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December 13, 2004

Not So Rich

Last spring, Frank Rich screened "Kinsey" and found it "an intelligent account of a half-forgotten and somewhat quaint chapter in American history."

Now he finds the film more timely. Indeed, his column in yesterday's New York Times held up "Kinsey" as the harbinger of a returning dark age, as religious conservatives hatch a new, post-electoral "plot against sex in America."

Golly, when I heard that "Kinsey" was attracting the usual spitballs from the usual suspects, I just took it as another skirmish in the Thirty Years War between publicity-seeking preachers and keister-covering broadcasters. To judge by Rich's account, though, the situation is more serious than that. Indeed, the battlements of sexual enlightenment are being stormed by an army of Bible-reading Orcs.

This is odd, given that only last week Rich was reassuring us that red-state couch potatoes enjoy televised T&A just as much as blue-state ones do. That struck me as a singularly uninteresting observation, but about all we can expect from a critic who (to paraphrase Charles Peguy) would go to any length to avoid being thought a prude.

Still, I can't help but wonder whether Rich is really worried about the end of nonmarital nooky as we know it, or whether he's just running short of ideas. To quote Peguy directly: "A word is not the same with one writer as with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket."

Posted by at December 13, 2004 8:00 AM