Existence and Order: An Analysis of Philosophical Thoughts in Perfume

Eunice 2022-03-22 09:01:26

I happened to watch a movie some time ago called "Perfume". The first half was a little mediocre, but in the second half it was elevated to a higher philosophical realm. Here, I would like to take the opportunity to sort out this film, and at the same time, I would like to talk about my views on this film from the perspective of existence and order. The first half is a summary of the plot of the movie. Friends who have seen the movie can skip it and look for the dividing line. Below the dividing line is the main content.

The general content of the film describes a genius who is very sensitive to smells. He came from the bottom of the world and has no parents and no parents. When he was a teenager, he was sold by the director of an orphanage to work in a leather factory with an estimated lifespan of no more than five years. Even though the environment was extremely harsh, he still lived tenaciously, and it was difficult for him to reveal why he had such tenacious vitality. Until one day, when he got the chance to go out, he discovered a beautiful girl through smell. He wanted to possess and preserve the wonderful smell emanating from her body, and his possessiveness was so strong that he accidentally killed the girl. He was very annoyed by this, not because he lost the girl, but because he couldn't preserve this beautiful smell. Thus, he discovered his goal of survival—learning how to preserve scents of extraordinary beauty. He seized the opportunity and became an apprentice in a perfume shop, trying to learn how to retain scents. During his apprenticeship, the owner of a perfume shop told him a story. It is said that a bottle of perfume was dug up in Egypt, and the fragrance inside was so fragrant that people all over the earth thought they had entered heaven. But the final thirteenth element of the perfume is unknown and therefore could not be produced. The protagonist is very interested in it. In his opinion, the most wonderful smell in the world is emitted by a beautiful girl, so he hopes to use the girl's smell to make this magical perfume. Before that, he first needed to know how to preserve the scent of a person. And when he learned that the owner of the perfume shop couldn't teach him this method, he fell to the ground instantly and was seriously ill, as if his life had lost the motivation to continue. However, when he learned that the City of Perfume had a way to preserve the smell of man, he was cured of his illness.

He immediately went to the city of perfumes, learned how to preserve the smell of people, and started making perfumes. In the process, he did not hesitate to kill thirteen girls, and finally made a magical perfume. But he was arrested at the last minute when the modulation was successful. People hated him to the core and planned to publicly execute him and torture him to death. However, just before the execution, he opened the perfume he had made, and everyone was intoxicated and crazy. The jailer knelt down for him, the people defended him, and the archbishop chanted that he was an angel. Everyone went crazy as he threw the perfumed handkerchief across the square. The people took off their clothes and started having sex with the opposite sex around them. Even the archbishop lingered with the nun next to him, indulging in crazy sexual desires. After that, the protagonist left there and returned to his birthplace. In that market, he poured the whole bottle of perfume on top of his head. People smelled such a strong perfume, and their erotic desire and sexual desire reached the extreme, and they fluttered. To the protagonist, kiss him, gnaw on his body, and at dawn, only a puddle of tattered clothes is left on the muddy ground of the market.

After watching this movie, I was both shocked and confused. When I see the crowd immersed in the carnival of erotic desire and sexual desire in Nietzsche's Dionysian festival, when I see the hero shed tears, when I see the hero pour the whole bottle of perfume on his head, when I see him When I was overwhelmed by crazy people, I kept recalling, examining, and thinking about the ideological connotation of this film. When I watch a good movie, I will always be immersed in the strong visual impact, complex emotional impact, unspeakable thought impact at that time, in this case, it is generally difficult for me to understand the content of the movie. Savor. But now, after these shocks have faded a little, I have gradually found some ideas for interpreting them. However, it is difficult for us to express the complete ideological content of a film clearly and completely, which is almost impossible. If it can be done, it only shows that the film is not good enough, and does not prove how perfect the interpretation of the film is. A good movie will always leave some vague areas for language and thought for people to speculate and taste. But here, I still hope to provide a little bit of understanding after my calm, and I intend to briefly talk about this movie from the perspective of existence and order.

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Human awareness of existence is actually vague. Our awareness of self-existence does not arise from the self, we can only prove it through the recognition of others, the reflection in a mirror, or the perception of our own senses. What is the ego? What is the real self? We don't know. We can only know the socially constructed outer self, or the indescribable abstract inner self in self-consciousness, or the fragmented corporeal self that relies solely on sensory perception. Our very existence of the self is actually a rough and fuzzy mixture of the outer self, the inner self, and the physical self. The protagonist of "Perfume" is a seeker of self-existence. The cruel living environment did not kill him, and he survived like a corpse. But he has an extraordinary talent for perceiving smells. This talent seems to allow him to discover the meaning of existence, and the meaning itself seems to be pure curiosity and exploration of the smells in the world. However, it is not so simple in fact. When he smelled the beautiful girl for the first time, what fascinated him was not only the novelty of the new smell, but the beautiful smell itself. The pursuit of good smells seems to have become the meaning of his existence. In order to preserve and possess these beautiful smells, he did not hesitate to kill more than a dozen young girls. This pursuit of beautiful things is obviously deformed. He thought that what he was looking for was only the smell of a beautiful girl, and he was indeed fascinated by it, but he separated the smell from the subject of the storage of the smell, and he consciously separated the two completely. This detachment of smell from the host of smell is clearly presented in a clip in the film.

When he was in a cave with almost no smell, he found that he could feel a thousand smells on himself, even the sausage he had eaten a few weeks ago, but he didn't He didn't find the smell on himself, he didn't know what his own smell was. Suddenly it rained heavily, he washed himself in the rain, and his body became very clean, but he still couldn't smell what he was. He perceives the world superhumanly with his superhuman sense of smell, but in the end he can't even perceive it himself. He equates the smell of things with the existence of things, and the smell of people with the existence of people. He was lost because of this, afraid of losing his existence, afraid of annihilation in this world. So he wanted to make the legendary bottle of perfume, and wanted to discover a supreme existence through this supreme and mysterious smell, and even become the supreme existence . But when he threw the perfumed handkerchief into the sky in the square and everyone fell into an endless, complete erotic, sexual orgy, he remembered the girl he met for the first time, not the girl Smell, but that beautiful girl. The crazy erotic desires and sexual desires of the people in the square aroused his reflection on existence . The perception that smell is existence is broken, thereby removing the obscurity and camouflage that smell has on existence itself.

The erotic scenes of the crowd made him fantasize about his meeting with the girl, and when he saw the girl he was attracted to her people, and then he immersed himself in the joy of making love with the girl. However, the scene suddenly changed, and the dead body of the girl appeared in front of him, and the girl's frightened eyes became the center of the picture. He realized at that moment that he could not have the same erotic desires as ordinary people. When people smell the most wonderful things in the world, they get addicted to it, but they don't just get addicted to it, they turn to the release of sex, and he doesn't feel sex or love. So it realizes the complexity of human existence, and when he realizes that he can't feel sex and love at the same time, he becomes extremely lost, when he finds that he can't really perceive the existence of his own complexity, he It seems that the desire to continue to exist has been completely lost.

In the end, he poured the whole bottle of perfume on his head, which in my opinion was actually an expression of his desire for sex and love, and more essentially, his desire to exist. The perception that smell is existence translates into sex is existence . He can't perceive sex and love himself, but he doesn't hate sex and love, on the contrary, he yearns for this kind of beautiful things. When he found that this bottle of perfume could arouse people's sexual desire and love, he put it The whole bottle fell down. Here I think there can be two interpretations, and these two interpretations are not mutually exclusive. First, he wanted to attract others with his strong scent and make everyone fall in love with him. The second is that he wants his brain to be stimulated by this strong perfume that can arouse people's erotic desire and sexual desire, so that he also has the same erotic desire and sexual desire as normal people. And when he returned to his birthplace, he actually expected to start over from the beginning of his life, allow himself to acquire sexual desire and erotic desire, be reborn in his birthplace, and regain his existence . He didn't want to be an angel or a saint in the eyes of everyone who inhaled the scent of perfume. However, the actual situation was that when he smelled such a strong perfume, people full of lust rushed towards him, he was surrounded by everyone, kissed, gnawed, and finally disappeared in the strong erotic desire of everyone.

Obviously, the actual existence of the individual must coexist with the order of reality. The existence of individuals is thrown into this seemingly order-filled world, but the coexistence of human existence and order in reality is forced, not by human will. Therefore, when man enters this world and has a will, the coexistence of man and order will inevitably have two states: compatibility and mutual exclusion. These two states are intertwined in the existence of the individual, sometimes there are many parts that are compatible, and sometimes there are many parts that are mutually exclusive. If order is compared to a point, then the individual exists in eccentric or centripetal movement with order. Of course, the existence of order and individual cannot simply be regarded as a point, they have countless concrete representations. Therefore, to be more precise, individual actually exists in the high-dimensional centrifugal movement or direction that occurs with order. in heart movement.

Compared with ordinary people, the protagonist's cognition of existence is too simple, which is actually the result of his subjectively constructed inner order. In the process of high-dimensional centrifugal movement between his individual existence and the order of reality, he subjectively constructs his own set of order, which is the reality he imagined and is incompatible with the real world. So he could kill those beautiful girls indifferently and dispose of their corpses calmly.

Therefore, he is like a devil, rampaging in the existing order structure of mankind, thus making people feel uneasy. But the moment he released that magical bottle of perfume, a new order was born! People surrender to him, wide field of people recognized the reality of the order is modified, the new order to be accepted by the people, under the new order, order his subjective reality and the public order to achieve a uniform. This bottle of perfume is absolute power, but it is like a gentle, rigorous and highly skilled surgeon, it perfectly cuts off the part of the reality order that the people followed that was repelled by the protagonist. In this state, the protagonist and the protagonist Everyone is in harmony.

Existence, order, harmony. Is it the protagonist's goal to achieve harmony between the subjectively constructed order and the people's actual order? Obviously not, but it is the result of his purpose. We can see from his confusion when he saw the people in the square begin to have crazy sex, the self-existence he pursues under the construction of self-order is not an inhuman existence, but is still a human existence. He is always in pursuit of a human being, not a divine being, constructed from a self-ordering structure.

However, the harmony of order is not the same as the coincidence of order . Unexpectedly, although he was dripping with a good scent, which made him holy and beautiful in people's eyes, he also aroused people's yearning for sex, the source of primitive pleasure that belongs to human beings. , and this most beautiful thing belonging to the original human nature is beyond the perception of the protagonist. Under the new order constructed by this magical perfume, the crowd revealed a possibility that the protagonist never realized existed. The actual order that the people originally followed has also penetrated into the construction of the protagonist's self-order, which has a huge impact on the protagonist's self-order, making him doubt the rationality of the self-order, and then become confused. He wants to have sex with people, he wants to be recognized, he wants to be recognized as a human being! The inability to perceive sex makes him lost and hesitant. He could have used this absolute force to make the archbishop of the Holy See kiss his shoes, but when he realized that his existence as a human being was an incomplete existence, he lost the praise and praise of his self-existence. interest. The self-order he had constructed collapsed because he found that his existence could not support his self-order. The disintegration of confidence in his own existence marks the end of his ego order .

Jumping out of this movie, we might think that order is actually malleable and changeable. When absolute power emerges, and the owner of absolute power is a determined being, then the order of reality will be reshaped. But it seems to me that all the order we perceive is actually our best guess about order, and that the universal order we speak of is just as much our fictional truth. There is no essential difference between this general order and the order constructed by the protagonist of the movie . If there is a difference between them, then the biggest difference is that the former believes in more people, while the latter believes in fewer people, but they are both in essence. The imagined reality is our direct or indirect conjecture and imagination of the purely objective order relying on our subjective cognition, but such conjecture and imagination are limited to our cognitive ability. The higher order hidden behind the world cannot be captured by human reason. We can construct a reasonable and effective ready-made order in the real world, but any attempt to imitate the higher order will be futile. , or become some kind of quackery and fall into the rut of historicism.

Therefore, the variability of order cannot appear in a higher order, whether it is a social order or a natural order. When we say that it is destroyed or destroyed, this higher order still exists, it is just not the imagination of the past The reality of the reality is separated from the foundation of reality and becomes a new imaginary reality built on the foundation of a new reality. In this process, the higher order is like a highly skilled trader who controls everything behind the world, but its true face is unknown.

View more about Perfume: The Story of a Murderer reviews

Extended Reading
  • Gia 2022-03-23 09:01:31

    The movie about love reminds me of a sentence: "If I can speak the tongues of ten thousand people and the words of angels without love, I will be like a ringing gong and a ringing cymbal. If I have the ability to prophesy and know all mysteries and all knowledge. And have the perfect faith that I can move mountains, but without love I am nothing."

  • Madie 2022-04-24 07:01:04

    All the people who abandoned the protagonist died of misfortune, and the protagonist also took the initiative to mutilate many people. Although the name is a "great fragrance preservation project", it is obvious that the dividing line between black and white is not clear in reality. Whether it is good or bad is entirely up to the individual. This film is like a biography of a legendary figure, giving a self-defeating ending, which seems to implicitly express a certain life course or religious meaning.

Perfume: The Story of a Murderer quotes

  • Narrator: In the period of which we speak, there reigned in the cities a stench barely conceivable to us modern men and women. Naturally, the stench was foulest in Paris, for Paris was the largest city in Europe. And nowhere in Paris was that stench more profoundly repugnant than in the city's fish-market. It was here then, on the most putrid spot in the whole kingdom, that Jean-Baptiste Grenouille was born on the 17th of July, 1738. It was his mother's fifth birth: she delivered them all here under her fish-stand, and all had been stillbirths or semi-stillbirths. And by evening the whole mess had been shoveled away with the fish-guts into the river. It would be much the same today, but then... Jean-Baptiste chose differently.

  • Antoine Richis: Forgive me... my son.