Twisters: Let Beautiful People Kiss Again, Hollywood!

This article contains spoilers for Twisters.

What a way to end a movie! After surviving multiple major storms, corporate overlords, and fresh bouts of trauma, YouTube sensation Tyler Owens (Glen Powell) says goodbye to ambitious meteorologist Kate Carter (Daisy Edgar-Jones) in the closing moments of Twisters. The latter is going to New York City where she hopes to get some ethical funding for her research that might have found a way to thwart tornadoes.

Before Tyler and Kate say goodbye though, the two former rivals embrace one another in a long, soft kiss. They don’t let go after the kiss either. Instead they hold on for a few more seconds, looking longingly at one another’s eyes, with Kate playing with Tyler’s hair. After parting at last, the two go in for one more tender kiss, this one sweeter than the last.

Wait, what? You don’t remember that scene?

Oh yeah, that’s because Twisters director Lee Isaac Chung shot the scene, but used an alternate ending. In the finished film, Tyler and Kate just trade looks of admiration and perhaps attraction. But they never act upon it.

The kissing shot has made its way to social media though, albeit in the form of cell phone footage from the shoot. Still, even in that imperfect form, it’s hard to watch the kiss footage and not worry that mainstream movies are still so scared of sex that they won’t even show a kiss, not even from actors as attractive as Glen Powell and Daisy Edgar-Jones.

Twisting Away From Romance

Speaking with Entertainment Weekly, Chung justifies his decision to avoid kissing by pointing to the spirit of the times. “I feel like audiences are in a different place now in terms of wanting a kiss or not wanting a kiss,” he said. “I actually tried the kiss, and it was very polarizing — and it’s not because of their performance of the kiss.”

“I think it’s a better ending,” Chung continued to argue. “And I think that people who want a kiss within it, they can probably assume that these guys will kiss someday. And maybe we can give them privacy for that. In a way, this ending is a means to make sure that we really wrap things up with it in a celebratory, good way.”

He even goes so far as to suggest that avoiding the kiss better serves Kate as a character. “If it ends on the kiss, then it makes it seem as though that’s what Kate’s journey was all about, to end up with a kiss,” he reasoned. “But instead it’s better that it ends with her being able to continue doing what she’s doing with a smile on her face.”

There’s some logic behind Chung’s argument. After all, how many male-centric stories have ended with the good guy getting the girl, thus reducing women to rewards for the hero? It’s easy to see why Chung wouldn’t want to continue such objectification, even if it flips genders. And if, as Powell and Edgar-Jones told Collider, the note to avoid a kiss indeed came from none other than Steven Spielberg, then the choice becomes even more deceptively persuasive.

Twisters obviously isn’t about romance. It’s about Kate overcoming the trauma and guilt of a mistake that cost the lives of her friends. And even more that, it’s about cool tornado set pieces. Furthermore, Twisters does have quite a bit of sensuality in it, only it’s between Kate and nature instead of her and Tyler. As with his pervious film, the wonderful Minari, Chung has an eye for lush greens and rich gray clouds. He devotes screen time to watching Kate stand in open fields and read the wind, watching how it crosses over her body.

All of that makes sense, and all of that has merit. But still… Powell and Daisy Edgar-Jones are attractive people. So why shouldn’t they kiss?!

The Spectacle of Smooching

The decision against kissing avoids the fundamental reason that we go to movies, especially big audience-pleasing blockbusters like Twisters. We go for spectacle, to see visions larger than life, for experiences that engage and overload our senses. By design, Twisters is crafted to deliver that in nearly every other way. In reality, Kate would need lots of therapy and all the hard work that entails to get over her friends’ death. Her formula to dissipate tornadoes would have surely gotten the attention of a more established advisor, who would have shepherded further and probably continued the research after she dropped out.

But none of that makes for exciting, popcorn-munching spectacle. It’s far more exciting to see Kate ride her fears, to use Tyler’s maxim, and revisit her research notes in a dusty barn with the hot Texan in a dripping wet T-shirt standing over her shoulder. We want her to have a heroic moment, to beat the storm, to save the day.

To be clear, big spectacle hasn’t gone anywhere. For more than a decade, Marvel movies and franchises like The Fast and the Furious and Mission: Impossible have kept people coming to theaters. And all of them are are giant spetacles with crowd-pleasing set-pieces and attractive actors. But these movies have been famously devoid of romance in general, and sexuality in particular. As Chung’s comments to EW reveal, studios remain nervous about including too much sensuality in movies, as audiences might call them exploitation or unrealistic. Apparently Twisters shot an ending with and without a kiss, and chose partially based on how test audiences reacted to each.

It’s understandable that movie studios, an incredibly conservative industry that avoids anything that might cost them a single dollar in revenue, might walk away from online furor, or one “polarized” scold in a test screening, and deem a kiss as a bridge too far for delicate modern sensibilities. But no real people should entertain such bad takes.

Sexual exploitation in Hollywood is a real thing, both on and off the screen, and it deserves thorough investigation. But simply insisting that all movies avoid sexuality in any form doesn’t address the problem. It looks away from it. Likewise, romance plots are often unrealistic. But most movies are unrealistic. Seriously, go walk through the halls of the science building at your local institution of higher learning. Sure, you’ll see some good looking people. But people who look like Daisy Edgar-Jones or Glen Powell? Of course not. You also won’t see them thinking they can survive an F3 tornado because their car drives stakes in the ground either.

The Revelry of Unrealistic Romance

When good people kiss, it’s part of the spectacle, something that Twisters embraces in every other regard. When Brandon Perea hoots and hollers, we cheer. When Kate accurately anticipates a storm’s movement and Tyler’s truck burrows into the ground, we cheer. When Javi (Anthony Ramos) splatters mud all over Scott (David Corenswet), we cheer!

And you better believe that we would have cheered if we got to see the proper version of Kate and Tyler smooching at the end of the movie. It’s a trick Hollywood’s been playing for over a hundred years, and it still works in a movie like Twisters because audiences aren’t here to watch superheroes, “gods,” or action figures pose. They’re here to see beautiful people play an approximation of everyday life in a heightened spectacular fashion, which includes the often every day occurrence of romance and love. And yet, due to some overcautiousness not to offend anyone, we’ll just have to clap at our phones while we watch leaked video on the internet instead of swooning in the theaters, like we did with every other part of Twisters.

Twisters is now playing in theaters, but you’ll have to supply the kissing.