perfume.
So, I said I'd watched Perfume, and was going to comment on it. There will naturally be spoilers if you haven't seen it yet.

We're meant to identify with the protagonist--that's why he's a protagonist, even if he's a bit of an antihero. Yes, he's an execrable excuse for a human being, but we still follow him. We're not given the option of following anyone else; consider this formal device: in the first half, death follows Grenouille in that everyone he comes into contact with dies coincidentally right after he leaves them, while in the second half, he brings death to them purposefully.

The story, to its credit, goes out of its way to remove the excuse that Grenouille is just following his desire--the method he ends up using doesn't even require murder; it just requires the subject to sit still and get greasy. He captures scent because that's what his compulsion is, but he murders because he just doesn't know any better.

The sexual urge is one of the basic drives that motivate people. It shows up in sonnets, in art, in great acts of selflessness and caring. (No, I'm not confusing sex and love; the latter draws from, sublimates and refines the former, which is why there aren't great love stories involving eunuchs.) But when blunted or mangled, this extraordinary motivation gives us stalkers and serial killers. Food for thought: are serial killers overwhelmingly male because the sexual urge is fundamentally different in males or because males are socialized differently?

As a footnote, I am highly disturbed that his actions are presented as having a higher motive. He's a pathetic, mangled excuse for a human being, and that ending--the one where he dies a magnificent and poetic death on his own terms, reads like a megalomaniac's script for his own blaze-of-glory demise. I was less put off by May.

I was reminded of the Corinthian (and the Sandman's curse to the "collectors", damning them to knowledge of their own mediocrity). I thought for a moment that the movie was misdirecting me, and that Grenouille's final target wasn't in fact the girl. But, of course, he's heterosexual, so he collects the scent of women. The Corinthian is homosexual, so he eats the eyes of boys. Same deal.

Tonight, Carin and I went out to Rick's, which we'd missed last week. We got dinner and watched two more eps of Babylon 5, including the one that Neil Gaiman wrote. Yes, that's Penn and Teller. Yes, that's the last guy who went around the station asking open-ended questions, which should be a lesson to everyone.

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