Stop us if you’ve heard this one before: a restrictive and repressive foreign country edited and censored an LGBTQ scene from a movie and now the American distributor is upset. We can think of a dozen movies that come to mind.
In this case, a Chinese distributor caved to the government’s pressure and edited a scene in the recent indie body horror movie “Together,” changing a gay wedding to a straight one. Neon isn’t pleased, and it demanded that Hishow, the Chinese distributor to whom it sold the foreign rights, stop showing “this altered version,” the company told IndieWire in a statement.
What’s weird, however, is that Hishow didn’t just cut the scene in question or edit it in such a way to make it look like it was a heterosexual couple getting married. Per some glaring social media posts that went viral last week, the distributor seemingly used AI to face swap a male character with the face of a woman.
Firstly, the Chinese distributor simply isn’t allowed to edit the film in any way, which is normally the case in sales agreements. In the case of a major studio film where the studio is handling global distribution, it needs to go through government approval to get released in China or other countries prone to censoring LGBTQ+ content, and the studio itself would need to make that decision on an edited version.
But for an indie like “Together,” which Neon bought the worldwide rights to (for $15 million out of Sundance this year), it handles North American distribution itself, and then it sells the movie to other territories for the rest of the world.
But under the terms of any deal they make with another international distributor, Neon is selling “Together” under the legal pretense that the distributor release Neon’s IP as intended. Hishow has halted the release since. “Together” officially opened on September 19.
It’s also unclear if this is really “AI” or just some other slapdash edit that swapped a man’s face with a female one. It’s hard to tell when you have nothing to go on but a screenshot smuggled from Chinese social media.
But people in China certainly seem to think this is an example of AI. China Digital Times reports that it wasn’t just the same-sex image that was altered, but the distributor did also cut out some straight sex scenes from the film, just like they could’ve done with the scene that was digitally altered. China Digital Times also compiled a collection of commenters from film forum websites like Douban, Zhihu, and Xiaohongshu. As one user implies, the AI is a more sophisticated and “terrifying” form of censorship because smart viewers have figured out ways to get around obvious censorship or can tell the difference, but that’s much harder with AI. Here’s a smattering of some of the comments, sarcasm implied on the last one:
“If they just deleted scenes, we could work it out by watching BluRay or streaming versions, and even scene alterations like cropping, dimming, or photoshopping in skirts could be fairly readily identified. But the evolution of alteration methods like this AI face-swapping is terrifying … in the future, we won’t even be able to tell if we’re watching the original film or not.“
“We’ve reached the point where it’s not a matter of cuts, but of falsification and misrepresentation.
“This is nauseating because it not only interferes with the integrity of the plot, it disrespects the sexual orientation of the actors. Congrats to those Chinese with thin skins for pioneering this new mode of film import. Next time, they might as well straight-swap “Call Me by Your Name” for hetero screenings.
“Awesome! Next, let’s use one-click AI to re-release “Brokeback Mountain,” “God’s Own Country,” “Lan Yu,” and “Happy Together” as “restored” hetero romances — a faster and more effective conversion than drinking Chinese herbal medicine! What a beautiful country! There’s hope for us yet!
The one commenter is especially right about the edit interfering with the integrity of the plot. Some SPOILERS! for “Together” follow. The scene that was edited isn’t just any old wedding. When stars Alison Brie and Dave Franco discover a video tape of the wedding, we learn the two men in the wedding eventually went through the same fusion process that is about to take place for them, and the two men ultimately formed into one single man, as played by Damon Herriman. When Brie and Franco eventually fuse at the end of the film, they become a single, androgynous, non-binary person. Erasing the same-sex marriage and making it a straight couple suddenly makes the Damon Herriman character make no sense.
That’s the really terrifying part of this particular edit — AI alterations that exist to serve censorship and degrade creators’ original storytelling.
