We Love You So – Where The Wild Things Are – Spike Jonze

Now that we’ve covered the question of what the wild things smell like, we turn our attention to another crucial point of odorific reference: Max.

We’ve already bemoaned the fact that theaters can’t provide accompanying “smell soundtracks” to films. There’s nothing that would make the movie-viewing experience more vivid than waves of powerful corresponding scents. Just imagine smelling the warm supper to which Max returns after his odyssey! It would be totally transformative.

Anyhow, if this were possible, Max would probably be best summoned by the scents of books (to signify the doldrums that he’s destined to escape), the smell of crayons (a whiff of creative boldness with the appealing potential for vandalism) and a slight trail of Golden Delicious apple perfume, as a reminder that good things await the adventurer at home.

Technology: make it happen!

Books and movies have one small thing in common: they combine aural and visual stimuli to the purpose of telling a story. But what about the other senses? One’s mind gets to wandering.

Where Wild Things are concerned, the answer may lie at I Hate Perfume, Christopher Brosius’s laboratory of unconventional scents. Rather than pander to classical tastes with rose and lilac-scented vials, Brosius creates formulas designed to invoke the most intricate of memories. Three of the scents developed at the I Hate Perfume workshop happen to bear a particular relationship to Where the Wild Things Are, due to their relevant subject matter. To wit:

If Max’s voyage had an olfactory accompaniment, it would no doubt be Brosius’s Eternal Return, a perfume designed to simulate the scent of sailing toward the shore. The mixture blends the smells of ocean air, wooden ships, and “a faint hint of cypress trees growing on a cliff above the water.” Sounds about right.

Then there’s Wild Hunt (which NAILS the wild rumpus in odorific terms)––the bottled and compressed scent of an ancient forest complete with “torn leaves, crushed twigs, flowing sap, fallen branches, old leaves, green moss, fir, pine, and tiny mushrooms”. Finally, there’s Memory of Kindness–based on the perfumer’s reveries of childhood–which has to be the smell of Max returning home.

Gosh. Is there even a vocabulary for the way that smells influence our perception of things? Will we ever have the equivalent of an olfactory soundtrack to films? to books? Life comes with its own built-in version, after all. And childhood is definitely the most powerful origin of smells. For these reasons, the whole concept of I Hate Perfume is a slightly mind-boggling enterprise.

Maybe Smell-O-Vision is due for a high-concept comeback.