It is already possible to make a good case for Kinsey as a classic in the growing genre of studios' arthouse production arms. It has the requisite sense of restraint; care with period detail; small budget ($11 million); focus on the artistic; fine performances from major names (Neeson in the title role and Linney as his wife). Kinsey - the biopic by Bill Condon of the most famous sex researcher in the world - has all these, but the subject is interesting enough, the acting fine enough and direction adroit enough to lift it above the median in the genre. It makes an excellent and attractive attempt at the difficult task of balancing historical accuracy with filmic flow.
All present on the panel at the DVD launch - biographer Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy, on whose book the film is quite largely based, Dr. Petra Boynton of University College London and Dr. John Bancroft, who retired last year after a decade as Director of the Kinsey Institute - agreed that Kinsey was a pioneering man, though an obsessive one. Gathorne-Hardy concluded that 'in the end, I came if not quite to like Kinsey, certainly to admire him.' Kinsey invites both liking and admiration. By their nature, biopics are difficult beasts to make one's own: the character is famous - otherwise it's not a biopic - so viewers have preconceptions of both star and character. Yet these rules are to be broken: any good biopic must leave one with a refreshed, in some way altered, view of the icon. In turn, there is limited freedom; historical accuracy has to be dealt with. This may not necessarily be factual accuracy, it might be emotional. In fact, that duality can provide much of the spine for a good biopic, and so it proves with Kinsey . Given what turned out to be 113 minutes in which to tell the story of a career of 40 or so years, compromises and compressions are necessary. If handled with sufficient alacrity, historical truth can live off the corpse of historical accuracy. So there is a scene in the film where an omniphile says something in an interview which causes Kinsey's assistant to storm out. According to Gathorne-Hardy this never happened, but some of Kinsey's staff were uncomfortable with the omniphile's responses and the scene hints neatly at some of the later controversies of Kinsey's work. Kinsey's character says in the film it was the only time he had to 'fake tolerance'.
One thing a biopic can't do is apply too much hindsight: some of the controversies which have come to surround his research can only be hinted at. This proves to be a significant problem for Kinsey . That omniphile (who documented his sex life with 9,412 partners; 'his life's work') is thought to have been the sources for one of the most controversial parts of Kinsey's research - the 317 children who are included in the Kinsey reports. Just who provided the data for those reports is the wider controversy surrounding Kinsey. Many of his subjects were in prison for sex offences (which were then defined in an even more restrictive way than they are now) and 75% of them volunteered their sex histories. Quite what light is therefore cast on his conclusions that 85% of American men and 48% of American women had had premarital sex, that 50% of men and 40% of women were unfaithful once married or that 69% of men had had sex with prostitutes is uncertain.
However the realities of Kinsey's research appear today, Kinsey is remarkable in its blend of the attractive and the unappealing in the man. Michael Caine has said that a great film must have a sense of place. Kinsey has a sense of person and that person is as honest a patchwork as a biopic can provide. Controversies that are limned or investigated include Kinsey's obsessiveness, his team's filming of sex, his bisexuality, affairs and encouragement of them within his team of researchers. Much of this is quite recent ground, having only been outed in James Jones' 1997 biography.
The film places great emphasis, rightly, on Kinsey's genius for sex research. It opens and closes with Kinsey training his researchers. 'Taking a sex history, it's a sacred trust - nothing less than an art' he instructs them; 'assume everyone has done everything'. The film's worth lies in its marriage of Kinsey's forensic, empirical interest in peoples' sex histories - he described himself as 'just a taxonomist' - with its exploration that people are more unpredictable than gallwasps.
Gallwasps were the first 20 years of Kinsey's career. The 1930s were the decade that formed Kinsey's interest in sex as a serious research effort, spurred by the clamour at Indiana for sex education classes, with the Association of Women Students petitioning the University for a course for students who were married or contemplating marriage in 1938. There is a neat scene where students feign being engaged to one another to get into the class. Once he has them in the lecture room, Kinsey subjects them to slides of male and female genitalia: gasps all round. Whilst Kinsey's attraction to putting humans under his microscope emerges neatly, it is shocking to realise that those slides are shocking in their directness and honesty today.
Kinsey's startling reports shot straight to the top of the bestseller lists on publication; they redefined America's sense of itself at that time. But some effects can be made to recede as well as grow and through a combination of repression and legitimate questioning of his methods, Kinsey's reports were, by the early '70s, relatively unknown. Their original genesis in Americans' ignorance about all aspects of sex and the lack of a survey of their (or any other nation's) sexuality has been largely lost amidst the welter of recriminations against Kinsey and the spread of the commercialisation of sexual imagery.
That sex is everywhere is a platitude; certainly the advertising spaces of the West are filled with it. From beyond the grave, Kinsey - never what you would call a PR man; he never made a TV appearance - has fallen foul of our supposedly open attitudes to sex. The posters for Kinsey were altered for London's Tube: 'orgasms' replaced with 'pleasure'. Rowan Pelling commented that, 'When I first heard about the objections, I envisaged a robust image of, say, a youth coupling with a horse; after all, it was Kinsey's research that revealed 17% of American farmhands had sex with their four-footed charges.' The irony is overwhelming. Never has the sweep of clinical investigation of human sexuality had the range it did for Kinsey, and it looks like it never will again. Britain and France participated in the Natssal sex surveys of 1990 and 2000, surveying 19,000 people; but little more was heard than a few details being salivated over, with a few articles in the medical press. And these were only phone surveys - all of Kinsey's subjects spoke either to him or a researcher trained by him, one estimate being that he conducted 40% of the interviews.
Gathorne-Hardy described the US today as 'the most licentious culture since Rome and the most puritanical ever invented.' One can't help but feel that, though our ignorance has diminished in some ways, it has grown in others. Kinsey's compassion, attested to by Dr. Bancroft, Gathorne-Hardy and Kinsey's research team - and shown in the film in a scene near the end of the film where a woman thanks him for showing her that to have lesbian feelings was not wrong (superbly played by Lynn Redgrave) seems to be sorely missed given our teenage pregnancy and STD epidemic. It's hard to argue with Dr. Boynton's plea that the scientific surveying of sex and sex education are things we need much more of. It seems that, for his faults and those of his research, Kinsey brought light into an area of humanity that was and is more associated with mere heat. The investigatory spirit so well captured by Condon's film has been blocked and Boynton and Trisha Greenhalgh have commented in the British Medical Journal that 'no single method [as Kinsey's] has been so abused'. Gore Vidal had his sex history taken by Kinsey and is one of many to talk of Kinsey's magical ability to extract the truth from his interviewees.
This commendable film captures some of that magical ability and, though perhaps a little over-kind towards the icon, poses questions to which it seems the 43 years since Kinsey's death have brought only a few answers. One area of advance has certainly been the treatment of homosexuals and Condon's openness about his sexuality has clearly fed into his film about the man who positioned all humans as being somewhere on a bisexual scale and into the film's reception. What seems troubling is that not only must the fight for gay rights and recognition go on, but so too must the fight to investigate and discuss our sexuality in a serious and non-commercial way.
Released to buy on DVD and to rent on DVD and video on 11th JULY 2005 from Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, Richard Dilks
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