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An image of purity
As a professor of English literature, Matthew Beaumont has previously argued :
“Milk is a liquid that, in a symbolic sense, is superficially secure in its identification with innocence and purity.”
For Victor, whose doted-upon mother dies in childbirth when he is still a child himself, the choice of milk could be viewed as a desire to be mothered. Yet his younger brother, William, who grew up without a mother at all, is never seen drinking milk.
In one scene, William Frankenstein, his fiancée Elizabeth, and her uncle sit at the dinner table with Victor. All three drink red wine, while Victor nurses his milk and discusses plans to create life from death.
In this case, the “the milk drinker” trope suggests to audiences that they ought not to trust the seemingly innocent person onscreen.
The Frankenstein of del Toro’s imagining is perhaps the most villainous version of the character I have seen. He is obviously mad and is cruel in that madness, even as a child. As such, our typical associations between milk and innocence are complicated by his character.
I, too, am a milk drinker. So why does it make my stomach turn to watch Frankenstein slosh it back while other characters sip on their wine?
Consumption as destruction
In his 1972 essay Wine and Milk
In comparing milk to wine, which Barthes claims is a “galvanic substance”, he argues:
“Milk is the opposite of fire by all the denseness of its molecules, by the creamy, and therefore soothing, nature of its spreading. Wine is mutilating, surgical, it transmutes and delivers. Milk is cosmetic, it joins, covers, and restores. Moreover, its purity, associated with the innocence of the child, is a token of strength, of a strength which is not revulsive, not congestive, by calm, white, lucid, the equal of reality.”
Not all characters that drink milk are evil. Take the goofy and lovable Joey Tribbiani from Friends (1994–04) who claims, and then proves , he can drink a gallon of milk in under a minute.
More recently, in the miniseries Fellow Travelers (2023), Jonathan Bailey’s character Tim is told by his lover to “shut up and drink your milk”, which he gladly does. Indeed, milk does hold us a symbol of innocence when shown through such characters.
However, I would argue that if milk is the symbol of innocence, then a consumer of milk can’t themselves be innocent or, at least, can’t remain innocent – since their consumption of the substance (and symbol) could also be viewed as a destruction of it.
Overwhelmingly, when milk is consumed onscreen, a game of power and control is played out. In Babygirl (2025), for example, Nicole Kidman’s character is delivered a glass of milk, which has been ordered for her by a much younger but dominant lover as a test of her submission.
Then there’s the example of actor Christoph Waltz, who plays perhaps the most famous milk drinker in cinematic history – the Nazi “Jew-hunter” Hans Landa – in Quentin Tarantino’s film Inglourious Basterds (2009).
In one early scene, Landa sits at the table of Perrier LaPadite and, although he is offered wine by his host, requests a glass of milk. Minutes later, he has his men execute almost the entirety of a Jewish family who are hiding beneath the farmhouse’s floorboards.
In a recent interview with YouTube channel Mythical Kitchen , Waltz was asked what he thought “makes a villain drinking a glass of milk so uniquely terrifying?” He replies:
“I’m not thinking about these things in these terms… I’m just thinking about, you know, this is the character, and now I drink a glass of milk, and that distance between is what I negotiate. And that’s it.”
Sounds to me like something a milk drinker would say.
Fiona Wilkes is a PhD Candidate at The University of Western Australia.
