‘Silence’ Fuels a Loud and Angry Debate : Movies: Jonathan Demme’s gruesome box-office thriller ignites arguments over creative rights, the depiction of violence against women and negative gay stereotypes.

Jonathan Demme’s thriller “The Silence of the Lambs” has performed box-office magic, holding on to the No. 1 spot in the national box-office rankings five straight weekends since its Valentine’s Day release and providing a ray of hope for beleaguered Orion Pictures. But not without engendering its share of controversy along the way.

From the beginning, the film has been under attack from individuals and special-interest groups who believe it is excessively gruesome and violent and that it degrades women and perpetrates negative gay stereotypes. Whether these accusations are valid is a subject of debate even within the groups themselves, raising questions about issues ranging from First Amendment rights and creative freedom to the impact of screen imagery on moviegoers.

Adapted from Thomas Harris’ bestseller, the film chronicles a battle of wits between an FBI trainee (Jodie Foster) and the imprisoned serial killer (Anthony Hopkins) she enlists to help her track down a second serial killer. The imprisoned madman is a wily psychiatrist with a penchant for eating his victims; the killer being sought is a cross-dresser who uses the skin of his victims to enhance his wardrobe.

They are not your typical big-screen bad guys, and they have been too much for some people to handle. Orion acknowledges that a few journalists walked out at pre-release press screenings, and though more and more people have been walking in , walkouts have continued throughout the film’s commercial release.

In San Francisco, a couple of women would not leave the theater until someone in management agreed to walk them to their car. New York’s weekly Village Voice published a variety of discourses on the film, most of them taking its content to task. Writing in February’s Mademoiselle, Ron Rosenbaum called “Lambs” “a sick pornography of butchery . . . a camera infatuated with decayed, mutilated flesh.”

“Why,” he asked, “would a director of Demme’s intelligence want to be anywhere near the film version of this project?”

Though he declined to be interviewed for this story, Demme discussed his dilemma as a filmmaker in last month’s Film Comment magazine.

“You want to own up to the text of the book and the script,” Demme was quoted as saying. “But you don’t want to cross the line with people, make people physically ill. . . . I’m not against mortification in films as a moviegoer, but in my own films I think I will always stop well short of it.”

Those who defend Demme on that score argue that most of the violence in the film is off-camera, or static (the grossest scene is an FBI examination of a flayed victim), and that it could have been a lot worse.

“To me, ‘Jaws’ made ‘Silence of the Lambs’ look subdued,” said Jack Myhill, general manager of the San Francisco-based theater chain Syufy Enterprises. “Filmmakers would argue that they have an obligation to portray life as it really is and I, for one, wouldn’t want to be the one defining boundaries. While it’s not ‘anything goes,’ I’d be reluctant to pull a film unless it offends most of our audience. Demme certainly didn’t exploit violence for its own sake. It’s a free-speech issue.”

Greg Rutkowski, vice president of West operations for the AMC theater chain, agreed: “Demme is a bizarre guy and there’s no question that he presses some different buttons, but he’s not appealing to prurient interests. Nothing in this film is gratuitous.”

Much of the criticism has centered on the portrayal of the serial killer, whose habit of skinning victims earned him the nickname Buffalo Bill. In both the book and the movie, he is depicted as a prissy cross-dresser with bleached blond hair and a poodle named Precious with whom he maintains an ongoing conversation. The book and the movie contain dialogue by the imprisoned psychiatrist explaining that Buffalo Bill is neither a homosexual nor a transvestite, merely a man with apocalyptic identity problems. Many people don’t buy that explanation.

“This film is a continuation of Hollywood’s appalling track record of portraying gays in negative ways . . . and could potentially encourage gay bashing,” said Richard Jennings, executive director of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), which has had members passing out information flyers outside theaters screening the film. “It also ignores the reality that most violence against women is committed by heterosexual males.”

Orion, which is getting a needed transfusion of cash from the success of “Lambs,” naturally has taken a different view.

“We feel that the film exposes--without condoning--the atrocities of the serial killer as an individual, not as a representative of any particular group,” said Marc Platt, president of Orion Pictures Productions.

“The characters of the film’s two psychopaths are composites of real-life mass murderers,” said David Forbes, president of Orion Pictures Distribution Corp. “Their sexual orientation is never depicted in the film. Their lives are depicted as so miserable and grotesque that they cannot be perceived as any kind of role model.”

Richard Schickel, who reviews movies for Time magazine, agreed with the Orion bosses: “No intelligent person will make the connection between the minority status of that psychopath and the minority group in general, just as we didn’t walk out of ‘GoodFellas’ thinking that all Italian Catholics are bad.

“All minorities have to allow for the possibility that there may be psychopaths or bad guys in their midst. Soon it will reach a point where the only villains you can put on the screen are WASP, straight males--and life is more complicated than that. It’s a dangerous situation when artists can’t engage honestly in the world because certain subjects are barred to them.”

Some members of gay-oriented organizations see the movie as a threat. AIDS Project L.A. benefited from a fund-raising premiere of “Lambs” before its commercial opening, and found itself under attack from GLAAD.

“As a gay man, I wasn’t offended by the film,” said Stephen Bennett, chief executive officer of AIDS Project L.A. “The villain was a psychopathic mess, not representative of the gay community. I encourage the efforts of GLAAD to stay on top of all examples of negative stereotyping, but as an AIDS organization we can’t take on the role of ‘advocates.’ We agreed to consult GLAAD in the future before booking any benefits. But you can’t be screaming about (the refusal to show the work of artist Robert) Mapplethorpe on the one hand and calling for censorship on the other.”

In the movie, Foster is cast as a strong and savvy heroine, a far cry from the “love interest” roles most actresses find themselves being offered. But some feminists point out that the movie is, at its core, just another “woman in distress” picture depicting excessive brutality toward women.

Sheila Kuehl of the Southern California Women’s Law Center said that if any other group was being routinely portrayed as victims in slasher movies, there would be an enormous outcry, but with women “it’s taken for granted like the air we breathe.”

“People say ‘Silence of the Lambs’ is a brilliant thriller, that it’s not about the killing of women but about a duel of wits between Foster and Hopkins,” said Kuehl. “That’s like saying ‘Ulysses’ isn’t misogynistic because it’s a great piece of literature. And the strength of Jodie Foster’s character is her ability to assimilate in a man’s world.”

Screenwriter Anna Hamilton Phelan (“Mask,” “Gorillas in the Mist”) sees it differently: “I saw this movie as very pro-female, one in which the horror of violence against women is brilliantly balanced by the presence of well-drawn female characters such as Jodie Foster’s FBI friend. When was the last time we saw a woman of color come out of Hollywood as bright and realistic?

“In so many movies, you sense the filmmaker’s rage against women, but Demme actually helped me to understand how such brutality filters down into everyday life--for Jodie Foster’s character and all of us. Whistling at a woman is nowhere near as bad as skinning, of course. But it’s all related.”

The National Organization for Women also has lined up behind the director.

“The bottom line is that violence does happen primarily to women and you need to portray that reality,” said Tammy Bruce, president of the group’s L.A. chapter. “The question is whether it exploits this reality or educates . . . Demme educates. He obviously put thought into the positioning of women in the film. The senator is female, even though there are only two of them in real life. Her kidnaped daughter remained angry and ‘thinking,’ which sends out the message that, even if attacked, you don’t have to be a ‘victim.’ And Jodie Foster’s character is a real woman--someone’s girlfriend, wife, sister--rather than a Sigourney Weaver superwoman. I’m telling all my friends to go see the movie.”

Phyllis Frank, president of the NOW chapter in Rockland County, N.Y., admitted to losing sleep over some of the film’s more sordid moments, but said that the subject matter was handled in a responsible way:

“Demme doesn’t use the degradation and torture of women as a marketing tool. He evidently despises the violence. If the movie helps to raise people’s consciousness as to how women are brutalized in real life, it’s making an important statement.”