A Psychoanalysis of Milk

In memory of Roland-François Lack Like Lina’s, the viewer’s suspicions are centred on the glass of milk. And it is this glass of milk, putatively poisoned, that is the focal point of my attempt in this article, pursuing hints to be found in the writings both of Gaston Bachelard and Jean-Paul Sartre, to outline a psychoanalysis of this peculiarly blank substance. Milk is a liquid that, in a symbolic sense, is superficially secure in its identification with innocence and purity (‘pure as milk’ is a phrase that, for instance, Sartre uses, to calculated ironic effect of course, in his account of the politics of innocence in Jean Genet’s childhood).11 Jean-Paul Sartre, Genet: Actor and Martyr, trans. Bernard Frechtman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1963), 6. See also Roland Barthes, ‘Wine and Milk,’ in Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (London: Vintage, 2000), 60: ‘[milk’s] purity, associated with the innocence of the child, is a token of strength, of a strength which is not revulsive, not congestive, but calm, white, lucid, the equal of reality.’ It could be said that in my consideration of milk the substance is on the contrary associated with corruption, a token of a strength that is revulsive and congestive, that is turbid, turbulent and... black. And, in part, I hope to displace this apparently instinctive or spontaneous association with innocence and purity, one that can lead us to misapprehend its phenomenological complexity. But, more importantly, I also propose to distil and extract a sense of milk’s ontology. The psychoanalysis of milk that I outline here, using Hitchcock as a case study, is thus not principally concerned with interpreting this object as a symbolic one that, like blood, water or wine, is inevitably traversed by individual and collective fantasies of various kinds – above all in so far as these relate to maternity, to the nourishing and the nurturing. Instead, it is concerned with excavating what might be identified as milk’s concealed or occluded ontological meaning. What in its innermost being is milk? What is the alchemical significance, so to speak, of this chemical composite consisting of fat and protein particles dispersed in a fluid containing, among other things, water, sugar and minerals? What is the secret of this secretion? On several occasions, a couple of which I will canvas in more detail in a later section, Sartre alludes to a shocking phrase he takes from a poem by Jacques Audiberti: ‘the secret blackness of milk’ (la secrète noirceur du lait). It is this ‘secret blackness’, materialized in the poison that the viewer assumes is present in the glass taken by Johnnie to Lina in Hitchcock’s Suspicion, that provides in concentrated form a sense of the ontological truth of milk. One of the occasions on which Sartre mentions ‘the secret blackness of milk’, the fourth and final one I have been able to locate, is a piece he wrote for the catalogue accompanying an exhibition by the North American sculptor David Hare in 1947. ‘Hare told me one day,’ Sartre reports in the final paragraph, ‘that he wanted to render by properly sculptural means natures analogous to the one Audiberti reveals in his famous phrase, “the secret blackness of milk”.’ Sartre goes on to argue that, like Hare’s works, which are influenced by surrealism but far from reducible to it, Audiberti’s image ‘oscillate[s] perpetually’ between destruction and creation. ‘For after all,’ he observes, ‘it’s true that the secret blackness of milk exists, and it is also true that the word “blackness” gratuitously destroys the essence of milk.’22 Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘N-Dimensional Sculpture,’ in The Writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, Volume 2: Selected Prose, ed. Michel Contat and Michael Rybalka (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1974), 170. The purpose of this article is to explore, through the films of Hitchcock, in particular Suspicion, and in the writings of Bachelard and Sartre, the latter’s hypothetical claim that, in some ontological sense, the ‘secret blackness of milk’ exists and to demonstrate that the idea of ‘blackness’, its perceived presence, destroys the essence of milk as this is conventionally understood.33 Note that, in this article, I do not address the racialized dimension of the idea of ‘blackness’ discerned by Audiberti and others in relation to milk. Hitchcock, it could be said, wanted to render by properly cinematic means natures analogous to the one Audiberti reveals in his remarkable, once-famous phrase, ‘the secret blackness of milk.’ In the well-known scene from Suspicion that I am reconstructing, set in the fashionable and ultimately unaffordable house Johnnie has rented for them in an idyllic village near the English coast, Hitchcock carefully darkens the romantic and comic moods that have been characteristic of the film so far. It begins as Johnnie, who has presumably dismissed the servants, quits the kitchen and, switching off the electric lights on the ground floor, crosses the villa’s cavernous entrance hall in the dark. He has delicately balanced the glass of milk on a circular silver tray that is itself balanced in his left hand. What is going on beneath the surface? Is the glass of milk pure or is it poisoned? Is Johnnie a rakish, rough-edged hero or, like Bruno in Strangers on a Train (1951), a sociopathic villain?44 Richard Allen notes that ‘Suspicion draws brilliantly upon Cary Grant’s own star persona: the transformation of Archie Leach the cockney lad into “Cary Grant” the romantic hero who always seems to contain Leach under his skin’ – see ‘Hitchcock, or the Pleasures of Metaskepticism,’ October 89 (1999), 76. Is this the sort of romantic comedy typical of Cary Grant’s performances in the early 1940s, or is it in fact an experiment in English noir?55 According to William Rothman, Hitchcock ‘designs Suspicion to pose the question, which it likewise leaves unanswerable, whether the film itself is a Hitchcock thriller or a comedy of remarriage’ – see Must We Kill the Thing We Love?: Emersonian Perfectionism and the Films of Alfred Hitchcock (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 72. Does the film, in short, have a ‘secret blackness’? In a smooth, continuous motion, one so precise it seems eerily mechanical, Johnnie proceeds to ascend the grand, gracefully curving central staircase to Lina’s bedroom (Figure 1). His face is a blank mask. As he silently glides upstairs past a series of sentimental pictures that appear to portray flirtatious couples, he is a dense black mass silhouetted against the pale wall and the prominent dado-rail beneath it. The surface of this wall is dramatically latticed with shadows from the bannisters, as if the entire house is caught in a net. Or in a spider’s web. One of the publicity stills for the film included the following caption: ‘Cunning, suggested by spiderlike shadows, seems to climb the stairs hand in hand with Cary Grant as he carries a glass of (poisoned?) milk to Miss Fontaine.’66 Quoted in Rick Worland, ‘Before and After the Fact: Writing and Reading Hitchcock’s Suspicion,’ Cinema Journal 1: 4 (2002), 20. Johnnie’s own shadow, the spider weaving its way through the web, appears then disappears against this background. It resembles the shadow of a shadow. This shadow, as it mounts the stairs ahead of Johnnie’s neat, self-contained silhouette, looks stunted and deformed. It is a rough beast that slouches through the house alongside the polished figure in an elegant suit: Mr. Hyde to Johnnie’s Dr. Jekyll. The visual focus of this coolly choreographed shot of Johnnie ascending the staircase is the glass of milk. Milk, in bottles or glasses, is a substance that features to powerful visual and symbolic effect in a striking number of Hitchcock’s films – particularly, it is perhaps no accident, his black-and-white ones. According to my rough count, it makes an appearance, aside from Suspicion, in The Lodger (1927), The 39 Steps (1935), Foreign Correspondent (1940), Spellbound (1945), Notorious (1946), Rear Window (1954), To Catch a Thief (1955), The Trouble with Harry (1955), The Wrong Man (1956), and Psycho (1960). As this list already perhaps implies, milk recurs in Hitchcock’s oeuvre with the compulsive insistence of a neurotic symptom. And it is for this reason that Slavoj Žižek, using Lacanian language, identifies it as an example of the sinthom; that is, a signifier that, though its meaning remains mobile and ambiguous, necessarily changing in relation to the various movies’ particular narrative contexts, nonetheless fixes or materializes ‘a certain core of enjoyment’, one that remains resistant to symbolic interpretation. According to him, the ‘glass full of white drink’ is one of those ‘characteristic details’, like a painter’s signature mannerism, ‘which persist and repeat themselves without implying a common meaning.’77 Slavoj Žižek, ‘Hitchcockian Sinthoms,’ in Slavoj Žižek, ed., Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock (London: Verso, 1992), 125-6. See also Slavoj Žižek, ‘From Symptom to Sinthome,’ in The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 55-84. There is something excessive about the glass of milk in Hitchcock’s movies. Elusive even when it performs a self-evident narrative function, it is somehow intrusive in its insistence. Gilles Deleuze also responded to this quality when, in Cinema 1 (1983), he included the glass of milk in Suspicion as an instance of what he called the démarque – an ordinary, often domestic object that, like ‘the first gull which strikes the heroine’ in The Birds (1963), mysteriously, even violently, detaches itself from or disrupts the ‘customary series’ of signs that make a film seem spontaneously susceptible to interpretation, suddenly becoming extraordinary, even alien.88 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (London: Continuum, 1992), 203. The glass of milk, as a Hitchcockian motif – overdetermined in its significance, enigmatic in its associations – plays an especially important role in Suspicion. In the scene in which it appears, the camera, positioned by cinematographer Harry Stradling Sr., according to Hitchcock’s instructions, on the landing outside Lina’s bedroom, first tracks Johnnie across the hallway, then remains motionless as he ascends the staircase. Franz Waxman’s musical score for the film, which offers variations on Strauss’ waltz Wiener Blut, composed for a royal wedding, loses its lightness and here becomes ominous and darkly ironic. When he reaches the landing, Johnnie walks directly into the lens – to the discomfort of the viewer, who has to repress an impulse to retreat from his looming, threatening form. At this point, the instant before Hitchcock cuts to Lina sitting apprehensively in her bed, the glass of milk seems to float in front of the camera, against the black shape of Johnnie’s body, with a ghostly independence, as if it has become detached from him. Throughout the shot, as the object rises up the staircase towards the camera, the glass of milk, which contains a liquid that is oddly unmoving, gleams with an unnatural and upsetting brilliance. In this context, then, the word ‘focus’ does not fully convey the disturbing and troubling intensity with which the glass of milk attracts the viewer’s attention. For it is as if the glass of milk, as indeed the shot hints, is destined to be brought not to Lina, sitting up in bed, but to the viewer standing on the landing – this is the only scene in the film to which Lina is not witness. The viewer, that is, is forced into making an almost excessive investment in the glass of milk. It positively rivets their attention. The light placed inside the glass, as Hitchcock’s unprompted comments indicate, makes the milk appear impossibly, preternaturally bright. It seems almost radioactive. But, in producing this effect of luminosity, it is only enhancing or highlighting its intrinsic properties. In his monograph on the representation of milk in the work of various postmodernist artists and photographers, Kenneth Hayes explains that, because of its chemical composition, ‘the scattering of light rays within milk gives it an appearance both dense and luminous’. He goes on: ‘Milk’s unique receptivity to light causes it to shine forth as if internally illuminated, as if brightness itself were made fluid. Milk thus shares in the allure possessed by all glowing things.’1010 Kenneth Hayes, Milk and Melancholy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press/Prefix Press, 2008), 29. The allure or attraction but also the repulsion ... Johnnie’s milk in Suspicion is too good to be true. It is too white to be comfortably emblematic of innocence. If, from the early 1940s, the time of his first Hollywood films, ‘milk was already a staple of the middle-class home and a signifier of hygienic, healthy living,’ as Casey McKittrick points out, then Hitchcock here relishes adulterating or corrupting its benign associations.1111 Casey McKittrick, Hitchcock’s Appetites: The Corpulent Plots of Desire and Dread (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), 82. It is as if some foreign matter is secretly present in this supposedly most natural of substances. And this had indeed been the case, historically speaking, for at least a century. From the opening decades of milk’s industrial production in the United States, the 1830s and 1840s, unhealthy additives were virtually constituent of this supposedly wholesome substance. The rising demand for milk in cities such as Boston and New York during this period, when it first became a staple foodstuff in American cities as a replacement for breast milk, rapidly led to mass production. As Mark Kurlansky has recorded, ‘large stables holding hundreds of cows were established adjacent to breweries, and milk became a big, profitable business.’ The run-off from the beer-making process, known as ‘swill’, was fed to the cows, which were kept in overpopulated and disease-ridden stables, via wooden chutes. But this produced thin, blue-tinted milk that then needed to be supplemented not only with water, which increased the volume of the liquid, but annatto and chalk, which enriched its colour and texture. The resulting product, known as ‘swill milk’, was identified by the social reformer Robert Milham Hartley as the cause of an unprecedented rise in infant mortality in Manhattan and the centres of other cities.1212 Mark Kurlansky, Milk: A 10,000-Year Food Fracas (New York: Bloomsbury, 2018), 163-4. Milk also proved ‘dangerous, even deadly’, because it was contaminated with bacteria that, prior to the introduction of mandatory pasteurization in the early twentieth century, spread scarlet fever, tuberculosis and other diseases.1313 E. Melanie Dupuis, Nature’s Perfect Food: How Milk Became America’s Drink (New York: New York University Press, 2002), 5-6. See Peter J. Atkins, ‘White Poison? The Social Consequences of Milk Consumption, 1850-1930,’ Social History of Medicine 5: 2 (1992), 207-27. Poison was thus already closely identified with milk from the moment it became a mass product marketed for its healthiness. There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie and Dim and in the to make up what to do with the The Milk milk or or which is what were This up and make for a of the A – Milk ... The of this liquid, which is to the ‘milk and innocence in a with in at of into their milk, so this on is not But, if the milk in and has been if something foreign has been to it, the phrase ‘milk also points to the or the that milk is that milk is with As Melanie and have it, ‘milk is to become something other Melanie and in the (London: 2018), For Hitchcock, even more for milk is always milk It contains an a something that, like all at the time an and the fact that the is In A even milk that contains no additives has its When to his in a of in the he that his before going to has left his consisting of and ‘a glass of the on the kitchen This milk, of course, it is milk, has or or in But its innocence has nonetheless been my milk always seem to me A In the early 1940s, when was a and Hitchcock was making his first American the American was more a of milk a In Suspicion, Hitchcock this staple of domestic in and and as it had been a He through his that, in the scene on the the of the milk, its the of its this white substance – which might a to the fact that, in an for the film, as in the from which it was Lina was by this point in the narrative – is an black On the of this and other by the see Worland, ‘Before and After the It is that are no at all in this film – as if the of Lina leaves no for In this like a or like one of Man characteristic the glass of milk the of Johnnie on the he is a black figure by what looks at first like a white the glass of milk is, on the a white form that, so Hitchcock hints, contains some sort of black When in the on that among other things, to milk for that is, to her milk for black the liquid that, in the of the is the cause of In Suspicion, the viewer, like Lina, takes Johnnie’s milk for – in the sense that this liquid as a substance that secretly contains a illuminated, the milk assumes the symbolic function, and the of black This is not the milk of but of in her of and that a of and is the to black This of and liquid, in the wine, as as in the of and trans. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), It also it in milk, though this substance. It might be said, then, that black is the to milk. milk is turbid, meaning or with because of the fat of its then it is also by a sort of or even ontological – the have a common in the it is only after that the of milk, its with becomes it is not an that Hitchcock to the image of a glass of milk, one that this time contains a a in his most film, Spellbound (1945), which is most famous for the that for it. In one of the and most choreographed the Dr. gives a glass of milk that he has with to – because of a memory that is only has an of white and gives this of milk and – for ‘milk – because he that, in the of what the opening the of the might the and his Dr. has placed the glass of milk in left Hitchcock the shot so that, of it in to the that, and the he in his hand (Figure what is the to his set this the opening shot of and It is as if the in the on the to the milk, in the on the not only as its symbolic as in some of the but as a of its It the in the milk – as in of its this liquid contains something and that is The in a sense, as the milk’s In the of from A this is ‘milk The of left that, in of the (1955), is by the by Robert to such is in this scene from Spellbound not in of and but the and the glass of milk. seem to for a or and a or But this is by the fact that the milk, which proceeds to his of the as had contains the The of the milk the of the impulse the in and rapidly to thus In this sense, the milk secretly contains the it is in a sense more the because of its innocence. As in Suspicion, though perhaps even more the viewer is also in this of by milk. in a Hitchcock a shot that identifies them with as he the milk (Figure In an article in the that ‘the to a shot, so that the is his as he You the of the white liquid his as he the Alfred Hitchcock, in Hitchcock on Selected Writings and ed. University of Press, is through the of the glass as the liquid But the effect of the glass before his is to make the milk rise like a in front of the even as the liquid At the of this remarkable, shocking shot, the milk seems to the which becomes no more a blank white (Figure In their identification with who presumably loses at this moment of it is as if the viewer too has been The viewer’s during the is of themselves in of as in a to its associations with the and the though at the time with a of its here, and, by it also the blank of the the opening of Spellbound in with the by which the of the which the that the most might itself be if in a in of the attempt both to distil and extract the black or poison in milk. after the fact that the most of all the between and child, one that is by the milk the from its nourishing is from the by In the on the of the role of in to ‘the which like an presumably the by the of milk was the cause of the on the of The trans. (London: Verso, 2016), Milk is thus almost from the moment of the caught up in an What was a to the is, to his or his We are with a but of this of The who the milk from his breast is a later to a to milk, which his has in This to if a on the milk or the it. We the that the up a memory of the so the the of with its to the of in The on trans. When the see or the that on the surface of milk – as a of as a – I a and, in the the and all the up the body, and cause and to with makes me at that milk me from the and who it. of that of their do not to do not it, it. But the is not an for who am only in their I I out, I within the through which I claim to of on trans. (New York: Columbia University Press, identifies the against the or of milk to be found in of the not a in his milk’ as a for the of In Suspicion, it that Johnnie is not after all to There is no poison in the glass of In The a but that on the example of Hitchcock’s film, and that like its in the role of an English Peter has a glass of milk to that, like the one that his first is in fact At that is the viewer’s – one that is because it. But that does

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