a glass of milk
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In the Hitchcock film Suspicion, a woman (Lina, played by Joan Fontaine) thinks her husband (Johnnie, played by Cary Grant) is a murderer. She already knows he’s a scoundrel, a spendthrift, and all the other qualities that made him the wrong man for her to marry—but she loves him, so she married him anyway. Lina is also sure Johnnie knows she knows. Before bedtime, he gives her an impossibly ominous glass of milk and tells her to drink it. She knows that if he is a murderer, it will be poisoned, and then she’ll die. What happens?
She doesn’t drink it. It turns out he’s not a murderer. Instead they were caught in a series of misunderstandings all brought on by her suspicions. It’s a very stupid ending—like if Gaslight had ended with the revelation that the lights actually were just flickering—and not the one Hitchcock wanted.1 He wanted the ending of the book: she drinks the milk and she dies.2
I watched Suspicion about a year ago and I’ve thought of it many times since because the ending of the movie is so wrong. What should happen is this: Lina drinks the milk. She doesn’t want to live in the world where her husband is a murderer. So she won’t, because either she’ll wake up and turn out to be living in the world in which he isn’t, or she’ll die and not have to live in that world. As in Tristan und Isolde, in which the couple are already in love before they mistakenly drink the love potion, the milk serves to confirm what she has chosen already. Lina has already drunk the milk through the years of their marriage and she is already poisoned.
Or—if you want a happy ending—Lina could refuse to drink the milk and leave in the night instead, on her own two feet. As the movie is this ending would feel very abrupt. But it would be better than what the movie ultimately chooses to do, which is to say: well, don’t you feel terribly silly, making such a fuss.
The other reason I’m always thinking of Suspicion, throughout last year and this year, is because I do feel as if I’m constantly being offered the glass of poisoned milk and being told: well, you have to drink it. There’s nothing else to drink, is there? You can keep leaving it on the bedside table, but sooner or later, you will have to drink it. A woman gets shot by an armed man who is putatively some sort of officer of the law, and an entire class of people make a point of saying things that are not true over and over. And tomorrow it will be something else and all the positions will have shifted.
But what is very unmistakable when you read these short claims is that these people liked seeing this woman get shot. It’s not a tragedy to them wherein somebody made the wrong call and now an innocent person is dead. She should be dead—because she represents an entire group of people they find deeply, deeply annoying.
I pass by a house most days that is coated in Trump signs as well as warnings that anybody who trespasses will get shot. Nothing about this house ever changes except that sometimes a sign gets replaced or there are more signs. There are never visitors or extra cars. There’s never a person outside mowing the lawn. I wouldn’t call the house in disrepair, precisely, but it doesn’t seem to be in the best of shape. I have made up many stories about the person in the house because even in a fairly Trumpy area, the house stands out as excessive. I feel bad for them because it seems like their life is pretty lonely. I would not try to get to know them because there are signs informing me that if I’m not there to drop off a new sign this person is going to shoot me. Whoever they are, they are a poisoned person, probably through a combination of circumstance and choice. But who knows.
I spend approximately all of my real life time around people who are in one sense or another pro-Trump, whether it’s “holding your nose and voting for him” or “pumping your fist and voting for him” and I love many of these people, some of whom are probably reading this, and I consider many of them to be better people than I am. I hear the takes on the radio, which sometimes surprise me but usually don’t. I am aware that people extend a kind of tolerance to me and don’t have certain conversations when I am around and that we mutually walk on eggshells around each other. I wonder what would happen if I got shot, how I would be represented, what the story would be about me. That is of course narcissistic but there it is you know.
And then there’s always a solution, which is to say, if you don’t want to live in a country where people lie to this extent, you could just drink your glass of milk. You could just take a sip. You could say oh maybe he really was scared, it was a tragic incident, she shouldn’t have been so reactive, she should have been calm. You could watch every angle of the video in order to infuse yourself with some kind of doubt. You could adopt the belief that a gun and governmental authority confer on somebody maximal latitude without responsibility for even honest mistakes, which you could persuade yourself that this was. You could do all that.
It snows. The rain comes and beneath the snow one finds mostly mud and some grass. It all looks very ugly this time of year.
(Probably.)
I’ve only read about half the book.