Dr. Kinsey and Nature

During the opening scenes, one of the interviewers asks Kinsey about his health as a boy. Kinsey replies with a long list of ailments that plagued him including typhoid fever and rickets. He credits his recovery to a discovery of the outdoors. “It improved greatly when I finally discovered the great outdoors. I never got over the excitement of setting out into the wild, escaping bed, illness, family…I started to learn about things by grasping them, tasting them, looking at them” (Scene 1). Here the encounter with nature appears in direct opposition to the medical progress made against Kinsey’s illnesses. Though undoubtedly treated with medicine’s best answer to his sicknesses, Kinsey himself points to nature as the curer of his maladies. The director can be seen here to endorse some of Foucault’s ideas, most specifically those that discredit scientific discourse as the ultimate source of truth. Kinsey, penultimate scientist, does not yet see that science fails to find the truth of his illness. He discovers his own humanity through an encounter with nature. But Kinsey has yet to make this connection. The director alludes to this confusion later in the same scene during a discussion between Kinsey and a fellow scout. When the scout admits to Kinsey of a sexual problem, most likely nocturnal emission, Kinsey responds with some instruction from a manual before suggesting, “Let’s pray.”



The confusion appears when Kinsey and company kneel before a spectacular wooded lake. Though he may have intended to pray to the Christian god, he appears to be praying to nature itself. This image implies ambiguity in Kinsey’s life. His youthful prayers are obliged to be made to the Christian god, a trend no doubt influenced by his father. During his adult years, as explored above, he looks to science for insight. But in the final scene, Kinsey’s revelation becomes complete as he sees the encounter with nature as a source of truth. The film sees Kinsey and his wife go through a variety of understandings within their relationship that result in some insecurity and suffering. This, compounded by Kinsey’s failing health, create struggle near the end of the film. In the last scene Kinsey suggests a walk through the woods that brings back some freshness and stability into their relationship. The encounter brings them to some truth. By presenting this in the closing moments of the film, the director locates truth, or at least insight that brings comfort in areas outside of both science and sexuality. This affirms Foucault’s theory of power and knowledge; for Foucault, the will to knowledge is exploited by power, offering only half truths that leave the searcher feeling secure but far away from truth. Kinsey compliments this argument by locating the peace of the main characters in a realm outside of science and inside the personal encounter.