Kinsey


by Shari L. Rosenblum

No euphemisms. A bare table, white walls, interviewer and interviewee facing each other with protestant austerity, the questions begin as starkly as the scene is photographed: “How old were you when you first masturbated?” The questions jar still today; it jars to hear them on the screen. The audience of Kinsey, Bill Condon's much ballyhooed biopic, shuffles uncomfortably in its seats, and then immediately reshifts its identification from interviewee to interviewer. We can handle this, we tell ourselves as we watch Alfred Kinsey (Liam Neeson) train his assistants (Peter Sarsgaard, Chris O'Donnell, and Timothy Hutton) in interview technique. Sexual sophisticates, every one of us, stifling giggles and gasps at the naughty words and graphic images on display, the film addresses us as the enlightened post-Kinsey generation. It invites us to sneer, smirk and scoff at the pre-Kinseyan naifs and their silly misconceptions (there's more than one position?!?), until, smugly recomposed, we settle in to be reassured.

“Everybody's sin is nobody's sin,” Condon's Kinsey tells a reporter. Of course, it isn't true (think slavery or human sacrifice -- consensus is not righteousness); but it's a comforting sentiment, and we cling to it. It's a comfort that we long for. We can see it in our daytime talk shows, adolescent novels, and Internet support groups -- we all need to know we are not alone. We judge ourselves less harshly because someone else feels the way we do, wants the things we want, dreams the dreams we dream. Especially when it comes to what we do when no one's looking. Especially when it comes to sex. We sleep better when we are assured that what comes naturally to us is perfectly normal. Kinsey's work, it may be said, helped a lot of folks sleep better. And for what it's worth, some far less well.

Alfred Kinsey was born in Hoboken , N.J. in 1894 to an austere family, headed by a sternly religious minister father (played in the film with tight-lipped bluster by John Lithgow). Out of step with his father's values (the film touches on just how much -- a boy scout temptation, implausibly warded off with prayer -- the biographies tell more), he was finally disowned when he abandoned his prescribed engineering studies for biology and psychology and landed at Indiana University, where his exhaustive taxonomical research on the gall wasp gave way to studies on human sexuality -- taxonomy of a different species, cataloguing what people do (“the thousand avenues,” perhaps, that his father attributed to lust) -- and the publication of two (pardon the pun) seminal books: Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953).

There's something in the imposing awkwardness of Liam Neeson that lends itself to the canonical portrait of Kinsey at play here -- an aura of self-assuredness that belies his lumbering step and hunched intensity. Restrained, it festers in the repressed desperation of Ethan Frome or Jean Valjean; unleashed, it has the force of Michael Collins and Rob Roy. For the role of Kinsey, Neeson builds the release into the control, and vice versa. Firmly grasping the arc between the two, he gives a balance to the portrayal that the good doctor may never have really known.

In Condon's version, Kinsey's lead-in to liberation was his own almost debilitating ignorance. A virgin on his wedding night, the scientist, by now playfully nicknamed Prok (Pro(fessor)K(insey)) and his former student/bride Clara McMillen (Laura Linney, in a heartfelt performance as put-upon wife and willing sexual explorer), playfully nicknamed Mac, are unable to consummate their nuptials. It seems they don't know quite how to make it work. This permits a series of scenes in which the couple consults a counselor, the audience learns that Kinsey was well-endowed (viewers familiar with the actor's rep smirking knowingly in the dark), the film devolves into a quick montage of marital gratification, and voilà, a lightbulb appears over Kinsey's head and he points it into other people's bedrooms. And anterooms. And cars. And barns. And prisons, though the film never tells us so.

According to the film, it was science (and a son's rebellion) rather than sex that gave Kinsey his greatest thrill -- we know this from his choice of nerdy bow tie and ill-fitting clothes as well as his ability to do cold calculations on erotic details -- but the evidence suggests otherwise. If Kinsey showed us nothing else, he made apparent that things are not always what they seem. But desirous of framing the doctor as savior to those once stigmatized as deviant, Condon hedges his bets, distrusting the audience with more than a hint of what might be called deviant in the doctor's own tastes: his homosexual acts are couched as scientific exploration; his and Mac's multiple partnerings a matter of rational expression (Sarsgaard is at his most compelling soft-voiced ambivalence as both of their lovers); his masochism a product of intellectual curiosity. He goes a long way to celebrate the security of the Kinsey marital relationship, and barely gets into the ongoing controversy about Kinsey's accepting data from a pederast (demonstrating only that Kinsey's response was that of a dispassionate man of science, neither complicitous nor approving). Preferring hagiography to biography, Condon sidesteps rather than defend, doing his best to forestall the finger-waggers, the intolerant, and the hypocrites by leading them not into the preacher's temptation.

There is a political agenda at work in the film -- and the film is at its strongest when it gives into it entirely, rather than pretend it isn't there. It touches most when it is not just moralizing about the imposition of morality, as it were, but showing the human cost of condemnation. A last gasp interview with Lynn Redgrave as a woman who found herself through Kinsey's writing reaches deep into the core of the question. Is judgment wrong? Is absence of judgment permissiveness? Do we have a right to judge or permit anybody else's private behaviors? Margaret Mead complained famously that Kinsey's books suggested no way of choosing between a woman and a sheep. Kinsey claimed he and his team were “the recorders and reporters of facts -- not the judges of the behaviors [they] describe[d].” Is it a message for the new millennium as so many critics claim? Reportedly, Dr. Kinsey tended to vote Republican.

©2004 Shari L. Rosenblum
CineScene