Deeper Into Smells
+ an exclusive gift for subscribers (no, really!)
The announcement that the Alamo Drafthouse would waft the smell of blueberry pie during screenings of the Hugh Grant horror-powerpoint, Heretic, has me thinking about cinema smell. Anyone who has ever been in a Drafthouse knows that that place already stinks to high heaven thanks to their menu of exclusively sloppy food. I’m not a huge fan of real meals in the theater. In 2019, I saw Midsommar with a group of friends at the height of a sticky Minneapolis summer — when the air conditioning broke and someone opened up their box of saucy chicken tenders, it felt like we were being flayed, too.
Theaters have been interested in smell as a third dimension for a while, but it’s never taken flight the way that 3D or 4DX have. Smell just isn’t as much fun as a seat that rumbles or a dinosaur that leaps from the screen — and it has even more potential to induce nausea. Smell-O-Vision is maybe the most famous iteration of the smellable movie, and this is probably only because of its appealing mid-century name. The product itself never caught on. But we’re in a new era of smells, with a cultural obsession for natural ingredients and a post-Covid appreciation of the olfactory sense.
Plus, we’re no longer filling every indoor space with cigarette smoke like we were in the heyday of Smell-O-Vision. Maybe smellable cinema is within sight.
After all, we’re in an unprecedented time of movie merch. Once upon a time, it was an insult to say that certain characters were invented to sell toys. Now that “selling out” is cool, every movie — even movies that, thematically, probably shouldn’t — has merch. For films that predate the advent of fast fashion, there are a billion Internet brands that exist to retrofit fandom onto dad caps and booty shorts. The era of the plastic toy in a cereal box may have ended, but the desire to own more stuff has not.
As an owner of film junk, I’m not finger-waving. Ethel Cain’s recent comments about how everything gets turned into a stupid lowest common denominator ironic joke resonate with me. All projects become memes, and then all memes become products. But the urge to celebrate the thing you love, and to communicate to others about the thing you love, is annoyingly human.
Smell is a hard thing to transport and share, as the scentrepenuers who tried to package it with cinema reels discovered. Heretic stinks enough without an artificial scent that has me fearing for a Peggy Hill mustard gas scenario. But when my friend Reiley made me my very own fragrance for my birthday, I thought about why smell is so hard to cinematize. If we can learn anything from the continuous failed attempts to make it part of the cinematic experience, it’s that scent is only pleasurable when it’s ephemeral. No good can come from the stench pump.
But to celebrate sixty issues and to recognize this newsletter’s conception as a place to honor physical media, I want to send you a cinematic smell. Reiley has made a special Deeper into Movies fragrance. We are only going to make a handful, so put your name here and I’ll send a sample vial to a few random readers, along with some bracelets and pins, and maybe a movie recommendation or two if you’re so inclined.
The perfume will smell like — what else? — the movies.
