This post contains spoilers for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. You have been warned.
So Malaysian cinemagoers, here’s what you should have seen at the end of The Rise of Skywalker.
Our heroes, fresh from saving the universe, are celebrating their triumph over Palpatine’s Final Order with plenty of pointing, backslapping, hugging, and kissing. As the camera pans across the revelry, we should have witnessed Commander Larma D’Acy, played by Amanda Lawrence and previously seen in The Last Jedi, locking lips with her X-Wing pilot girlfriend in the franchise’s first on-screen same-sex kiss. It is a fleeting moment, but one that lasts just long enough to register as some sort of representation.
What we got instead was an abrupt and awkward jump that we’ve become all too familiar with when at the cinema. When our over-protective censorship board has once again deemed something as being either too rude, or too sexy, or too gay for our fragile Malaysian sensibilities. We’re so used to it that most of us barely notice when it happens. Our well-practiced brains filling in the relevant curse words and sordid sexual encounters.
While obscenities, violence, and even some sex is known to sometimes get past Malaysian censors, homosexuality is still an absolute no-go. Bohemian Rhapsody and Rocket Man both saw extensive cuts to anything remotely gay (including the line of dialogue where Rami Malek’s Freddie Mercury comes out as being gay to Lucy Boynton’s Mary Austin), and movies like Moonlight, Call Me By Your Name, and Love, Simon don’t even make it to our shores.
The “offending” same-sex kiss was reportedly shown in China but not in Singapore and the UAE.
There was another unexpected jump at the beginning of the movie when the Millennium Falcon lightspeed skips while fleeing First Order Tie Fighters. Though I imagine that cut was due to a brief obscenity and not because Poe and Finn, fearing death, finally gave into their passions and gave us the smooch we actually wanted. #FinnPoe
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