March-June 2026
Minneapolis Institute of Arts
Tara Kaushik’s “Domestic Dread: A Closer Look At The Milkman”
Andy Sturdevant in conversation with Nik Nerburn
TRT 14:42
Three Channel Video, Dollhouse, Wallpapered Pedastal
2026
It's a Hard World for Little Things:
Family, Fathers, and Northern Gothic in Nik Nerburn's The Milkman
By Andy Sturdevant
“It’s a hard world for little things,” says Rachel Cooper, played by Lillian Gish, in Charles Laughton’s 1955 Southern Gothic film Night of the Hunter. She has just watched a barn owl silently swoop down and carry off a rabbit into the West Virginia night. Cooper has been sitting on the porch of a rural shack with a shotgun, protecting a couple of local kids from Harry Powell, a murderous preacher played by Robert Mitchum in full sociopathic grandeur. In the pursuit of a buried fortune, Powell has already killed the children’s father and their mother, and is coming for them next. Out in the darkness beyond the house, Powell circles unseen, singing the minor-key nineteenth-century hymn “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms.”
It’s this hymn that connects Night of the Hunter to Nik Nerburn’s The Milkman, where it also serves as a whistled leitmotif for an ominous paternal presence announcing itself. It is a hard world for little things that Nerburn has created, as the action of the film is set entirely in a modest, ramshackle midcentury dollhouse. The dollhouse is empty of human figures, except for an enormous pair of hands representing a father, who alternately whittles a sharp stick, smokes, and pours cream into his coffee as he regales an unseen listener – a son or daughter, one presumes – with cryptic filial anecdotes about ditches and “the county.” Wandering around outside, unseen, he (or perhaps the titular milkman) whistles “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms.” The song’s mournfulness – it was written as a funerary number by a West Virginia Presbyterian elder – is undercut by its chilly Calvinist confidence in divine protection. What have I to dread, what have I to fear?
So maybe it’s dad out there, stalking the perimeter, or maybe it’s the milkman. Or maybe dad is the milkman. Nerburn’s setting is an undefined period in the middle of the last century, but even at that early date the cliches about milkmen were well-established – cliches that quickly shade into jokes about lonely housewives, early morning rendezvous, and offspring with features markedly different from those of their fathers. Milkman jokes hinge on a kind of paternal uncertainty, and The Milkman literalizes that uncertainty through a slightly abject stop-motion character. The only to-scale figure onscreen at any point is a walking eight-ounce carton of 2% milk – fatherhood curdling into pure function: biology and delivery without emotional accountability. The cow on the front of the carton winks in the most nakedly conspiratorial way, just before it’s destroyed. That cow has heard all your milkman jokes before, too.
The Milkman is based on a few stories from Nerburn’s family, the sort of half-remembered tales where all the principals have long since passed. It’s really two stories, both involving migrations from rural areas to Minneapolis: from the maternal side, an uncle said to be the sire of a Grand Forks milkman, and from the paternal side, a grandfather whose childhood was cut short by the alleged murder of his mother by his father, and the father’s subsequent disappearance, after the family arrived from Michigan in the idyllic Oak Lake Park neighborhood of Minneapolis. The neighborhood was razed shortly thereafter in an early spasm of urban renewal, and so ultimately not only are the people gone, but the stage on which the drama occurred is gone, too.
The two family stories resolve in a series of events playing out in this aging, crumbling dollhouse whose wallpaper, paint, and improvised renovations become visual evidence of time layered without resolution, in a way that mirrors family structure – a shared space hiding family histories and family knowledge. These family histories and this knowledge are verifiable, to a point. However, there is a sort of code of silence in many American families across all socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds. The twentieth century was a time of in-migration, of leaving established family networks, and often the stories associated with them. Just 38% of Midwesterners in 1900 lived in cities, a number that had shot up to 58% by 1930, only a generation later. Farms and small towns emptied for growing industrial cities like Minneapolis and St. Paul. A constant complaint I’ve heard in my forty-something years talking to friends and peers about their family histories is how little we, the descendants, seem to know about our grandparents’ and great-grandparents’ generations. Why haven’t American families done a better job preserving their families’ inheritance? What did they leave back on the farm?
I’ve long believed it’s because someone, at some point on the family tree, made a point to ensure that this inheritance was forgotten. The early twentieth century was a carnival of paternal dysfunction, marked by decades of war, violence, alcoholism, abuse, and abject poverty. My sense is that the people who came out of it – and the men in particular – were so scarred by the experience that they made a conscious decision to forget and to hide. There’s a concept called a “bulwark generation,” which applies here. It’s the idea that a specific individual has to take some decisive and self-sacrificing action to shield the next generation from the cycle of abuse and dysfunction passed on to them by their fathers, and to their fathers by their fathers, and so on. Maybe they stopped drinking, but the parade of indulgences in The Milkman speak to milder forms of oblivion and self-medication: nicotine, caffeine, sex. The father in The Milkman, whatever his biological relationship to the object of his monologues, points out a beloved family heirloom in the form of a framed black-and-white postcard of a very non-picturesque ditch in Grygla, Minnesota (population 155 in the 1920 census), on his grandfather’s farmland. “A lot of things in your life are the way they are because of that ditch,” he suggests cryptically.
What does that mean, we wonder? Maybe he’s telling us, in his typically circumspect way, that the ditch is the embodiment of that bulwark. The Grygla ditch is what shields the well-adjusted, middle class youth of late twentieth century Minneapolis from the violence and chaos of their family’s recent past. Maybe that cow isn’t winking about milkman jokes, after all. Maybe it’s suggesting, “trust me, kid, you’re better off not knowing about that ditch…”
If Night of the Hunter represents a Southern Gothic tradition, operating in the haunted, decaying rural landscape of Appalachia, Nerburn’s piece represents its urban, industrialized northern counterpart, stretching from North Dakota to Michigan and centered in Minneapolis – instead of twisted trees and neglected cemeteries, it’s grain elevators towering at the end of Winter Street. In fact, I initially read The Milkman’s setting as a rural space, a lonely, barren landscape, not a close-knit urban community. Nerburn repeatedly encourages this mistake throughout. The menace in The Milkman does not arrive from the city; it arrives with the people who brought their histories there. The Oak Lake Park of Nerburn’s family’s recollection is a kind of lost paradise. The historical neighborhood was developed in the 1870s as an affluent enclave with large Victorian homes, curving streets, and early forms of planning, and later occupied by immigrants from both rural America and Eastern Europe. The journalist Harrison Salisbury, who grew up in Oak Lake Park in the 1910s, confirms this wonderfully in this recollection of the place: “To my playmates and their families, Oak Lake was a land beyond dreams. They had seen nothing like the Victorian houses, the lawns, the curving streets, the sidewalks and the elms in Bialystok or Pinsk. In the villages, they had lived in izbas of mud and reeds, with thatched roofs and clay floors. Now they occupied three thousand square feet in a mansion, bigger than the landlord’s house.” Even when Salisbury was writing, only a few decades removed, it already seemed fantastically unlikely. Who would believe such a thing? It’s all gone now. The dollhouse stands in for the vanished buildings, and becomes itself a record of competing intentions, each generation modifying what it inherited from the last. The only way to see every layer at once would be to tear the structure apart completely.
Nerburn doesn’t do this, though. He doesn’t rip it all down in The Fall of the House of Usher mode. Dollhouses, as an artform, are particularly female-coded. It’s actually the stereotypically feminine virtues – the daughterly ones, you might say – of care, patience, and attention that come through after the film's many acts of paternal disappearance. This dollhouse Nerburn constructs for the piece ultimately suggests a kind of humility about the past. By the time Brenda the genealogist calls and leaves her voicemail, with her databases and DNA matches, the principals have been reduced to miniatures. Not because they were unimportant, but because all historical actors eventually become little things. Their houses disappear. Their neighborhoods are demolished. Their stories become anecdotes. Their descendants struggle to distinguish memory from folklore. Rachel Cooper’s observation in The Night of the Hunter about the little things could just as easily apply to family histories. Most lives disappear without leaving much trace. What survives are little things: an address in a city directory, a photograph, a rumor, a postcard from Grygla, a story about a milkman. The people themselves recede into darkness. What do we owe them? Not perfect factual reconstruction of their lives, nor a forgetting of it entirely. One can engage with the past through concealment, omission, and mythologizing. One can also do it through a belief that enough records, recovery, documentation, and verification will clear up any lingering mystery. The dollhouse of The Milkman suggests a third way: building a home for the little things, and treating them not as evidence to be either decoded or hidden away, but as material to be worked.
Andy Sturdevant (he/him) is a writer, artist, and designer living in Minneapolis. He is the author of four full-length nonfiction books, including the Minnesota Book Award-nominated book Closing Time: Saloons, Taverns, Dives and Watering Holes of the Twin Cities (with Bill Lindeke). Andy has written about art, history and culture for a variety of Twin Cities-based publications and websites, including ArchitectureMN, Mpls. St. Paul, MinnPost, MAS Context, mnartists.org, Apology, The Smudge, The Growler and others.
andysturdevant.com.