

to meet our gaze, as if to confirm her identity while sensing

Grenouille’s (and the audience’s) eerie presence. At precisely

that moment, Tykwer abruptly cuts back to Grenouille still

breathing in all that red; he then immediately opens his eyes,

indicating that he, too, has “seen” Laura through her scent. The

scene works—precisely because the camera does not get up

close and “into” the fragrant object (i.e., Laura’s hair). Instead

of offering a barrage of visual excess, Tykwer’s camera here

remains at a distance, and thus activates our imagination: it

25

invites us to transfer the ambiguity of what we are seeing into

the hint of what we (imagine to) smell.

But scenes like this remain exceptional, which is why the

overall psychological effect of Tykwer’s film differs sharply from

that of Süskind’s book. A quick survey of the public’s reaction

demonstrates that what remains consistently exhilarating and

joyful for the reader is experienced as numbing and boring by

the viewer (at least in Germany). The reason for this affective

difference between literature and film is partly medial, of

course, since the low-tech medium of the book is much less in-

vasive than is the digitally enhanced, high-tech medium of film.

Using the full potential of the latter is bound to have an

infinitely greater effect upon the audience than the relatively

meager rhetorical devices of the former. Moreover, given our

visually saturated society today, it is far more intriguing to

ingest a Bernhardian rant than to be force-fed on Hollywood’s

mass-produced audio-visual gimmicks. I say “intriguing,”

because the issue no longer concerns the audiences’ ability to

“cope with” or “rehearse” stimuli in order to avoid trauma or

other mental problems, as Freud and Benjamin still argued in

the last century. All of us today are able to “cope with” our

visually saturated world just fine. Nor is it a question of

ideology, in the sense that audiences are transformed into

brainwashed fanatics ready to follow a dictator into war.

Rather, it is a question of aesthetic stimulation and pleasure,

occasioned by a change in what Jacques Rancière recently

called the “distribution of the sensible” in a given society.21

Simply put, the goal of art consists in engendering difference

and in making this difference [palpable, able to be

experienced], “sensible.” In John Dewey’s words from his 1931

lectures on Art and Experience: “The conception that objects

have fixed and unalterable values is precisely the prejudice

from which art emancipates us” (95). To achieve this goal, a

few drops of Grenouille’s perfume here and there would have

been much more effective than Tykwer’s pouring out the whole

bottle over each and every one of his opulent scenes.

The reason why Tykwer cannot resist the temptation to do

so, however, was not only his 50 million dollar budget. It has

equally to do with his humanist understanding of Süskind’s

novel and the fact that, for Tykwer, the fictional character

Grenouille is a lamentable victim, rather than embodying a

26

structural effect of society. Given the utopian aspirations

expressed in all of his films so far— think of the miraculous

escape of Sissi and Bodo at the end of The Princess and the

Warrior (2000), or the protagonists’ final ascent to heaven in

Heaven (2002)—in the end Perfume, too, is all about

redemption, reconciliation, and wholeness. And it is precisely

this absence of harsh necessity that the baroque style of the

film seeks to render present on the screen—which is why so

many of Tykwer’s scenes stylistically resemble those produced

by the advertisement industry: both disavow the structural

necessity of deprivation.

This brings us to the final image of Tykwer’s film, which

does not have a counterpart in Süskind’s novel. It presents a

close-up of the last drop of perfume about to hit the ground in

that disgusting Paris fish market. The drop, of course, signals

that the Enlightenment is never able to devour its primitive

other without leaving a remainder—reminding us that the

dialectic will continue, no matter what. There is, according to

Tykwer, always hope for redemption in the form of a true

human community—one drop is, after all, precisely the right

dosage to do the trick, as we saw earlier in the movie. And yet,

this last drop of perfume carries not only a promise, but also a

threat—not simply because it signifies the constant danger that

the masses will be seduced by an evil genius, but also because

it betrays the artificiality and unnaturalness of the total re-

demption to which Tykwer aspires. Like Grenouille’s perfume,

(our desire for) redemption is always manufactured, and thus

remains subject to human treachery and guile. The only way for

the threat to become a promise is if we renounce this aspiration

altogether, or at least, like Süskind, recognize its potentially

lethal nature. To choose life, on the other hand, is to

acknowledge that its apparent fullness ultimately rests on

deprivation and need. It is, basically, to acknowledge the

necessity of (political, scientific, cultural) distinctions, however

artificial they may turn out to be in the future. Notes

1 Tom Gunning has proposed a somewhat different terminology to describe

the same aesthetic and institutional shift. He compares the by now proverbial “cinema of attraction” that lasted until ca. 1906 to the reign of what he calls “narrative integration” after that (Gunning 56).

27

2 See, for example, Belach et al (eds), Das Kino und Thomas Mann;

Gersch, Film bei Brecht; Prodolliet, Das Abenteuer Kino; and Capovilla, Der Lebendige Schatten.

3 For a more comprehensive discussion of the media-competition at the turn of the century, see Strathausen, The Look of Things. 4 In one of the earliest American responses to Kittler’s work, Robert Holub concluded that Kittler exhibits a remarkable “lack of reflection on his own historical situatedness” which leads him to “muster only a helpless and cynical political gesture” devoid of substance or “political ramifications” (43). For a more comprehensive and well balanced critique of Kittler’s work in general, see the introduction to Gramophone, Film, Typewriter by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz, xi-xli.

5 It deserves mention that this is not an adequate description of Kittler’s later work or his oeuvre as a whole, which makes a significant contribution toward a nuanced historico-theoretical understanding of the development of (ancient, modern, and “new”) media. See in particular his Berlin lectures published as Optische Medien.

6 For more, see Kreimeier, Die Ufa-Story. 7 In his influential essay “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic

Apparatus,” Baudry claims that the “arrangement of the different elements—projector, darkened hall, screen” found in the cinema’s auditorium “reproduc(es) in a striking way the mise-en-scène of Plato’s cave” (45), and he concludes that “the cinema assumes the role played throughout Western history by various artistic formations” (46). See also Paul Valéry’s comment

that “Plato’s cave is nothing but a gigantic dark chamber” (qtd. in Paech 66). Other critics have expanded on the importance of the Italian Quattrocento and the re-invention of monocular perspective during the Renaissance as a crucial influence or scientific prerequisite for the invention of cinema.

8 Regarding the relationship between cinema and modernity, see also the collection of essays edited by Charney and Schwartz, Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life.

9 See Lowe, History of Bourgeois Perception. 10 See Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle; and Simmel, “Metropolis and

Mental Life.” 11 Media artist Olafur Eliasson, for example, experiments with retinal

afterimages in some of his work, his explicit goal being to turn the spectator “into a projector” (Olafur Eliasson 21).

12 Susan Buck-Morss’ otherwise intriguing essay “Aesthetics and Anesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay Reconsidered” is a case in point. In Benjaminian fashion, Buck-Morss convincingly demonstrates how 19th and early 20th century technology contributed to the fragmentation and alienation of human perception. What is missing from her account, however, is any discussion of contemporary (digital) technology and its ability to increase rather than decrease our aesthetic sensibility toward our own body, as Hansen and other new media critics have recently argued. If indeed the overall goal of art is “to restore the instinctual power of the human bodily senses… not by avoiding the new technologies, but by passing through them,” as Buck-Morss rightly

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summarizes Benjamin’s position (5), then we need to apply this insight to our own era and its technological capabilities.

13 In his excellent introduction to an edited volume on Literature and Film, Robert Sham rightly contends that, “in fact, there can be no real equivalence between source novel and adaptation” and that “the widely varying formulae for adaptation—‘based on the novel by,’ ‘inspired by,’ ‘free adaptation of’—indirectly acknowledges the impossibility of any real equivalency” (18f.).

14 In his Optics from 1637, Descartes famously claimed that “(i)t is the mind, which sees, not the eye” (108).

15 See von Förster, KybernEthik; and Luhmann, Soziale Systeme. 16 For a Frankfurt School inspired reading of Süskind’s novel see Gray, “The

Dialectics of `Enscentment'”; and Butterfield, “Enlightenment's Other in Patrick Süskind's Das Parfum.”

17 “The whole structure,” Gilles Deleuze contends, “is being moved by this primordial third that nonetheless remains distinct from its own origin” (45). This empty field or blind spot is the sine qua non of structural difference: “no structuralism without this point zero” (48). See also Jacques Lacan’s comments on “petit objet a” as that which “lacks in its place” (24).

18According to Marks, haptic cinema “enables an embodied perception” and thus “depends on limited visibility and the viewer’s lack of mastery over the image” (Touch 4; 15).

19 Both Der Spiegel and Die Zeit were fairly critical of Tykwer’s film, claiming that “Tykwer does not succeed in finding unique images for the abstruse cosmos of the nose” (Hoch; my translation) and that “the visualization

of the act of smelling remains rather banal” (Nicodemus; my translation). By contrast, the majority of American reviewers, led by Roger Ebert, reacted positively to the film, thus indicating once again the discrepancy between the European suspicion of (and the American fondness for) big-budget productions.

20 Cf. Mike Beilfuß’s comments at http://www.cinemamusica.de/152/das-parfum-tykwer-klimek-und-heil (accessed Dec 10, 2007).

21 See Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics. Works Cited

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Ed.Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen. New York: Oxford UP, 1979. 23-7. Baudry, Jean-Louis. “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic

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