To be cool on screen, you can chain Cosmopolitans like Carrie Bradshaw, slurp on Vodka Martinis like James Bond, or taste Japanese whiskeys like Bob Harris in Lost in Translation. You can even be a White Russian aficionado like in The Big Lebowski and still be the epitome of cool. But a drink has the power to instantly transform every adult character who drinks it into an immense psychopath: milk. Alex and his droogs drugged with Moloko Plus, a speed milk in Clockwork Orange; SS Hans Landa and his sadistic glass of milk in Inglourious Basterds; Anton Chigurh, of No Country for Old Men, who sends his victims’ milk straight from the bottle; Leon, the ruthless hitman, who shares a glass of milk with little Mathilda; Rose Armitage, the racist psychopath from Get Out, who drinks it through a straw; or Immortan Joe, who sequesters dairy mothers in Mad Max: Fury Road. But what is the delirium of all cinema psychopaths with milk? comes from inside the body of a mammal and intended for infant feeding – there is also something disturbing about it. Is it the pasty mouthfeel it leaves or the infamous taste it takes on when it has turned that is disgusting? Is it the sexual connotation – the other white liquid produced by the body being sperm – or the primitive state to which it refers that is disturbing? If it can be tolerated to accompany a bowl of cereal (before or after, that is not the question), the white mustache that it deposits on the lips of its consumer is definitely the most repulsive sight there is.“ New Parsifalian Myth”Beverage associated with youth and innocence, so it can symbolize a person in inner conflict, stuck between childhood and adulthood. In Alex, Hans Landa, Anton Chigurh, Léon, Rose Armitage or Immortan Joe, real criminals, sadistic and ruthless, milk accentuates their madness even more by contrast with the purity it is supposed to symbolize and embodies the calm with which they carry out their atrocities. For the philosopher Roland Barthes, who published an essay entitled Le vin et le lait in 1957, “its purity, associated with childlike innocence, is a guarantee of strength, of a non-revulsive, non-congestive force, but calm, white, lucid, all equal to reality”. The most striking glass of milk in cinema remains the one that the droogs of Clockwork Orange mix with speed. It’s the image of their gang leader, his vicious eye with made-up eyelashes, reveling in this dangerous white mixture that immediately comes to mind when we talk about the use of milk in the cinema. Thanks to him, Stanley Kubrick insists on the immaturity of the antiheroes of the film and reminds the spectators that the terror is sown here by men barely out of childhood. Forty years after its release, it is certain that the shock of A Clockwork Orange continues to fuel the troubled image of milk consumers in the cinema. Still according to Roland Barthes, before this feature film, “a few American films, where the hero, hard and pure, did not shy away from a glass of milk before taking out his vigilante colt, prepared the formation of this new Parsifalian myth”. Since then, depending on the script and the intentions of the director, the milk can cover other symbols, such as the sadism of the SS Landa, who thanks the Jewish family he is about to assassinate and their cows by placing them on a stand. equality, the racism of Rose Armitage, who does not mix her colored cereals with her immaculate white milk, the infantility of Léon, who embarks little Mathilda on her murderous missions, or even the post-apocalyptic world of Mad Max: Fury Road, in which adults consume breast milk, a paroxysm of infamy. One thing is certain, milk is intended for infant feeding, and it is therefore the symbol of a certain dysfunction. To go further, here is a video that analyzes its use in the cinema:
Leave a comment