Ashley Judd has called out her 1997 breakout film Kiss the Girls for “making entertainment out of sexual terror”.
In the film adaptation of James Patterson’s novel, Morgan Freeman plays a detective and forensic psychologist investigating the disappearance of his niece, while Judd portrays a doctor named Kate who is kidnapped and imprisoned by a masked killer.
While the movie changed her life and career, Judd now has “complicated” feelings about Kiss the Girls and its depiction of violence against women.
After thanking her fans for loving the movie and sharing positive memories from her time on set, the Divergent actress delved into her new perspective on the film.
“It’s okay to love the movie and come up to me and say it’s your favourite movie,” Judd began, before sharing that she has recently been wondering “why filming male sexual violence” and “torture of the female body” is considered entertainment, noting that the “very misogynistic dialogue” was “excruciatingly not okay”.
The 57-year-old, who has been open about her own experiences with sexual assault and sexual harassment, continued, “It’s the resilience after male sexual violence. It’s resilience after male sexual torture of the female body and I go… why is that entertainment? Why is that a capitalist enterprise? Why do we create entertainment and earn money off of such a subject?”
She added, “The movie is about trauma, and it is traumatising… To me, this is not entertainment. It’s collective denial… and making entertainment out of sexual terror.”
In the lengthy caption, the Double Jeopardy star reiterated her good experiences and evolving relationship with the film.
“Why is sexual terror against women something we package as entertainment? Why is it profitable?” she wrote. “So today I hold Kiss the Girls in a more complicated way – with gratitude for what it meant in my life and career, affection for the people I worked with, and curiosity about what the story represents in our culture.”
Following the commercial success of Kiss the Girls, Freeman reprised his role as Alex Cross in 2001’s Along Came a Spider.
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