pheromone movies

Lounge
1

Hm… how about some movies that might loosely be interesting to somebody interested in pheromones, relating to influence, perception vs. reality/image vs. substance, or attraction… here’s my short list, and why:

  1. Blade Runner: (perception) real vs. not-real. Ultimately the question is irrelevent. What matters is what feels real and is authentic to our humanity. The least human characters are the humans themselves who lack love or compassion even for their creations, and the most human are all replicants/robots, who can feel love (and yes, Deckard is a replicant- the unicorn in the hallway… but that’s another million post flamewar rigt there :slight_smile: )

  2. The Matrix: (perception) world hidden away under everybody’s eyes. Lots of philosophical stuff and a good place to get introduced to some philosophical concepts; a wierd blend of very post-modern and classical philosophy. Reality vs. percieved reality. Lots of heavy, concise dialogue mixed with very cool gun battles and marital arts.

  3. Audition: (attraction and perception) for all you PUA’s out there. Actually a “bad”, but interesting and artistic film. A really gorey critique of Japanese males idealized sexual tastes and oblivious “misogyny”. Two salary men create a game disguised as an interview audition to pick up women for a middle aged man’s love life, and it goes horribly wrong- she is not who they think she is. Their deception is returned with another (Japanese language film).

  4. Glengarry/Glen Ross- (influence). High pressure salesmen fight over their jobs. Some do very well, some lose badly. Some very good performances by Alec Baldwin, Al Pacino, and Jack Lemmon. I’ve never been a salesman but it would be a job I’d find hard to do, too “ethically challenging”. Still a very interesting take on it, especially as they all seem (more than) a bit slimey and yet some win and some lose, and it all seems to come down to charisma and how convincing they can be, and not to actually what they say but how they say it. Jack Lemmon’s character seems to have everything going agaist him- age, and a general lack of percieved trustworthiness- he’s just a loser and its obvious from the moment you see him, yet you can’t help but have some pitty or empathy for him anyways.

2

To be honest, those are better overall than the obvious ones, like Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, and the scene in Oceans 13 involving The Gilroy. Those two show a completely unrealistic portrayal of pheromones in use, while the concepts you point out in the other movies are pertinent on a more philosophical/existential level.

Very interesting topic, indeed.

-D4

3

I haven’t seen those, I guess I’ll have to look them up just to see how badly wrong they go. I saw Ocean’s 12, though, but not 13.

4

Idle posted some clips from those movies in the Men’s forum. Check them out. The thread has probably sunk down a few pages. He presented them as extremes with, my guess is, a healthy dose of tongue in cheek. For example, he uses a pretty morbid (but not gory) scene from Perfume as a warning of what could happen when you overdose. :smiley:

-D4