What the Nose Knows - Avery Gilbert [71]
SCENTED ENTERTAINMENT as an art form needs something more than a projectionist with a screwdriver and a flask of perfume. At around this time other people were giving serious thought to the artistic and dramatic potential of smell. Aldous Huxley offered a whiff of the possibilities in his 1931 novel Brave New World:
The scent organ was playing a delightfully refreshing Herbal Capriccio—rippling arpeggios of thyme and lavender, of rosemary, basil, myrtle, tarragon; a series of daring modulations through the spice keys into ambergris; and a slow return through sandalwood, camphor, cedar and newmown hay (with occasional subtle touches of discord—a whiff of kidney pudding, the faintest suspicion of pig’s dung) back to the simple aromatics with which the piece began. The final blast of thyme died away; there was a round of applause; the lights went up.
It’s a great fantasy: smells arrive at the nose in precisely timed pulses and disappear just as quickly. But as I learned in Blind Trust, moving scent through a big space is an inexact art form. Fan-blown air masses move slowly and linger too long; it’s easy to end up with olfactory sludge.
There is another problem. Even if a scent organ delivered odors with the brisk precision that Huxley imagined, the audience would have trouble keeping up. Fragrance arpeggios would blow by too quickly for the human nose to perceive distinct notes. (A mouse, on the other hand, might get it. Mice generate a fresh impression of the smellscape with each sniff, and since they sniff several times a second, they can easily keep up.) The human nose works on a longer time scale; it can’t follow a smellody the way the ear follows a tune. Anything faster than largo ma non tropo would leave an audience in the dust.
Bill Buford encountered a typically sedate olfactory tempo when he worked as a line chef in the kitchen of an Italian restaurant:
By midmorning, when many things had been prepared, they were cooked in quick succession, and the smells came, one after the other, waves of smell, like sounds in music. There was the smell of meat, and the kitchen was overwhelmed by the rich, sticky smell of wintry lamb. And then, in minutes, it would be chocolate melting in a metal bowl. Then a disturbing nonsequitur like tripe (a curious disjunction, having chocolate in your nose followed quickly by stewing cow innards). Then something ripe and fishy—octopus in a hot tub—followed by overextracted pineapple. And so they came, one after the other.
Another obstacle to olfactory cinema is clearing the air between performances. The movie-industry veteran Arthur Mayer found this out in 1933 when he installed the first true in-theater smell system. He had just taken over Paramount’s Rialto Theater on Broadway, when he was approached by an inventor who claimed he could deliver scent to an audience in synchrony with a movie. His demo film about a pair of young lovers was accompanied by all sorts of smells. There was a hitch, however, as Mayer recalled:
The blowers which wafted these odors out with such precision were supposed to waft them back with equal efficiency, but unfortunately this part of the invention had not yet been entirely perfected. The auditorium was so full of a mingling of honeysuckle, bacon and Lysol that it took over an hour to clear the air and for several days afterward there was such a strong smell of those mature apples around that a friend asked me if I was making applejack on the side. It was a long time before I finally lost confidence in the smellies, but my man and I—I had become a zealous partisan if not a partner—could never seem to master the backwards waft.
Mayer didn’t name his olfactory accomplice, but a cartoon in his book provides a clue. It shows Mayer in a projection booth, peering down into the house. Next to the film projector is a large device