Sexuality is such a prevalent theme in today's culture that it's hard to see why Alfred Kinsey's research on it caused such
a big stir in the 1940s. The film "Kinsey" paints a portrait of a complex, socially awkward man whose personal feelings played only a small role in his clinical studies, a man who was simply curious to know what people were thinking (or, more to the point, doing). In "Kinsey," written and directed by Bill Condon ("Gods and Monsters"), we are given a view of early-20th-century morality that is somewhere between quaint and frightening. Kinsey's father (played by John Lithgow, reliving his "Footloose" sanctimony), a small-town moral tyrant, preaches that "the modern inventions of science have been used to cultivate immorality" -- the same argument that very sensible people today make about Internet pornography and such, except that HE'S talking about inventions like electricity and the telephone. The worst one of all, according to Alfred Kinsey Sr.? You'll never guess. It's the zipper, because it gives "men and boys speedy access to moral oblivion." Raised in this environment, Dr. Kinsey himself (played as an adult by Liam Neeson) is the very picture of sexual ignorance and repression, but as a budding scientist, he has a natural curiosity. He becomes a biologist, and a bookish one at that, spending 11 months in solitude looking for a particular breed of wasp. He eventually gathers 500,000 specimens. Even if a guy like that WANTED to have sex, what are the chances he could?
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