Ashley Judd reflected on the complicated feelings she has for her breakout film, 1997’s “Kiss the Girls,” criticizing the thriller for “making entertainment out of sexual terror.”
The actress got candid in an Instagram post shared Sunday, in which she shared both a lengthy video and a caption describing her new insight into the movie, which follows a forensic psychologist (played by Morgan Freeman) as he hunts down a serial kidnapper.
While Judd thanked fans for loving the film, including her in it, and defended the project as “pivotal” to her career, she noted that her “perspective on this movie has evolved quite significantly over the years.”
“’Kiss the Girls’ centers on male sexual violence and the torture of women’s bodies,” Judd wrote in her caption on Instagram. “At the time, we often framed stories like this around female resilience — the strength of surviving. Many people still say that’s what the film means to them. But I’ve found myself asking a different question: Why is sexual terror against women something we package as entertainment? Why is it profitable?”
Judd, who became a prominent figure in the #MeToo movement after speaking out against Harvey Weinstein, echoed similar sentiment in her video upload, sharing, “I want to talk about the movie in a way that has become more clear to me over the years, and I invite you to consider [this] for yourself. It’s okay to love the movie and come up to me and say it’s your favorite movie. And also, I became curious about why filming male sexual violence, torture of the female body and some of that dialogue — which I would literally cringe while I was listening to the dialogue, if I ever watched the movie in a theater or with anyone. Very misogynistic dialogue, excruciatingly not okay.”
As Judd went on, she highlighted that many fans felt the point was meant to highlight “the resilience after male sexual violence.” Yet, Judd made it clear she wasn’t swayed by that argument.
“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?” Judd pondered. “So we’re valorizing my [character’s] resilience in the movie but we’re not necessarily critiquing or wrestling with or holding at arms’ length why… the movie is about trauma, and it is traumatizing.”
The actress stated pointed blank that she did not find the film to be “entertainment,” blasting it as “collective denial” and “making entertainment out of sexual terror.”
Watch her full commentary here.
