[This story contains spoilers for Twisters.]
Twisters audiences are getting swept up in the renewed debate surrounding depictions of sexual intimacy on the big screen. Social media users have been in a tizzy over the ending of director Lee Isaac Chung‘s action film that stars Glen Powell, Daisy Edgar-Jones and Anthony Ramos.
A follow-up to the 1996 film Twister that starred Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt, the new movie centers on Kate (Edgar-Jones) aiming to put a tragic tornado encounter behind her as she returns to Oklahoma to assist a team in tracking dangerous storms. Twisters shows her slow-building connection to YouTube-famous storm chaser Tyler (Powell) — but you might be blown away to learn that the pair never express their affections with an onscreen kiss.
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“My partner immediately lamented the fact that their romance was never physicalized in any way, and that they even avoided the hunky hero ever taking his shirt off,” says John Bucher, executive director of the Joseph Campbell Foundation who has served as story consultant for projects released by Paramount, HBO and A24. “It speaks to our deep conflict with intimacy right now as a culture that we are avoiding it altogether because it’s too messy or complicated. So we’re just shelving it. We’re just putting it completely aside so that we don’t have to deal with it.”
Indeed, the film’s team did opt to shelve such a scene. Chung actually filmed a kiss between Powell and Edgar-Jones, with footage of the lip-lock having made the rounds on social media, though it was not in the finished film. The two stars have said this was the result of a note given by executive producer Steven Spielberg, and both said the decision made sense to them.
Chung himself recently said that scrapping the kiss was a result of evolving filmgoer preferences. “I feel like audiences are in a different place now in terms of wanting a kiss or not wanting a kiss,” the director told Entertainment Weekly. “I actually tried the kiss, and it was very polarizing — and it’s not because of their performance of the kiss.”
Debate around the film follows research suggesting that members of Gen Z are less interested than previous generations in seeing onscreen sex scenes. While recent movies with steamy scenes have indeed sparked interest among younger viewers — think Amazon titles Challengers, The Idea of You and Red, White and Royal Blue — films seem less likely to include moments of unearned nudity or intimacy. (Last year, a study reported that sexual content in major films had dropped nearly 40 percent since 2000.) In the case of Twisters, Powell has said he saw the kiss omission as helping to frame Kate’s self-actualization as not hinging on having a significant other by her side.
Brian Hurwitz, who works as an in-house writer for production company Dolphin Entertainment and is a lecturer at UCLA, notes that members of Gen Z and younger millennials can see intimate scenes as “a sign of the inequality of times past” when women may have had less say in such scenes. “It’s the discomfort, and the sign of any sort of intimacy has become forced,” he says. As a real-world example, he cites last year’s scandal surrounding Spanish soccer player Jennifer Hermoso getting an unwanted kiss from the then-president of the nation’s soccer federation, who has since resigned.
Hurwitz also reasons that today’s younger viewers have less need for titillation through film: “In the ’80s, it was the only way they could get all the kids in the theater to see the slasher films, and all the kids couldn’t wait to watch these young women have sex and then die. But today, it’s five seconds away on any tween’s phone. What do they need it for?”
According to Hurwitz, the intimate scenes in Netflix’s Hit Man, in which Powell starred opposite Adria Arjona, felt more integral to the storyline. Conversely, he points out that, while the original 1984 film Beverly Hills Cop shows Eddie Murphy’s title character taking his colleagues to a strip club, Netflix’s recent sequel Axel F features no such scene.
Amid the rise of the #MeToo movement in 2017, Hollywood has seen an increase in the popularity of intimacy coordinators to help guide sexualized scenes. However, the topic continues to spur debate, with many people within Hollywood praising the role — and some even advocating for intimacy coordinators to get their own Oscar — while stars including Jennifer Aniston and Michael Douglas have preferred to shoot such scenes without using them. (“Please, this is awkward enough,” Aniston has said about her preference.)
Michael Bronski, a media professor at Harvard University and former film critic for Gay CommunityNews, presumes that the conversation around Twisters would have been much different if the potential kiss had involved an LGBTQ couple. “If you had a movie with a queer or trans theme, and you didn’t have the kiss, queer audiences would be more outraged because that would feel like it was censorship rather than an artistic choice,” he says.
A sequel to Twisters now appears likely, given that the Universal movie is overperforming at the domestic box office, having surpassed $80 million in its opening weekend. In other words, perhaps fans will have to wait and see whether Powell and Edgar-Jones’ characters get a chance to express their affection physically. But while that absent smooch led to plenty of griping (“The most powerful move Kamala [Harris] could make right now is to come out in strong opposition to cutting the kiss from Twisters,” quipped podcaster Clay Keller), not all onlookers see the shifting sensibility as a negative.
“It speaks to a larger question within Gen Z that I really admire, and that is that they’re looking for something that’s real, not just an experience of the moment of intimacy,” Bucher says. “What does it really mean to connect with another person, not just in an act?”
