The image on the right is the promotional poster for a new film opening this week, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer. I haven't seen the movie or read Patrick Suskind's bestselling book on which it is based, but my point isn't to criticize the film itself. It is to condemn, once again, marketing that, in order to titillate its audience, fetishizes both parts of the female body (as opposed to seeing the body as a whole -- with a head and mind attached to it) and the victimized, frequently bloodied and/or dismembered female body.
The story of the film and the book concerns a man who murders virgin young women to preserve their scent, which he believes is the perfect perfume. The reviews of the film are somewhere between mixed and poor -- but, it should be noted, almost every critic praises both its visual artistry and its courage.
Some might, in fact, argue that, far from endorsing the fetishization I condemn above, the film is actually about the danger of a man's out-of-control sexual appetite. More than one critic, though, is disturbed by the lack of an internal check in the film -- and see the visual artistry at the service of something rather sinister.
Violet Glaze of the Orlando Weekly writes: "As the body count of sexualized corpses increases (an indignity sharpened by the hypocrisy of staying above the navel to clear an R rating) Perfume starts to resemble an olfactory Peeping Tom minus the intellectual chops necessary to back up its atrocities. It's a shame the rancid, misogynist undertone of lowest-common-denominator slasher porn overwhelms all its redeeming qualities."
But, as I said, how the film ultimately deals with this issue is not really my concern here. The marketing of a film -- or any narrative -- often overwhelms the story itself, since most people likely will see the marketing out of context that sit through the whole work.
And the image the marketers use for Perfume (see it in live action on the film's official website) follows a long and increasingly intense sexist advertising tradition.
First, seeing women as sex objects is nothing new, but in the last few decades advertising has increasingly dehumanized women by portraying them as animalistic or, as in this case, showing only an outline or just specific fetishized parts of the female body.
Consider how many fast-paced trailers for films and TV shows have what seems to be an obligatory random shot of a woman, usually with her head not in the picture, taking a piece of clothing off. To cite simply the example that flashed across my screen as I was writing this post, take a look at the last few moments of the TV spot for the upcoming Alpha Dog.
Sometimes this dehumanizing and fetishizing is "benign" -- portraying women as dolls, perhaps -- but it can also have a very creepy side, when violence against women becomes part of the appeal. See Christine's earlier post on how this disturbing trend has infected television drama.
In the Perfume image, the blood-as-rose-petals seduces the casual viewer in this subtle but devastating system.
Note: I must credit About-Face, an amazing website whose goal is to "to equip women and girls with tools to understand and resist the harmful stereotypes of women," with cataloging the most egregious advertising "offenders," as they call them, a few of which I link to above. And it's great to see that About-Face just launched a blog -- so I'm sure they'll be scooping me on this stuff soon.
And, speaking of scooping, I was surprised Bag News Notes -- another remarkable website that analyzing popular visual imagery -- hadn't picked up on this yet (although their focus is usually the news). But, as you can see, they've been busy breaking down the visual imagery of a rich political week.
This entry is cross-posted at PopPolitics.com