Why Does Frankenstein Drink Milk?

Guillermo del Toro's new Frankenstein introduces us to a creature who exists on the border between the living and the dead. It barely eats, barely drinks, barely participates in that banal farce of self-preservation we call metabolism.

Victor Frankenstein’s body is another matter. From the moment he appears on screen, this genius grown man (and as a child too) drinks obscene quanteaties of milk. What this does to his body is, for lack of a better word, amazing. However, his consumption betrays something about his place in the world. He gulps the motherly liquid the way other men drink scotch. His apartment is littered with empty bottles. The approach isn't subtle, but its meaning appears to be lost on many.

A quick search online confirmed it: audiences begging the internet to explain the milk. A small, shameful surge of pride rose within me, as I believe myself to be uniquely capable of answering this, both as a breastfeeding enthusiast and as a critic.

First, we must state the obvious: milk on screen is never innocent, nor is it a simple shortcut to motherly nostalgia. As the absolute powerhouse of a paper that is “A Psychoanalysis of Milk: The Case of Alfred Hitchcock” taught us, a glass of milk in adult hands is never just a prop. It shifts the original meaning of milk so that purity transforms into unease, and what was once nurture becomes threat.

So why does Victor Frankenstein drink milk like an underfed kitten? This question inevitably leads to a second, more philosophical one. If milk is the first substance we ever taste, the first contract we sign with the world, what does it mean that Victor signs it again and again, long after his mother is gone?

Milk of human kindness?

The most common (and therefore laziest) interpretation of milk is that it equals innocence or purity.

This reading must be stopped. This is the kind of symbolic shorthand that flatters the viewer and insults the film. It’s also politically dishonest because it treats milk as some kind of moral neutral when the reality is much more complex.

Milk has never been innocent. It is a bodily fluid produced under duress. Look around you and locate the nearest udder. Get close to it, smell it, poke it with your index finger. It is swollen, infected, gorged with pressure, a trembling organ that ejects warm, sticky, opaque liquid. This is not purity. What this is is labour and exploitation, that is to say, politics.

Let us be clear, milk is not the symbol of innocence. In the psychonalatic arena, it is the infantile leaking back into adulthood. It is the maternal body invading spaces where it no longer belongs. Some online theories suggest that Frankenstein drinks to remember his mother, or that it is a way to show he's not mature. It is, in fact, an ideological act:

He is suckling from his mother’s necrotic teat as a method of authorship, feeding on the corpse of origin in order to manufacture a new one.

In the psychoanalytic mythos, to drink milk is to take the mother inside the body, to preserve the lost object by swallowing it. Victor is cannibalizing his grief, which is another form of sublimation.

And this, of course, is where creation happens. His compulsive milk-drinking coincides with the birth of the Creature because creation, for Victor, is the only available response to the mother’s silence. If she cannot nurture him, he will nurture himself; if she cannot give him life, he will give life to something else.

But every creation carries the mark of its creator, and Victor’s body remembers what it lost. Because he is motherless, he builds a being who will remain permanently outside the maternal circuit. He builds a creature who will never taste the sour yet sweet aftertaste of the mother's teat. The implication is painfully simple:

If the mother is gone, Victor will attempt to become her, but only in the most limited, uncanny, malfunctioning ways available to him as a stunted genius.

On the other hand, we have the Creature. He starves for a symbolic mother. He was born without ever being part of the metabolic contract of living. He does not drink milk because he has no birthright over it.

In psychoanalytic logic, the breast is the portal into language. It is the foremost law and bond. To suck on the nipple is to belong in the world. The Creature never drinks. Therefore, he never belongs, so he looks furtively for ways into the world. He becomes a voyeur of knowledge and language. By what is negated to him, the Creature becomes perverse.

Since he is pre-maternal, the Creature is born outside of that covenant that makes us human. He longs for meaning, not in the sentimental sense, but in an ontological one. He is without category in the world, without position in the circuitry of meaning.

Meanwhile, Victor gets drunk on milk. In the eyes of the Creature, this is an abomination: Father hoarding the Logos he refuses to give.

And here lies the bond that creates the epistemological drama. Victor suckles compulsively from a dead body, while the Creature dies of thirst. The creation of the Creature itself is not the tragedy, but the fact that it is a milkless life.

The Creature is milkless, yes, but only because Victor cannot give it what it needs. The milk-drinking is Victor’s attempt at impersonating a mother. In a few years, this will be a classic example of Laster’s principle of misaligned origin: the belief that one can access the source by imitating its symptoms.

So, Victor creates life in a role he is emotionally, symbolically, and spiritually unprepared for. For this, he compensates in the only way he can: he ingests. But ingestion is not creation. He can drown himself in milk, but he cannot offer nurture.

With this, we can finally move to answer the question that started it all:

Why does Victor Frankenstein drink milk? 

Because milk is the last thread that binds Victor to the world he desecrated. His last connection to the mother. The afterbirth that is still attached to him and to his Creature. Milk is the central theological thesis which gives substance to the film and sustenance to its characters.

He drinks milk:

• Because his creation (understood as authorship) has made him symbolically void.
  • Because his creature wanders milkless in the world, and the guilt presents itself as a thirst that can never be quenched.
    • Because milk is the promise of a mother and her loss.
      • Because, in Laster’s terms, he believes he can become the origin by copying its symptoms.
        • Because he drinks to mimic the breast he cannot embody.
          • Because Victor is trying to stabilize a reality he has mutilated.
            • Because milk is the only gesture he has left to show the universe he still abides by its laws.
              • Because there is no other way to survive the crime of creating a life and refusing it the milk that would have made it human.

Without milk, Victor is not. Without milk, the Creature is not.

And Yet It Moves.

Further reading:

A Psychoanalysis of Milk: The Case of Alfred Hitchcock by Matthew Beaumont

Imperium Lactatum: The Necropolitics of the Motherly Nectar by Lysmander Wren

This Is Not my Milk, What Did You Do to my Milk, Mother? by Henri Laster