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Kinsey (Bill Condon, US)
by Richard Porton
Near the opening of Where
the Boys Are (1960),
an exasperated Dolores Hart reprimands her sex-education teacher
for assigning an outdated textbook and blurts out, “What about
Dr. Kinsey?” The prim instructor can only reply, “This
course is about interpersonal relationships, not Dr. Kinsey!”
Pert Ms. Hart (who tellingly plays a character named “Merritt”)
gets the last laugh by interjecting, “What’s more interpersonal
than backseat bingo?”—slang for “heavy petting”
in the Mesozoic era of teen comedies. This far from Wildean banter
provides ample evidence that, 12 years after the publication of
Alfred C. Kinsey’s highly influential Sexual
Behavior in the Human Male, the man affectionately christened “Dr. Sex”
by his students already had become a pop icon.
Curiously enough, as some of us rub our wounds
after the seeming victory of fundamentalist “values”
in the recent US election (at least that’s what the media
pundits tell us), it’s clear that the late Dr. Kinsey was
a quintessentially American figure. As Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy observes
in his lively biography of the great man, “America is at once
the most licentious culture since Rome and the most puritan country
in the world.” The British biographer then adds that “it
is the evidence of the latter that astonishes the transient visitor,”
informing his international readership that near Indiana University,
where Kinsey started his crusade for sexual enlightenment,“[T]here
is an entire channel devoted to preachers…the Christian Right,
just as it was in Kinsey’s day, is against sex in all of its
manifestations.” This cultural schizophrenia is reflected
in the very way Kinsey, Bill Condon’s new biopic, is distributed
worldwide. New York–based journalists attended screenings
at a building where Fox News blares out broadcasts that regularly
cheer on the newly re-coronated (or newly born again, if you like)
G.W. Bush at the entrance, while upstairs Twentieth Century Fox’s
boutique distributor, Fox Searchlight, screens left-liberal or risqué
films such as Kinsey and I Heart
Huckabees.
Of course, some commentators might claim that Kinsey,
despite its humane intentions, is compromised at the outset by its
status as a star-studded biopic. The biopic is, after all, one of
the stodgiest of the old Hollywood genres; complex and contradictory
men and women are regularly turned into stick figures through the
formulaic machinery of the biographical film. Condon circumvents
(without thoroughly vanquishing) some of the biopic’s impediments
by fracturing chronology in a supremely viewer-friendly fashion.
To a certain extent, Kinsey’s life unfurls in Bildungsroman-like
fashion; the insecure son of a raving fundamentalist lunatic (played
by John Lithgow in an unusually restrained performance) gradually
sheds his inhibitions and becomes an avuncular dispenser of sexual
wisdom. This kind of linear movement, a monotonous aspect of almost
every biopic, is partially deflected by Condon’s ingenious
decision to frame his narrative with re-enactments of the famous
(or notorious, for the prudes who still assail the scientist’s
legacy) Kinsey sexual histories. The sex histories were essentially
in-depth interviews, administered by either Kinsey or his associates,
which employed a standard set of questions designed to quantify
the vicissitudes of sexual behaviour. Foregrounding these interviews
allows Condon to employ a strategic frontality: Liam Neeson as Kinsey,
the zoologist/entomologist turned sexologist, is positioned as a
looming presence who benevolently peers down on his subjects, benighted
individuals plagued by sexual repression.
Unlike subsequent, more jaundiced European avatars
of sexual freedom (Foucault comes to mind, although he was too dour
to endorse anything as affirmative as the American sexologist’s
anti-puritanical agenda), Kinsey combined a wide-eyed veneration
for science with a kind of pantheism that corresponds to his endorsement
of pansexuality— and has its roots in both Rousseau and American
Transcendentalism’s optimistic appreciation of the natural
world. The Rousseausitic/Transcendentalist origins of Kinsey’s
gospel of sexual freedom become clear in the early scenes featuring
the scientist’s courtship of his future wife, Clara Bracken
(née McMillen, hence her nickname “Mac,” and
played by Laura Linney with her usual ebullience), against various
Midwestern pastoral backdrops. At one point in the film, Condon
hits on a brilliant visual modus operandi for encapsulating Kinsey’s
aspiration to be the Johnny Appleseed of sex. To illustrate Kinsey’s
success in convincing Americans to talk more openly about sex, Kinsey superimposes a number of randy talking heads on a map of the United
States. The general effect is that of a priapic version of the WPA
travel guides or a Whitmanesque vision of sexual chatter: I hear
America screwing, if you will.
Curiously enough, despite the fact that Condon
is gay, the film’s exploration of Kinsey’s bisexuality
is more timid and riddled with melodramatic contrivances. Condon
is consistently scrupulous in reflecting the various crises of Kinsey’s
career, but, in a rather standard Hollywood manoeuvre, he chooses
to focus on the inevitable (although surprisingly temporary) marital
crisis that comes to the fore when the philandering professor confides
to his shocked wife that he has been fooling around with Clyde Martin
(Peter Sarsgaard), one of his trusty sex researchers. (As Gathorne-Hardy
himself pointed out in a letter to The New
York Times, “all
biopics have to condense, to let one character do the work of two
or three and so on…What is unusual about Bill Condon’s
film is how accurate it is.”) Yet, rather than becoming mired
in the familiar terrain of marital dysfunction, it might have been
more amusing for Condon to have included some scenes exploring Kinsey’s
friendship with Kenneth Anger (the conversations between the square
Midwesterner and Anger, the impish Aleister Crowley disciple, must
have been a hoot), or the patient scientist’s determination
to record the sexual histories of the entire cast of the stage production
of A Streetcar Named Desire.
There’s also a rather bland, if well-intentioned,
earnestness in Condon’s decision to give Lynn Redgrave a plum
cameo towards the end of the film as a lesbian who feels eternally
grateful to Kinsey for making her feel less of an outcast. Despite
the theoretical chasm between Kinsey and Foucault, both the upbeat
American and the skeptical Frenchman believed that there are only
heterosexual and homosexual acts, not essences. But Condon demonstrates
these precepts with a dutifulness that might have erupted into enlivening
comic brio if the script had been tweaked slightly.
Fortunately, a refreshingly comic tone leavens
all of the contingent earnestness in the scenes highlighting Kinsey’s
rise to fame during his tenure at staid Indiana University. Kinsey’s
battles with his conservative critics are no less generic; the scandal
generated by Kinsey’s sexcapades is not that much different
from the outrage that greets Henry Fonda’s reading of a letter
written by the martyred anarchist Bartolomeo Vanzetti to his college
class in Elliot Nugent’s The Male Animal (1942). In any case,
the spectacle of the adoring students who throng to Kinsey’s
classes, as well as the prissy academics and bureaucrats who denounce
his work, resembles the media whirlwind that envelops our current
academic superstars. In addition, Condon displays a certain satirical
finesse in casting the enjoyably hammy Tim Curry as Thurman Rice,
Kinsey’s primary antagonist on his home turf.
It goes without saying that any biographical film
relies inordinately on a strong lead performance. Liam Neeson delivers
the goods; his impersonation of the fabled professor’s oscillation
between gung-ho enthusiasm and anguished self-doubt (the, I suppose,
obligatory scene featuring Kinsey’s penchant for sexual self-mutilation
is blessedly short) is conveyed with near pitch-perfect aplomb.
Nevertheless, there’s an almost unavoidable disparity between
the suave actor’s own persona (however much he tries to conceal
it) and the man with the crooked grin and bad haircut who appeared
on the cover of Time in the 50s. Movie magic can only do so much,
but for a film that studiously challenges nearly every sexual shibboleth
that G.W. and his right-wing supporters cherish, we could do far
worse.
Richard Porton
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Kinsey
Articles in this
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Kinsey
by richard porton
and in the magazine...
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by michael koresky
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