The so-called new media redefine social relations both on a micro and a macro scale. A media user from five or six decades ago is an entirely different subject to a modern user. Within half a century, the roles of particular media, their social functions, and consequently users’ patterns of perception all changed. A 21st-century recipient is, as far as anthropology is concerned, equipped totally differently to one from the 1960s. Nevertheless, one thing remains unchanged in the real and the media worlds alike. Both confront us with the predominance of sight and hearing while taste, smell, and touch are of peripheral interest in spite of the perceptions conveyed through them being all-encompassing. The article focuses primarily on the sense of smell, but also on the closely related taste. Smell is too elusive and indeterminate and cannot be measured to the same extent sound is measured, for instance. Smell therefore has to give way to the more durable and definite senses. Its presence in films is absolutely marginal which is due to, as I perceive it, the technological capabilities in this area, or rather lack thereof. In this text I argue that certain films should be watched with one’s nose and taste buds, are a source of cognitive confusion, since everything important depicted in them is beyond the viewer’s reach. When scrutinising such films, one arrives at a conclusion that cinematic realism (but not only realism) must be multisensory. Otherwise, a case of epistemic schizophrenia occurs. The above reflection is undertaken in the context of two theories of social communication, namely M. McLuhan’s classic proposal and the cognitive theory of film.