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 we sat in the Korova milkbar trying to make up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening. The Korova Milk Bar sold milkplus, milk plus vellocet or synthemesc or drencrom which is what we were drinking. This would sharpen you up and make you ready for a bit of the old ultra-violence.1414 Stanley Kubrick, A Clockwork Orange: Screenplay – available at: https://www.dailyscript.com/scripts/A+Clockwork+Orange.pdf Milk plus … The name of this liquid, which is uncomfortably close to the conjunction ‘milk pus’, places corruption and innocence in a violent juxtaposition (cows infected with mastitis are, in fact, at risk of releasing pus into their milk, so this play on words is not entirely inappropriate). But, if the milk in Burgess’s and Kubrick’s dystopian society has been adulterated, if something foreign has been added to it, the phrase ‘milk plus’ also points to the idea, or the suspicion, that milk is never merely milk; that milk is never entirely identical with itself. As Melanie Jackson and Esther Leslie have put it, ‘milk is subtle, supple, shifting, ever ready to become something other than itself’.1616 Melanie Jackson and Esther Leslie, Deeper in the Pyramid (London: Banner Repeater, 2018), 3. For Hitchcock, certainly, even more than for Kubrick, milk is always milk plus. It contains an inherent surplus; a supplementary something that, like all supplements, at the same time constitutes an excess and implicitly exposes the fact that the original entity is intrinsically incomplete. In A Clockwork Orange, even milk that contains no additives has lost its purity. When Alex returns to his ‘manky quarters’ in a block of flats, in the novel, he finds that his mother, before going to sleep, has left his supper, consisting of ‘tinned spongemeat’ and ‘a glass of the old cold moloko’, on the kitchen table. This milk, of course, since it is mother’s milk, has ‘no knives or synthemesc or dremcom in it’. But its innocence has nonetheless been terminally tainted: ‘How wicked, my brothers, innocent milk must always seem to me now.’1717 Burgess, A Clockwork Orange, 25-6. In the early 1940s, when Kubrick was a high-school student and Hitchcock was making his first American movies, the average American was drinking more than a pint of milk a day. In Suspicion, Hitchcock renders this staple of domestic life, rich in nutritional and nurturing associations, strange, dangerous and deadly once again, as it had been a century before. He ensures through his ingenious technical innovation that, in the scene on the stairs, the luminosity of the milk, its inordinate milkiness, paradoxically evokes the hidden presence of its opposite: poison. Beneath this innocent, aqueous white substance – which might transmit a faint allusion to the fact that, in an earlier script for the film, as in the novel from which it was adapted, Lina was pregnant by this point in the narrative – there is an evil, viscous black substance.1818 On the censorship of this and other details by the Production Code Administration (PCA), see Worland, ‘Before and After the Fact,’ 10. It is noticeable that there are no children at all in this film – as if the infantilization of Lina leaves no room for them. In this respect, like a photographic negative, or like one of Man Ray’s characteristic images, the glass of milk reverses the monochromatic coding of Johnnie on the stairs. For, where he is a black figure distinguished by what looks at first glance like a radioactive white core, the glass of milk is, on the contrary, a white form that, so Hitchcock hints, contains some sort of invisible black lava. When Lady Macbeth, in Shakespeare’s tragedy, invokes the ‘spirits/That tend on mortal thoughts’, demanding that they ‘unsex’ her, she asks them, among other things, to ‘take [her] milk for gall’ (1. 5. 30–1, 38). She asks them, that is, to take her milk for black bile, the clotted liquid that, in the medical theory of the four humours, is the cause of melancholia (melaina kole; literally, ‘black bile’). In Suspicion, the viewer, like Lina, takes Johnnie’s milk for gall – in the sense that they interpret this thin-white, innocent liquid as a substance that secretly contains a thick-black, corrupt one. Excessively illuminated, the milk assumes the symbolic function, and the occult identity, of black bile. This is not the milk of human kindness but of human cruelness. Julia Kristeva, in her discussion of Aristotle and melancholy, observes that froth (aphros), a ‘white mixture of air (pneuma) and liquid’, is the ‘euphoric counterpoint to black bile’. This mixture of air and liquid, she adds, ‘brings out froth in the sea, wine, as well as in the sperm of man’.1919 Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 7. It also brings it out in milk, though she doesn’t mention this substance. It might be said, then, conversely, that black bile is the dysphoric counterpart to milk. If milk is physically turbid, meaning cloudy or thick with suspended matter, because of the fat content of its casein proteins, then it is also defined by a sort of spiritual or even ontological disturbance – the two words have a common root in the Latin turbidus. Perhaps it is only after Freud that the impossible whiteness of milk, its fundamental nonidentity with itself, becomes perceptible. No doubt it is not an accident that Hitchcock returns to the image of a glass of milk, one that this time contains a sedative rather than a poison, in his most ‘psychoanalytic’ film, Spellbound (1945), which is probably most famous for the dream sequence that Salvador Dali designed for it. In one of the film’s lengthiest and most artfully choreographed shots, the fatherly psychoanalyst Dr. Alex Brulov (Michael Chekhov) gives a glass of milk that he has laced with bromide to John Ballantyne (Gregory Peck) – who, because of a traumatic memory that is only subsequently revealed, has an irrational fear of white objects and surfaces. Brulov gives Ballantyne this concoction of milk and dope – another recipe for ‘milk plus’ – because he fears that, in the grip of what the opening title calls the ‘devils of unreason’, the younger man might harm the older man and his former pupil, Dr. Constance Peterson (Ingrid Bergman). Once Brulov has placed the glass of milk in Ballantyne’s left hand, Hitchcock frames the shot so that, very slightly out of focus, it floats in disconcerting proximity to the cut-throat razor that, sharply defined and catching the light, he holds in his right hand (Figure 3) (In what is surely the director’s sly tribute to his celebrity set designer, this blade recalls the notorious opening shot of Dali and Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou (1929).) It is as if the blade, in the foreground, on the left, relates to the milk, in the background, on the right, not only as its symbolic opposite, as in some Surrealist variant of the game ‘Rock, Paper, Scissors’, but as a sign of its inner logic. It exposes the latent danger in the milk – as though, in spite of its soft, warm innocence, this liquid contains something hard and cold that is potentially lethal. The blade therefore functions, in a sense, as the milk’s unconscious. In the language of Alex from A Clockwork Orange, this is ‘milk plus’ containing ‘knives’. The ‘story of right hand, left hand’ that, in Charles Laughton’s Night of the Hunter (1955), is narrated by the preacher impersonated by Robert Mitchum, to such sinister effect, is in this scene from Spellbound dramatized not in terms of Love and Hate but the razor blade and the glass of milk. These items initially seem to stand in, respectively, for a violent masculine or paternal principle and a nurturing female or maternal one. But this neat opposition is complicated by the fact that the milk, which Ballantyne proceeds to drink, thereby preempting his use of the blade as Brulov had intended, contains the bromide. The ‘victory’ of the milk over the blade, of the maternal impulse over the paternal one, in sedating him and rapidly sending him to sleep, thus entails Ballantyne’s emasculation. In this sense, too, the milk secretly contains the castrating knife; indeed, it is in a sense more deadly than the knife because of its apparent innocence. As in Suspicion, though perhaps even more surprisingly, the viewer is also implicated in this process of poisoning by milk. For, in a startling reverse cut, Hitchcock constructs a point-of-view shot that identifies them with Ballantyne as he drains the milk (Figure 4). In an article published in 1946, the director explained that ‘the camera moves to a back shot, so that the audience is behind his eyes as he drinks. You get the impression of the white liquid obscuring his sight as he tilts the glass.’2020 Alfred Hitchcock, ‘The “Hitch” Touch,’ in Hitchcock on Hitchcock: Selected Writings and Interviews, Vol. 2, ed. Sidney Gottlieb (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2015), 80. Brulov is visible through the bottom of the glass as the liquid subsides. But the paradoxical effect of Ballantyne’s tipping the glass back before his eyes is to make the milk rise like a tide in front of the camera even as the liquid drains away. At the climax of this remarkable, frankly shocking shot, the milk seems to fill the screen, which finally, albeit briefly, becomes no more than a blank white square (Figure 5). In completing their identification with Ballantyne, who presumably loses consciousness at this moment of abstraction, it is as if the viewer too has been sedated. The viewer’s sensation, during the dissolve, is of themselves dissolving in milk; of helplessly capitulating, as in a dream, to its associations with the comforting and the cosy, though at the same time with a fatal premonition of its potential deadliness. Whiteness, here, signifies unconsciousness; and, by extension, death. Perhaps it also signifies the blank screen of the cinema itself. ‘Our story,’ the opening title of Spellbound announces in sententious tones, ‘deals with psychoanalysis, the method by which modern science treats the emotional problems of the sane.’ Psychoanalytic practice, which uncovers the dark drives that covertly motivate the most innocuous gestures, might itself be represented, if in a slightly colourful metaphor, in terms of the attempt both to distil and extract the black bile or poison secreted in milk. Freud, after all, exposes the fact that the most innocent of all relationships, supposedly, the relationship between mother and child, one that is sometimes symbolized by the milk the child imbibes from its mother’s nourishing breast, is from the beginning shaped by forbidden desires. In the ‘Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality’ (1905), discussing autoerotism, Freud traces the role of sucking in adult sexuality back to ‘the child’s lips’, which ‘behaved like an erogenous zone; presumably the stimulation by the warm flow of milk was the cause of the pleasurable sensation’.2121 Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality: The 1905 Edition, trans. Ulrike Kistner (London: Verso, 2016), 42. Milk is thus almost from the moment of the subject’s birth caught up in an autoerotic economy. What was once a satisfaction to the subject is, indeed, bound to arouse his resistance or his disgust to-day. We are familiar with a trivial but instructive model of this change of mind. The same child who once eagerly sucked the milk from his mother’s breast is likely a few years later to display a strong dislike to drinking milk, which his upbringing has difficulties in overcoming. This dislike increases to disgust if a skin forms on the milk or the drink containing it. We cannot exclude the possibility, perhaps, that the skin conjures up a memory of the mother’s breast, once so ardently desired. Between the two situations, however, there lies the experience of weaning, with its traumatic effects.2222 Sigmund Freud, ‘The Paths to the Formation of Symptoms,’ in The Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, trans. James Strachey (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), 412-13. When the eyes see or the lips touch that skin on the surface of milk – harmless, thin as a sheet of cigarette paper, pitiful as a nail paring – I experience a gagging sensation and, still farther down, spasms in the stomach, the belly; and all the organs shrivel up the body, provoke tears and bile, increase heartbeat, cause forehead and hands to perspire. Along with sight-clouding dizziness, nausea makes me balk at that milk cream, separates me from the mother and father who proffer it. ‘I’ want none of that element, sign of their desire, ‘I’ do not want to listen, ‘I’ do not assimilate it, ‘I’ expel it. But since the food is not an ‘other’ for ‘me’, who am only in their desire, I expel myself, I spit myself out, I abject myself within the same motion through which I claim to establish myself.2323 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 2-3. Kristeva identifies the prohibition against the cultural, or culinary, use of milk to be found in parts of the Bible (e.g., ‘Thou shalt not seethe a kid in his mother’s milk’ [Exodus 23:19]) as a metaphor for the ‘prohibition of incest’ (105). In Suspicion, it transpires that Johnnie is not after all attempting to murder Lina. There is no poison in the glass of milk.2424 In The Two Mrs. Carrolls (1947), a crude but compelling melodrama that leans heavily on the example of Hitchcock’s film, and that like its predecessor casts Nigel Bruce in the role of an alcoholic, English director Peter Godfrey has Geoffrey Carroll (Humphrey Bogart) bring a glass of milk to Sally Carroll (Barbara Stanwyck) that, like the one that killed his first wife, is in fact poisoned. At least, that is the viewer’s assumption – one that is never tested because she never tastes it. But that does