Carol – the film based on Patricia Highsmith’s novel The Price of Salt – stars Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara as two women who develop an intimate relationship.
However the Huffington Post reports that Delta Airlines have been showing an edited version of the film, which has the lesbian kissing scenes edited out.
Comedian Cameron Esposito watched the film during a flight and tweeted about the edited version, saying:
Watched Carol on a plane and they edited it so the man character never even kiss. Booo. Two women kissing is fine for planes.”
Watched CAROL on a plane & they edited it so the main characters never even kiss. Booooooo.
Two women kissing is fine for planes.
— Cameron Esposito (@cameronesposito) August 3, 2016
BTW my seatmate totally watching something where Paul Giamatti was participating in BDSM w/ a lady but CAROL had no kissing!?
VERY MAD.
— Cameron Esposito (@cameronesposito) August 3, 2016
This is not dirty pic.twitter.com/zDOZMDIGXS
— Cameron Esposito (@cameronesposito) August 3, 2016
In a statement to Entertainment Weekly, Delta Airlines said that the reason they showed the edited film was because the studio supplied them with two versions. An unedited version that included nudity and the edited one that cut the nudity as well as the kissing.
If we were worried about kissing we wouldn’t be showing the film in the first place, but because there are scenes with more than a few seconds of nudity, we opted for the edited version instead of the theatrical version.”
Screenwriter Phyllis Nagy, who wrote the screenplay for Carol, said that United Airlines and American Airlines took the full version of the film shown in cinemas while others chose to screen the edited copy.
Delta has said that it chose the edited copy because the theatrical version included explicit scenes that “did not meet its guidelines”.
Unfortunately, the edited copy also removed all kissing, but the company did not have the rights to edit them back in.
Some fans have started using the #FreeCarol hashtag to convey their disapproval at Delta’s decision not to show the full film while others, including singer Mary Lambert, have expressed their surprise after watching Carol and assuming that the lack of physical intimacy was a creative decision.
wait WHAT!? I saw it on a Delta flight and thought that the director/producer chose that creatively.
— Mary Lambert (@marylambertsing) August 3, 2016
Carol has been voted as the best LGBT film “of all time” by film experts.