Monday, December 06, 2004
Sex in the reality-based community. It's been a while since I ponied up $9.50 to see a movie, so I figured it ought to at least be a sex movie. Kinsey is worth your time: a solid portrayal of a controversial figure who was unafraid to speak up in a world that hated and denied its own reality.
The central struggle that Kinsey represents is normality vs. "morality," with science elbowing religious concepts of sexual morality across the line into realm of the abnormal, which of course they are in the statistical sense of the word. In the real world, then and now, acts of missionary-position sex between a husband and wife for the purpose of procreation are relatively rare and statistically deviant. Norms of behavior can only be declared once they have been measured, and Kinsey was indeed a true pioneer in his persistence to measure them. Did he go too far in researching (and therefore validating) certain practices such as pedophilia? Hell if I know. I only saw a movie. But there is no doubt that his initial impulse — to free sex from its medieval shadows and to bring it into the light of rationalism — was as politically threatening then as it is today to those who hate reality-based norms.
In 2004, of course, that means the Republican Party with its never-ending parade of closeted homosexuals, adulterers, voyeurs, serial philanderers and pedophiles. Cast any light on their private lives and they scuttle like cockroaches. Kinsey's scientific solution: Study the cockroach. Their cultural solution: Hate the light.
The acting: Liam Neeson's earnest geek is a compelling mixture of determination and vulnerability. For most of the movie his single-mindedness is charming and convincing in its depiction of the passion behind rationality. As Kinsey's wife, Laura Linney is given less to do than she probably deserves, but she makes the most of it. John Lithgow: requisite parental evil. Oliver Platt: wasted in a thankless role.
Amiable period production design. Nicely directed, including some very interesting transitional montages covered with a good score by Carter Burwell and better than average musical supervision.
Biographies are hell to film for two reasons. One is the straitjacket of chronological history ("he did this, then he did that, and then..."), which imposes a rigor that is extremely difficult to avoid without the reflex of flashbacks.
The second and more problematic area in filming a biography is The Importance of All Events. In life you never know which events are going to be formative or profound. Not so in film biographies: a movie must be dramatically economical while a book can be expansive and discursive and exploratory. In the movie, when Young Kinsey encounters someone, you just know it's got to be so damn important because he's Young Kinsey and his career hasn't even gotten off the ground yet and so the whole world he inhabits seems poised to deliver the Kinsey We Know and every little thing we see is Setting the Stage for Why He Is So Famous, which drains most scenes of narrative zest. The resulting lack of suspense is dramatic naturalism at its most unnatural.
There are a couple of interesting attempts to minimize these hurdles cinematically. In one sequence, when Kinsey and his staff start racing around the country to gather the data for the first book on male sexuality, a nice animation of a racing red line criss-crossing the map of America overlays on the film's essential stylistic device, an interview motif, as hundreds of interview subjects appear as destinations on the map, all talking at once. On top of that, the classic Ella Fitzgerald rendition of "Too Darn Hot" by Cole Porter is played ("according to the Kinsey report...") and what should be a mess of cacophony and visual chaos, or a weatherbeaten cliché, turns out to be a charming solution to a routine cinematic problem — how to depict the passage of time.
Although the talk is frank and there are a couple of jolts, Kinsey isn't especially sexy. That's one of the things I liked about it, because it assumed the freedom to rise about the ostensible subject matter, the study of sex, and to look at how sex threatens power.
One of the film's strongest theses is that the regulation of sexual attitudes is a class struggle — not the kind of pronouncement you expect from a Hollywood biopic. Kinsey's rise and fall had everything to do with his bondage to wealth in the form of the Rockefeller Foundation. The whims of Big Money determine his fate more than the quality of his work itself. Who can't identify with that?
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Greatest Hits
· Alternatives to First Command Financial Planning
· First Command, last resort, Part 3
· Part 2
· Part 1
· Stealing $50K from a widow: Wells Real Estate
· Leo Wells, REITs and divine wealth
· Sex-crazed Red State teenagers
· What I hate: a manifesto
· Spawn of Darleen Druyun
· All-American high school sex party
· Why is Ken Lay smiling?
· Poppy's Enron birthday party
· The Saudi money laundry and the president's uncle
· The sentence of Enron's John Forney
· The holiness of Neil Bush's marriage
· The Silence of Cheney: a poem
· South Park Christians
· Capitalist against Bush: Warren Buffett
· Fastow childen vs. Enron children
· Give your prescription money to your old boss
· Neil Bush, hard-working matchmaker
· Republicans against fetuses and pregnant women
· Emboldened Ken Lay
· Faith-based jails
· Please die for me so I can skip your funeral
· A brief illustrated history of the Republican Party
· Nancy Victory
· Soldiers become accountants
· Beware the Merrill Lynch mob
· Darleen Druyun's $5.7 billion surprise
· First responder funding
· Hoovering the country
· First Command fifty percent load
· Ken Lay and the Atkins diet
· Halliburton WMD
· Leave no CEO behind
· August in Crawford
· Elaine Pagels
· Profitable slave labor at Halliburton
· Tom Hanks + Mujahideen
· Sharon & Neilsie Bush
· One weekend a month, or eternity
· Is the US pumping Iraqi oil to Kuwait?
· Cheney's war
· Seth Glickenhaus: Capitalist against Bush
· Martha's blow job
· Mark Belnick: Tyco Catholic nut
· Cheney's deferred Halliburton compensation
· Jeb sucks sugar cane
· Poindexter & LifeLog
· American Family Association panic
· Riley Bechtel and the crony economy
· The Book of Sharon (Bush)
· The Art of Enron
· Plunder convention
· Waiting in Kuwait: Jay Garner
· What's an Army private worth?
· Barbara Bodine, Queen of Baghdad
· Sneaky bastards at Halliburton
· Golf course and barbecue military strategy
· Enron at large
· Recent astroturf
· Cracker Chic 2
· No business like war business
· Big Brother
· Martha Stewart vs. Thomas White
· Roger Kimball, disappointed Republican poetry fan
· Cheney, Lay, Afghanistan
· Terry Lynn Barton, crimes of burning
· Feasting at the Cheney trough
· Who would Jesus indict?
· Return of the Carlyle Group
· Duct tape is for little people
· GOP and bad medicine
· Sears Tower vs Mt Rushmore
· Scared Christians
· Crooked playing field
· John O'Neill: The man who knew
· Back to the top
 
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