Liquid Laughter. A Gendered History of Milk & Alcohol Drinking in West-German and US Film Comedies of the 1950s — Page 4:
Two Plateaus
16 For developing and transmitting these discourses and strategies during the 1950s, the cinema apparatus in general and romantic comedies in particular were highly influential. It was a suitable platform to disarticulate the partial gender inversion of the early 1940s.
17 The jokes present in 1950s romantic comedies focused on the reproductive man and the productive woman. This setting is represented via several distinctive social characters, like the single mothering father, the childless non-reproductive woman, the passionless man, the desiring woman, the anti-authoritarian weak man, the authoritarian strong woman, the jobless single man, the working single woman, the regressive boy, the old spinster, etc.
18 To analyse this aggressive operation in romantic comedies, we will elaborate on the metaphoric appearance of particular liquids, milk and alcohol, in order to open interesting windows for interpretation. These metaphors were never the actual theme of the movies but nevertheless platforms or agents for signifying specific developments. As we will see, alcohol on the one hand symbolizes unproductive masculinity and thus signifies liquidation,[4]"Liquidation" means to become fluid in a non-fluid fixed order and thus can tend to life as well as to death. Economically, it stands either for access to cash-flows or for becoming illiquid. flight, transgression, helplessness, illness, disability, and denial. On the other hand, it also stands for an independent, strong and non-reproductive femininity, which is associated with success, power and sexual passion instead of family and children.
19 In the comedies, alcohol becomes a borderline at which processes of transformation take place. As much as excessive alcohol consumption challenges the rules of heteronormativity, for it leads to sexually inactive men and women, complete abstinence is no better an alternative, for it signifies sexual immaturity. Milk carries out the exact counter-running movement. It gains its importance because it occupies the place of alcohol and takes over alcohol's functions. As for consuming alcohol, drinking milk in the movies also allows for flight — a flight, however, that in the 1950s did not end in liquidation but in complete regression, in a restabilization of personality and thus of the gender order. This regression was determined in solely Oedipal terms, resulting in patriarchal subject positions.
20 With the help of milk's healing capacities, controlling the liminal processes of alcohol drinking became possible. Certain characters were more or less forced to drink alcohol, to satisfy their desire for liquidation, but only to prove that they have naturalized their gender formation. In this sense, both milk and alcohol symbolized an exit from a certain order, its denial through non-productivity. But in the end, the metaphor of healing through milk consumption served to overcome the deviant gender arrangements which are usually described as "crises" in historiography; it focused on re-installing man's position in the phallic order. Using the point of male denial as its departing range, milk offered simultaneously total non-productivity for men and success for women. But although this at first glance affirmed the deviant gender arrangements of the war years, in the end these metaphors re-introduce men back into the patriarchal position. This is the aim of these movies; it is their humorous way of disarticulating subversive gender arrangements.