Movies and Olfaction

As I started documenting the evocative power of olfaction in cinematography on the @movieolfaction Instagram page, it quickly became an obsession. Almost every movie mentions smells, stinks, or fragrances. I want to share some of the questions that arose when hunting for the mention of olfaction in the movies. I mention over 60 films and over 100 scenes with this “smell commentary” on my page. As I began collecting screenshots and quotes, some patterns started to appear. At first, it was just surprising, but later, it became somewhat alarming—just how often assumptions, binaries, and generalizations are used due to odors or as a metaphor for stinging humiliation.

The films surveyed since the end of 2020 (when I launched the page) are a random selection of genres. In descending order: drama, comedy, romance, thriller, action, horror, history, fantasy, sci-fi, documentary, crime. The era clusters where the films' events take place are present-day, the 90s, the 60s-80s, and the 19th century. The dominant locations where the events take place in the film are the USA, England, France, China, and Korea.

Vampires and Comedy have more in common than we thought

In hunting for olfactive commentary, look out for vampires, ghouls, and witches. One of the most sensual vampire aesthetes is Matthew Clairmont (Matthew Goode) in A Discovery of Witches (2018). Mr. Clairmont can compare the smell of your flesh to honey, chamomile, and frankincense. The vampires in this TV show rely on scent for truth-finding, path-finding, hunting, and even a sense of time. Additionally, other vampires within the series can smell nationality, gender, and other non-human creatures and describe the scent of a witch’s power as a “spring,” sweet and green. Isn't it poetic?

At the same time, back in the world of Homo sapiens, I found that smell is spoken about most often in comedy. Pleasant smells were mainly remarked upon in response to food, cosmetics, and sometimes memories. Memories or melancholy are not so much about the judgment of the scent but mainly about the sentimental attachment to it—or the source of it. In Always Be My Maybe (2019), when Sasha (Ali Wong) meets with Keanu Reeves, they share what they miss about each other—smelling comes first. I’m sure that in post-COVID reality, we all will feel like Sasha and Keanu. As it turns out, fantasy and comedy are more flexible fields for discussing smells as a cultural heritage. Perhaps it is through humor and superpowers that we can rebuild outdated constructs.

Always Be My Maybe, 2018, Nahnatchka Khan. Ali Wong, Keanu, Randall Park, Vivian Bang

But in the world of homo sapiens, prejudice beats the truth

It probably won’t come as a surprise, but sadly, the most popular scent commentary is one of judgment—of bias and prejudice about nationality or race, gender, health, or social status. I compared large clusters, such as mentions of bodily odors (sweat, farts, breath, hair, health) and cosmetics (perfumes, shampoos, soap). I began to try to organize my comments on scenes into judgment, shame, bias, class inequality, hate, fear, and more. After viewing a relatively small selection of scenes, I cannot ignore the vast world hiding behind our ignorance. We are facing our turbulent imagination, actively using olfaction as a wall between people and different sectors of society through generalization, to intimidate.

Starting with the bigotry of Kitty (Judy Greer) in Unkle Frank (2020), who makes several generalizing comments that "they all" smell good or assumes that all gay people share broad commonalities. Even though the events in the movie take place in 1973, these comments still sound regrettably familiar today.

“Oh, God, you smell so good! Do you all smell good?” “Unkle Frank,"  Alan Ball, 2020. After Frank (Paul Bettany) comes out that he is gay, his sister-in-law Kitty (Judy Greer) greets his partner Wally (Peter Macdissi) with generalizations where “you all” implies “you all gays.”

An example of olfactive hate and racism appears in The Matrix (1999), where Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving) (a white man in a suit and tie) shares with Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) (a black man, tortured and held hostage) his olfactory intolerance and deep disgust in response to Morpheus’s body smell. While ostensibly a revulsion that Agent Smith feels towards the smell of all humans, it is impossible to divorce this exchange from the racial dynamic played out.

 In The Smell of Slavery: Olfactory Racism and the Atlantic World, Andrew Kettler writes, "Racism is one of the many aspects of culture and language that is felt through the sensory organs. Even as most of the ivory tower understands race is not genetic, the academy remains at an intense and losing racial moment in the West, at a place where most scholars are not correctly understanding the place of the body in the marking of race. The racist mind cannot simply be told that race does not exist, because racist knowledge is not entirely conscious. Rather, racial familiarity is embodied to such an extent within racialist perceptions that the experience seems to be biological. To deconstruct racism through educating the mind alone consequently creates a resistant body and an impervious body politics of racists and their many intellectual and embodied siege mentalities. To deconstruct how the five senses work to perceive the other, more attention must be paid to the subconscious experiences of disgust that are educated within the racialized social habitus."

“...This reality, whatever you want to call it, I can’t stand it any longer. It’s the smell, if there is such a thing, I feel saturated by it, I can taste your stink.”
“The Matrix,” 1999, The Wachowski Brothers (Lana and Lilly Wachowski). Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving) telling Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) 

More recently, Parasite (2019) has drawn viewers' attention toward odor and discrimination—this time concerning social class. The same views on social bias were displayed in 1617, where Angelus Sala, a physician, stated that “nothing in a world so drawers downe the plague as illness and stinke… For when plague comes into a land, it begins with poore and dirty folke who live crammed all together like piggies in narrow styes and whose lives, pastimes and converse are like those of wilde beestes.”

“Parasite” 2019, Bong Joon-Ho. Manager Dong Ik (Lee Sun-Kyun) smelled the presence of Mr. Kim (Kang-ho Song), guessed where the smell was coming from, and tried to describe the smell to his wife Yeon Kyo (Yeo-jeong Cho). Mr. Kim, members of his family listen together with the judgment of their smell:

“...An old man smell?”

“No, no, it’s not that. Like an old radish. You know when you boil a rag? It smells like that. But that smell crossed the line. It’s hard to describe. But you sometimes smell it on a subway.”

“It’s been ages since I rode the subway.”

“People who ride the subway have a special smell.”

The binary cultural baggage of olfactory history

The screenwriter, director, and producer of a movie all share responsibility for the choice of verbiage, symbols, and associations it contains. These are not just artifacts of the past; through the medium of film, they continue to stay as the "norm." Even a cursory glance at cinema through the lens of theoretical olfactory content provides copious examples of binary misconceptions. Is it even possible to present completely politically correct dialogues when characters are supposed to display their binary thinking?

For example, in response to a @movieolfaction post with quotes from the movie The Wave (2020), in which Cheryl (Sarah Minnich) argues with her husband Frank (Justin Long) about the "scent of a woman" on his clothes, the perfumer Christophe Laudamiel comments, “...or was he with a gay queen?” In The Rhythm Section (2020), the presence of assassin Stephanie (Blake Lively) is recognized by a blind criminal because she "smelled like a woman."

“The Wave," Gille Klabin, 2020. Cheryl (Sarah Minnich) assumes that her husband, Frank (Justin Long), was with another woman.

As you can see from the few examples, prejudice and language about smell are inextricably linked. Away from the stage, in reality, sanitation and deodorization are often well-intentioned but have been criticized by artists and researchers in recent decades because odorlessness divides people as much as it unites, depending on the context. And what does today’s cinema “teach” us while serving up such biased references to smells? We can't solve it without a pinch of skepticism from the movie viewers themselves.

From my days in drama college, I remember being taught that directors, screenwriters, and actors should aim to “raise the culture of those who will consume a cultural product.” But simultaneously, when you are a student, you tend to reactively move away from the "beautiful.” Too “neat” is perceived as dishonest, albeit again with the best intentions, because it leads to censorship of reality and forced affectation. I watched movies that reached the front page of platforms such as Netflix, Amazon Prime, HBO, Showtime, and Sundance, and their repertoire began to diversify only recently, notably following the reach of the Black Lives Matter movement. However, the movies written and published before and during these years still carry notions of the past, and one observation cannot be undone for sure: most likely, the mention of the smell will come from a white nose.

 My movie screenings turned into an artistic socio-cultural observation. The page is growing, and the statistics are not improving. But I hope these observations will draw your attention the next time you hear about the smell on the screen; it will become a topic worthy of discussion after about inequality, binary prejudices, and the colonization of our senses. And what do we do with the movie dialogues of the future? We can start with awareness. Because the way we talk about smell matters.

This article was first published in Olfactive Material, Glasgow, in the summer of 2021.

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