Hey, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab.
I don’t know how Knowles budgets his spy time. I know there’s a fair amount of material that competes for his attention. Like me, he could be reading or watching something pretty much every hour of the day if he chose. As a result, life becomes a matter of setting priorities. I tend to decide what I’m going to read next or watch next based on how interested I am in the artist. Ang Lee’s new film? Yes, please. Carrot Top’s new film? Not going to get to it for a while. If someone’s done something I like in the past, I’m going to keep my eyes open for whatever they’re doing next. I give my eyes and ears around town lists of names, and whenever something new crosses a desk, I get a call or an e-mail or a package. Well, this weekend, one of those mysterious packages crossed my desk. Inside was a screenplay, 126 pages, dated AUGUST 2000. There were two names on the title page, and they commanded equal attention from me: KINSEY by Bill Condon.
Condon is, as you know, the Oscar winning screenwriter of GODS & MONSTERS, a remarkable, delicate, powerful little film. It was not just a beautiful nod to one of cinema’s great early filmmakers, it was also an important milestone for gay cinema in America. The film dealt with tricky sexually themed material with a sure hand and a bracing adult intelligence, and it worked to create empathy in one of the trickiest characters I’ve ever seen. James Whale isn’t a cuddly center for a film. He was a complex man, living in great pain, and his story is dark, dripping with sorrow at times. Condon’s sheer taste as a filmmaker is what makes GODS & MONSTERS so moving, and the fact that it manages to be a film about how we all search for affection, how we all ache for love and contact, is what allows it to shake easy labels. It’s a great film, not a great "gay" film.
I didn’t realize Condon was working on the story of Kinsey, but as soon as I saw the title, I was interested. There were two recent biographies of Alfred Kinsey published, and just reading the reviews of them was fascinating. All I ever knew about Kinsey was that he wrote some sort of sex manual. That was impression of him growing up. And that’s it. It was an old sex manual, too, from way back in the ‘50s, so I figured it was material that wasn’t relevant now. Still, it might be interesting to watch someone struggle with that material in a more innocent time, I thought.
Man, was I wrong.
Alfred Kinsey is an important American figure, the Darwin of sex, a revolutionary whose work is still cutting edge right now, today, even though we believe we’ve evolved as a culture. Kinsey’s story isn’t just a fascinating adult drama. It’s an essential film experience, one that I literally can’t wait to have in a theater. Bill Condon’s KINSEY manages to etch a memorable, moving portrait of this... this... this hero, and he manages to also paint the definitive picture of America’s relationship with its own sexuality. If this was a film I’d just seen instead of a script I just read, I would be grabbing all my friends and organizing a trip back to the theater tomorrow, just so we could have the inevitable conversations afterwards. As it is, I’m just dying to know now what’s happening with this film.
First of all, this is tricky material. There’s no doubt about that. It’s strong, it’s mature, and it deals frankly with a lot of material of an explicit nature. This isn’t some late-night Skinemax film, though. It’s also not a dry biopic, a genre that I’m really not especially fond of. Instead, it manages to use this man and his life and his work as a way to explore the very important ideas that his research raised, ideas about both love and sex. Condon gives center stage to Grafton Noone, who is a member of Kinsey’s research team, and it’s an interview with him that provides the framework for the film. This allows us an omniscent voice into the film, an important element when you’re dealing with these subjects. Instead of having the complex and contradictory Kinsey narrate the film, Condon has allowed himself a voice with which to comment on and critique Kinsey’s life and work even as we move through it.
The film starts with Kinsey as a child, and with a few quick scenes, it shows what sort of sexual education Kinsey had. It’s a repressive, highly religious upbringing. Kinsey is so afraid of masturbation that he cries afterwards. He’s a brilliant scholar from a young age, something the script suggests as a way of escape, and he begins collecting. This leads him naturally to science, where his almost obsessive drive to collect data brings him gradually to his calling. Kinsey started his research as far back as the ‘20s, when he was cataloguing gall wasps and observing them. His work led him to the conclusion that there were no two gall wasps that were the same, that they evolved by giant leaps and bounds from generation to generation, and that they were sometimes not even recognizable as the same species from parent to offspring.
It’s during his days as a college professor that he meets Clara, a student who eventually becomes his wife. Theirs is an unconventional relationship from the start, and a good deal of that is simply because Kinsey is so socially eccentric. When they marry, their sexual life gets off to a terrible start. On their wedding night, Kinsey tries to enter Clara, causing her extreme pain. They try again several times and are on the verge of deciding that they just aren’t physically compatible when they visit a doctor and he diagnoses the problem as a simple matter of Clara’s hymen being inordinately thick. Kinsey realizes that his own complete lack of knowledge about the practical matters of sex made him unable to answer even this one simple question in a matter regarding his own wife. At the same time, he begins to enjoy an erotic life for the first time, and he realizes that everything he had been told about it was wrong. Kinsey’s personal inhibitions slip away, and he begins to indulge his interest in all things erotic. Clara is his willing partner in the journey, and the sequences of them taking their first steps into this world are wonderful. There’s an innocence about Kinsey’s curiosity, and he manages to mix the clinical and the personal.
At this point, he was still working on collecting gall wasp data, though, and publishing papers on it. He actually gathered over a million samples, creating staggeringly precise results. When Kinsey made the logical decision to start teaching sex to his students, it was a reaction to all of them being as woefully undereducated as he was. Kinsey’s not just a brilliant lecturer and researcher, he’s also a moral crusader. He believes that he is doing the right thing, that he can make a positive difference in the lives of his students and his community.
But the journey his work takes him on isn’t simple and straightforward by any means. Instead, it’s a trip that pushes the envelope so hard it shreds. The definitions of fidelity, normalcy, homo and heterosexuality, perversion, and love all fall under scrutiny and are challenged by what Kinsey and his group of researchers learn, both as scientists and as people. They use the same approach for researching human sexuality that Kinsey used in researching gall wasps, gathing data from as many subjects as possible by way of interview. These interviews form a major chunk of this film, and it’s great material. It’s funny, it’s human, it’s genuinely enlightening. There is such a beautiful cacophony of voices in this script, so many different types of people, so many different ideas and orientations, that when you’re done reading, you’re left dizzy, left to make the same conclusions that Kinsey does.
And what are those conclusions? Well, that’s the film’s secret weapon. That's what is going to make this an event, a cultural moment that's bigger than just the film. I don't know if America is ready, even now, to be told that we are gull wasps, that we are endlessly diverse, that the conventional notions of gay and straight don't matter, that they're labels without meaning, that we are all just shades of grey on the sliding scale of sexual experience, and that black and white are just illusions. People aren’t just going to watch this movie. They’re going to explode when they watch this movie. For me, there was a moment as I was reading when I felt that kundalini eye open in a whole new way, when I suddenly understood something about the world in a way I never had before. I consider that a good thing. Some people will be terrified to have that happen to them in a movie theater, and they’ll react strongly to it. This is a film that will be genuinely controversial. This past weekend should prove just how much value there is in challenging an adult audience, though. THE EXORCIST’s per-screen numbers are no fluke. That film has a reputation as being stronger than anything being made today, and audiences flocked to share that experience in the theater again. KINSEY is a film that will provoke each and every viewer in a different way, and that’s the brilliance of it. I can’t believe how entertaining it is, even as it bombards you with big ideas. Condon manages to do what Philip Kaufman always seems to strive towards in his films. He combines a European sensibility towards sex with an American sensibility towards film, and what he comes up with feels wholly original. It's something that seems alive, vital, even necessary.
I hope good things are happening for this script. I’ll be prying further into it in the weeks ahead. In particular, I’m curious about casting. Kinsey is one of the best roles any actor will be offered in their career, a dream for anyone of substance. He’s cold and clinical at first glance, but he’s a man of deep passions and he’s capable of real heat. He’s a genius as a scientist, but a failure as a celebrity. If someone like Tom Hanks or George Clooney or Russell Crowe plays this role, it’s a big movie by definition, and those stars can make the material approachable for a mainstream audience. If someone like Jeff Bridges (a dead ringer for the real Kinsey) plays the role, it’s going to be a great film, but it’s going to play edgier, and there’s more work involved in getting audiences to take the chance. Maybe those big movie star names buy Condon and his producers the freedom to talk about these subjects.
All I know is, I was changed by this material. Very few films ever reach me at that core place where I define myself. This one, just in script form, hits at the level of real experience, and I have to credit that to Condon's skill as a writer just as much as to the material he's working with. It’s important stuff. This is the kind of film that awards were invented for, and it has that rare chance to also be a commercial monster. The first time Kinsey discussed this material in public, back when he published his groundbreaking SEXUAL BEHAVIOR IN THE HUMAN MALE and the follow-up FEMALE volume, he created an instant international dialogue on these subjects. America’s religious and moral baggage crushed Kinsey, though, and his work somehow went from national consciousness to historical footnote. This second attempt to give proper weight to his revolutionary work has a chance to reach even more people. All it’s going to take is the nerve to pull the trigger. Can’t wait to see who the hero is.
I’ll be back with a full report on this project as I find out more about it. Until then...
"Moriarty" out.
