Illustration: The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, 2024, season 2, episode 4.

This ongoing creative inquiry examines how negative olfactory narratives could be linked to the re-production of the uncanny and monstrous wild in our imagination. 

I propose to think of the monstrous in film through olfactory narratives. Characters such as vampires, wolverines, and orcs—a demographic of fantastical realms most often characterized by unique olfactory attributes (and stench)—could lead us to the sensory characteristics of nature and the wild, encompassing the primal, the uncanny, and the sublime.

In fact, not the monsters were the initial guides in my exploration of the wild's concept complexities. Instead, the olfactory narratives in films guided my investigation. As an artist, I have been working with fragrant materials as one of my main mediums since 2016. Creating artwork with olfactory dimensions was an essential gateway for me to sensory studies like sensory ethnography, leading to the media infrastructures of violence and coloniality. The proposed exploration supports my ongoing investigation of culture and politics through the limits of smell. Any way of thinking about olfactory heritage is invariably characterized by swings between culturally opposed extremes, such as obsession and rejection, perfume and stench, and sanctity or doom. 

Here, cinema is an example of an accessible mainstream cultural channel, a vast area of sensory re-production of legacies and meanings. In 2020, I first published my social media archive of cinema screenshots mentioning olfaction. These mentions were verbal but included plenty of examples of body language. Subtitles were also an inalienable part of the narrative methodology for the first iteration of the archive, based on a technical limitation of the screenshot format. The subtitles highlighted the interplay between verbal and textual narrative.

By collecting movie screenshots as cultural evidence, I immediately began to see frameworks that, upon more detailed analysis, revealed their systematicity. I was asked to elaborate on my findings from the @movieolfaction archive, and in 2021 a short survey article was published in Olfactive Material, Glasgow. The article reflects and perpetuates social biases. Smell is frequently used to reinforce stereotypes and prejudices based on race, gender, social class, and sexual orientation. These cinematic representations contribute to maintaining harmful stereotypes and social divisions. We need to be more critical of these portrayals and challenge the messages they convey. By being more mindful of how smell is used in film, we can challenge these harmful narratives and work towards a more inclusive and equitable society.

Constructed narratives illuminate discrimination through verbal violence among dialogue participants and, owing to the accessibility of cinematic content today, perpetuate these stories, thereby amplifying and reinforcing narrative continuity and its impact on our perceptions and beliefs regarding gender, race, and class. In terms of working with the social context of smells, such narratives not only preserve historical facts but also act as a tool to signal the continued presence of past contexts. 

The significance of negative olfactory narratives in the film could be linked to historical human conceptions of nature and the fear of its unpredictable dominance, with exploitation and destruction as human solutions to overcome the uncanny.

While further exploring the cinematic depictions of olfactory interactions, it became apparent that monsters were the sole category of "olfactory outcasts" who genuinely owned, proudly, and effectively used their sense of smell. In a world where human characters often shy away from or are ashamed of their olfactory experiences, monsters embrace their heightened senses, using them to navigate their environments, hunt their prey, and assert their power. This unique ownership of the olfactory sense positions monsters as liminal figures, residing at the periphery of "civilized" culture and portrayed as beyond the boundaries of human perception. They inhabit a realm where the natural and the supernatural converge, where the primal and the cultivated collide. Their acute sense of smell becomes a metaphor for their connection to a more instinctual, untamed existence, a connection that human characters often struggle to reconcile with their own refined sensibilities. In this way, the monstrous olfactory narrative reminds us of the wild that lies within and without us, a wild that is alluring and terrifying. It challenges us to confront our fears and desires, acknowledge the primal instincts that lurk beneath the surface of our sophisticated selves, and embrace the wildness that exists both within us and in the world around us. We are constructing these monsters in our likeness, but we are afraid of falling prey to their "unattainable" sensory capabilities; it is the same way we build virtual worlds in movies and online, and the monsters will migrate there with us as a version of our shadow when we face in opposition to the obscure frontier.

The way we talk about olfaction today is a way to overcome Western prejudices about its crude qualities of sensory perception, which have led to the stigma and postponement of scientific and cultural research on olfaction in particular. As the sense of smell is often called the lowest of the senses, I’ll emphasize that it’s not just because of the grossly simplified ranking of the prioritization of the sensory channels but also because it references its connection to a primal. That may be traced back to the transition of humans from four-legged to two-legged locomotion; bipedalism allowed early humans to free up their hands for tool use and carry objects. We can speculate that getting taller from the earth’s surface and seeing farther began to shift human sensorial "priorities." Assuming those who are associated with nature encompass groups often characterized as barbarians, primitives, and underdeveloped populations, women are integrated into this context, too, due to their historical association with nature, which includes aspects such as fertility, the symbolic interpretation of the earth's seasons, the lunar cycle, menstruation, climatic patterns, and water movements. The unruly emotionality of women in the form of hysteria also continued this line of thought until 1980. However, the concept of hysteria dates back much further. It was first described in ancient Egyptian and Greek societies, and throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, it was one of the most commonly diagnosed "disorders" in women. We can notice how qualities are vague and instantly transferred through associative translation, raising questions like who precisely the "translator" is. 

First image, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, 2024, season 2, episode 4.

Second image, “Picky Blinders,” S.6, Ep.1, 2022.

The third image is a screenshot of the @movieolfaction database. All rights reserved.

Illustratory images portraying monsters created in Midjourney, using the prompt: “a female monster mix of gargoyle, vampire, orc, and wolverine, surrounded and made of plants and dark, on a background of sublime and uncanny landscape, realistic like a movie set.”