Anyone who believes that the nation
has progressed intellectually, educationally, or culturally in the last 50
years should take a long, hard look at Kinsey.
The film biography of the pioneer
sexual researcher Alfred Kinsey provides an important lesson in American
attitudes toward sex, science, and especially truth, and in the surprisingly
contemporary facile politicizing of serious research. Back in the allegedly
halcyon days of the 1950s, a purported age of innocence and simple goodness,
the movie suggests that Americans officially discovered sex, and that nothing
has been the same ever since.
In our time, the appearance of Kinsey has in fact reignited the
controversies of the past, inspiring a number of conservative organizations to
protest against the picture, its protagonist, and apparently, sex in general.
Repeating the reactions of that time, some vocal segments of the right wing —
are any of them quiet? — maintain that Kinsey’s research and publications on
the sexual behavior of the American male and later, the female, legitimized
promiscuity, apparently just as Einstein somehow legitimized moral relativism,
and Darwin plowed over the Garden of Eden.
Because most Americans somehow equate
morality with sex, his opponents conclude that Kinsey initiated the present
moral decline of the nation. (Remember when they all blamed Dr. Spock?)
The picture actually presents a
relatively conventional, straightforward dramatization of Kinsey’s life and
career, showing a serious, repressed young man (Liam Neeson) bullied by a pious
father (John Lithgow), who escapes into academic research. Kinsey began his
scientific work on the gall wasp, an apparently fascinating insect (to him),
but through teaching biology at Indiana University, gravitated toward what
today would be called sex education, a daring step in the 1940s.
The ignorance of both his students
and his colleagues inspired him to investigate the subject, mostly through
thousands of interviews and questionnaires, resulting in his publication of the
best-selling scientific books in history and a consequent celebrity he never
sought.
Balancing a rather literal account
with the frequent interruptions of Kinsey’s interviews as a narrative device,
the movie also shows the scientist’s own education in sex, assisted by his
free-spirited wife, Clara McMillen (Laura Linney).
It sketches out the development of
his concept of some sort of sexual commune among his assistants and touches on
his alleged bisexuality, including an episode with Clyde Martin (Peter
Sarsgaard), one of his assistants. When he interviews his own father in a brief
scene, Kinsey also comes to understand some of the personal hell of Victorian
repression and some of the history of the man’s hateful personality.
Most of all, however, the movie deals
with the extraordinary impact of his research on the study of sexual behavior
and on the public consciousness. Shocking and titillating the nation, the
expert on gall wasps became a household word, and something of a dirty one at
that.
Kinsey appeared on the covers of all
the major magazines and, in scenes that foreshadow contemporary public
reactions, earned the vilification of the usual crowd of politicians,
preachers, and pious hypocrites. The picture demonstrates once again the fear
and hatred of knowledge that permeate American public life, the refusal to acknowledge
any unpleasant or even unfamiliar truth, the preference for the false and
exaggerated emotionalism of demagoguery over the clarity of objective science.
Although the pseudo-documentary
approach of the director tends to flatten out the emotional potential of the
people and actions, the impressive cast, featuring such well known names as
Timothy Hutton and Chris O’Donnell in relatively minor parts, mostly conveys a
sense of Kinsey’s research group and some of the context of the time.
With an especially impressive
confidence and charm, Oliver Platt plays Herman Wells, the president of Indiana
University, who supports the controversial scientist and his research with a
quantity of understanding and courage rare in an academic administrator.
Liam Neeson, an unusual choice for
the role, displays a previously hidden side of his talents and skills. The
actor somehow reduces his raw strength and virility, playing a quiet, hesitant,
vaguely eccentric, somewhat pedantic teacher and earnest scholar without a
great deal of physical appeal but with a convincing sense of intellectual
passion.
His character grows throughout the
movie, gradually developing solidity and assurance, never losing touch with his
youthful love of the natural world, which ultimately sustains him in an often
difficult and certainly tumultuous public career.
The greatest value of Kinsey, however, probably resides in its
retelling of an important and perhaps forgotten chapter in 20th-century
history. The story of its subject’s life and work provides a distressing lesson
in the present’s capacity to repeat the folly of the past, its depiction of a
public faith in ignorance over learning, of prejudice over truth, of the
hysteria of the American people overtaken by a fit of morality.
If it all sounds familiar, it should.
If the shoe pinches, wear it.
Kinsey (R), starring Liam Neeson,
Laura Linney, Chris O’Donnell, Peter Sarsgaard, Timothy Hutton, John Lithgow,
Tim Curry, Oliver Platt, Dylan Baker, Veronica Cartwright; written and directed
by Bill Condon. Little Theatre
This article appears in Dec 29, 2004 – Jan 4, 2005.
