A Psychological Analysis of

“Perfume: The Story of a Murderer”

In this movie review, the psychological aspects of the story will be analyzed, particularly the
psychology of the main protagonist (Jean Baptiste Grenouille) and other individuals involved in
his life. The film,
Perfume: The Story of a Murderer”,
demonstrated issues that mankind faces such as the need for love and regard.
As denoted by the movie’s title,
the story depicted in the film is about how a young man became a murderer in his efforts to
create the perfume with the best scent in the entire world. Right from the start, I saw that Jean is
not like any other man. His face was not that of a guilty murderer but of someone who got lost
along the way. It seems like he was incapable of feeling emotions. As I go along in the movie, I
learned how his life right from his infancy up to his adolescent stage was not normal. It is not
normal in a way that from the start
he wasn’t fortunate enough to
experience a good childhood since his Mother, who, just after giving birth to him, left him to die
surrounded by rancid and decaying fish flesh and other garbage under the fish stand she was
working on since she was destitute and unable to take care of him. She was an unfit and bad
mother and her rejection
of the baby Jean has led to Jean’s
placement into an orphanage which was also full of abused and neglected children. Although
Jean was gifted with the unique ability of smelling and identifying different kinds of smell, his gift
instead, has scared other orphans away from him and has made it more difficult for him to
communicate and interact with the other children them. No adult was present during his early
childhood, the formative years of any
person’s life,
who might have been able to guide, teach and help him with the rules of society and in
socializing with other people and this was evident in the part where he was shown to focus on
every smell but unable to talk for the first five years of life. In the hands of an abusive and brash
orphanage mistress, Jean never learned to act normally in terms of social conduct and
understand what is morally right or wrong. Moreover, he never experienced love, care and
support from all adult models in his life thus, he never learned how to think and feel the same
way as others. As he grew older, he became more ambitious and goal-driven to acquire the
scents of all things. He was beginning to show signs of sociopathic disorder, unable to feel
emotions and capable of doing immoral acts without feeling remorse and guilt. It became
ingrained into his mind that only through the creation of the best perfume he will be able to
obtain love and admiration from the people, thus; he started obsessing on capturing and
preserving the scent of women whom he regard as having the most alluring and intoxicating
scents. His actions can be explained by the Drive-Reduction Theory which proposes that people