By Nils Bothmann. He’s living alone, always buying the same brand of milk in the supermarket and always sips just this milk while spying on the outside with cameras installed in his windows and his door’s viewer: He is the eponymous but hard to grasp drinker of milk in James Rumsey’s short film. In the interview the filmmaker discloses that his protagonist’s name is Brian, but when watching the movie, he’s just “the milk man”, a nameless, everyday entity. He is the person, the viewer is watching closely, while he in turn watches his surroundings. They say that in the cinema everyone is a voyeur, and now we meet another voyeur within the film. But unlike the voyeurism without sanctions we all practise in the cinema, this private kind of voyeurism is highly suspect: When the protagonists wears a blood-smeared shirt at the beginning of the film, we instinctively scent a neighbourhood psychopath. This isn’t the kind of harmless neurotic like Melvin Udall in As Good as it Gets. This is no gifted weirdo like RAIN MAN. Or is he?

What starts out like a classic tale of psychosis and psychopathy ends in a nice twist that manages to not only surprise our expectations but also proof the fact that cinema is always deception, nothing but a carefully chosen extract that guides our expectations and relies on our media experiences – which is just what happens in the case of the milk drinker. With this commentary about the fragmented effect of the media MILK MAN fits very well into Great Britain, where the debate on public surveillance and the security of privacy has been going on fiercely for some time now. By showing the seemingly incriminating surveillance video of the exact shop where the milk drinker is used to buy his beverage of choice, the film shows how unsignificant pictures like these are without a bigger context. Just like you cannot guess if the hooded neighbours the milk drinker is observing so mistrustfully are harmless rowdies or indeed dangerous individuals.

In a calm, slightly bleak way Rumsey visualises and tells his story of a man that didn’t venture out into the world, but rather stayed at home watching it with surveillance cameras. It is a document of our more or less routine paranoia – this milk man could live next door to you or me. In these times of everlasting videotaping of everyday life he is thoroughly believable, just as the Hollywood thriller DISTURBIA presented us with a high tech voyeur as a hero. But if this milk drinker is indeed a hero or not is something we find out very quickly at the end of MILK MAN.

Links

• MILK MAN (GB 2009. James Rumsey)
• Short Films as a Way to Create New and Clear Cineastic Voices – An interview with James Rumsey
• Realism for the Art, Romance for the Market – Nils Bothmann about the British film market