The film Kinsey, written and directed by Bill Condon, stars Liam Neeson as Professor Alfred Kinsey, a biologist from a (dare I say) dangerously conservative Christian family who devotes a vast majority of his career to the study of sexual behaviors of humans. A film phenomenal in both script and storyline, Kinsey shows a professor’s simultaneous fight against society and alongside those that compose it.
Alfred Kinsey, a zoologist who studied at Harvard, begins his career with the collection of gall wasps as a means of observing genetic diversity in insects; however, when in the course of helping couples with their sex-related marital problems, he discovers that a far more necessary study is that of human sexuality, being that so little scientific study of the decidedly taboo subject had actually occurred. He begins this study by teaching a class based entirely on the subject of the human sex drive and its implications in a social context, rather than the common “health class” ideals of complete abstinence until marriage and then complete monogamy while married. His teaching of this class lead him to begin his extensive study of human sexual activity.
The movie Kinsey leads to an entirely new view of sex as compared to the societal standards at the time and, more yet, currently with its brazen display of nudity throughout the film, as well as the basis of conversations being almost entirely sexual. To produce a film about just these brazen styles of Alfred Kinsey as a scientist was sheer genius, and I can only hope to see other such works spew forth from the same Hollywood that gave us “Triple X” and “Are We There Yet?.”