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Love at the Multiplex
- Abstract
Movies for adults—not to be confused with adult mo-vies—are few and far between these days, so one is grateful when serious fare comes to the local multiplex. On the very serious and all-consuming topic of love and sex, the season just past featured three such movies: Kinsey, Closer, and Sideways. All three attracted a good deal of attention, were in the running for industry awards, and drew comment from critics impressed not only with their qualities as movies but with what they had to say about the way we live now.
Kinsey recounts the life of a man who became, for a spell, perhaps the most notorious figure in America, and certainly the most notorious professor of all time. As one learns from published biographies, Alfred C. Kinsey (1894-1956), the author of the best-selling volumes Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, presented himself as a model of scientific detachment, a taxonomist who had examined and categorized the sexual proclivities of mankind as disinterestedly as he might the mating habits of the gall wasp—on which he had become a world expert during his earlier career as an entomologist.
About the Author
Algis Valiunas writes on culture and politics for COMMENTARY and other magazines. His "Goethe’s Magnificent Self" appeared in January.
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