The Irony of “The Perfect Human”: Illusion of Perfectionism

We eat everyday. We eat everyday. We sleep every day. The level of repetition in every second of our lives is astounding yet no one cares to notice it. Do we analyze the behaviors of ourselves every single day? Do we even realize the choices we make every single day? After chasing tangible and intangible desires, do we still know who we are? Jorgen Leth’s The Perfect Human explores the idea of identity in an experimental and detached method. 

This film was released in 1968 as a cult short film. Leth decided to create this film in black and white filter, depicting a middle class Danish couple performing everyday rituals. Majken Algren and Claus Nissen depicted the couple in a detached manner, functioning like a robot in a white boundless room. 

The couple starts the film by doing mundane routines such as the man smoking, the woman brushing her hair, and the couple eating together. Approximately two minutes into the film, Leth, the narrator and the director, analyzes the couple in a suggestive tone. He says “we will see the perfect human functioning…how does such a number function?” Leth manipulates the audience’s perception of the couple from animated humans to cold, functional artificial intelligence. He suggests the couple is a model of the perfect human, then compares the couple to a number. Not another animated subject, but a number like zeros and ones that crafts the unconscious of all software systems. 

It has been six minutes into the film. There hasn’t been any mention of the name of the man and the woman. The narrator observes, and continues to observe the couple doing their mundane activities. 

Approximately four minutes before the film ends, consciousness sparks in the man’s mind. The man says “Why is fortune so capricious? Why is joy so quickly done? Why did you leave me? Why are you gone?” The man repeats these four sentences. For the first time in the film, he expresses joy, then confusion, then anger, then sadness. As a perfect human, he starts to break down from the construct of perfection. However, he remains in the element of repetition. If a perfect human only mindlessly functions without questioning and feeling itself, is the man still a perfect human after the inquiry and exploration of emotions? If he is not a perfect human, who else is he? Is he still a living being, or is he an idea? 

Leth made an interesting, artistic choice of making the film black and white because the loss of color desensitizes the audience's emotional connection with the couple. Furthermore, indifferent eye contacts and disengaged movements of the couple make the audience feel even more distanced from the couple. The cherry on top of this great, emotional disconnection between the couple and the audience is the couple’s repetitive action and facial expressions. The actors did an amazing job in portraying the non-existence of self-identity and loss of consciousness by showing nearly the same facial expression for every different movement. 

The couple remains emotionless and detached at the end of the film. Leth does an excellent job in engaging the audience to reconsider the definition of human and individual beings. He successfully experiments the contrast between theories and reality through being the investigator of a model of the “perfect human.”