Kinsey (2004)

This movie is a must see for anyone who is fascinated by sex, by the history of modern sex research or by America’s prudish hypocrisy regarding sexuality. That does cover everyone on this site, right?

The movie has a style that fluctuates between a documentary and a more traditional fictional narrative. It works in the sense that you see both the story of Alfred Kinsey’s life and a depiction of the research he conducted. In my opinion, one seems to inform the other. Kinsey’s willingness to be an active participant in his research and to interview absolutely everyone he meets, no matter how seemingly inappropriate, shows a side of scientific study that usually goes unacknowledged. Scientific researchers are themselves human and what motivates them to pursue an area of research may say as much about the findings as their interpretation of the data.

The movie opens with a fantastic scene of Kinsey himself being interviewed about his sexual history as part of a training session for his assistant, Clyde Martin. The camera’s focus, however, is not on Liam Neeson, who plays the adult Alfred Kinsey, but on Kinsey’s assistant Clyde, who is played spectacularly by Peter Sarsgaard. Off camera, Kinsey is answering questions about his own sexual history that show a candor which seems genuine and amazingly self aware. Through Kinsey’s critique of Clyde’s interviewing style, we also come to understand Kinsey’s emphasis on conveying a nonjudgmental attitude that seemingly made his research so successful. In a way, the audience is being told, like the assistant, to suspend our biases, our preconceptions and our judgments. Despite whatever you think you know about Alfred Kinsey or about human sexuality, this scene prepares you to find yourself challenged by the rest of the movie.

The concept that people are sexually fluid and can be rated on a scale, pioneered by Kinsey, may seem commonplace for the modern urban liberal types, but I assume that this movie will seem quite shocking to many American audiences who still see the world very much in terms of moral absolutes. Wrong and right. Black and white. Gay or straight. The shades of gray that make up the sexual experiences of most humans are still not talked about extensively across most of this country. For instance, the movie has a scene where Kinsey presents a woman in her mid 80’s as the one of most sexually fulfilled women he has encountered in his research … and then you see an image of her masturbating.

I think the movie’s only flaw was that it left a few loose ends unresolved. Other than that critique, I felt that the performances were flawless, the plot was engrossing and the way the visual narrative was presented was interesting but not disruptive. This movie really stayed in my head for a week. Not so much because there is anything particularly titillating (sorry!), but because of what amazing strides Alfred Kinsey’s research made in towards changing American attitudes about sexuality and what a dishearteningly long way we have to go before becoming a society that could have fully accepted a genius like Alfred Kinsey.

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