SILKWOOD

SILKWOOD

(Spoiler Alert)

In January of 1979 I moved to Charlestown, Indiana, a small town approximately seventeen miles northeast of Louisville, Kentucky.  The place being so small, I expected it to have an ambiance that was peaceful and quiet, and it might have turned out that way had a nuclear power plant by the name of Marble Hill not been under construction in Saluda Township just eighteen miles up the road.  Although the project brought many jobs to an economically depressed region, it was not well received.  The facility came with a high price tag; then after the Three Mile Island disaster in March where a nuclear meltdown threatened the lives of thousands of Pennsylvanians, protests over cost morphed to cries for safety.  The concerns were exacerbated in May when a former employee of Marble Hill turned whistleblower and reported that there were air pockets in the walls of the containment chambers large enough to drive a truck through.  It took public meetings, false stops and starts in construction, and a predicted cost that went from $700 million to $7.7 billion to finally end construction.  Despite the sympathy townsfolk felt for the employees who had relocated to the area only to find themselves stranded without means to feed their families, most of us breathed a sigh of relief over the aversion of impending disaster.


I guess that experience explains my interest in the movie Silkwood, which is based on the life of Karen Silkwood, a divorced mother of three who worked at Cimarron Fuel Fabrication in Crescent Oklahoma.  Cimarron was a plutonium processing plant that made rods for nuclear power facilities and was owned by Kerr-McGee, a billion-dollar energy company that dealt in chemical, oil, coal, wood, and nuclear power sources.  The heads of the company were State Senator and former governor of Oklahoma, Robert Kerr and advisor to both Presidents Kennedy and Ford, Dean McGee.  It was also one of the largest employers in the vicinity.


The movie opens with a group of people clad in protective gear handling deadly radioactive materials while joking with one another in a rural twang; in the background country music plays. The scene focuses on one of the technicians who describes a miracle he witnessed at the church revival he recently attended. This is the Bible Belt and, although the people who work at the plant have highly technical jobs, they are not college educated technicians.  The manager brings in a group of new-hires and asks Karen (Merle Streep) to explain what she is doing.  Although uncomfortable with being called out, she hesitatingly describes how her machine blends plutonium and uranium oxide and presses it into the plutonium pellets, which look like metal capsules, that will be inserted into the rods the company sells to nuclear power plants.  When the newbies ask about radiation poisoning, the manager cuts Karen off and says that it is no worse than a sunburn and reassures them that plutonium won’t do them any harm if they are careful.  After he moves on, Karen laughs about the manager calling them professionally trained technicians, because they aren’t.


Nor are they treated like professionals.  People have to ask permission in advance to get time off because production is three months behind and there is a lot of mandatory overtime.  Wages are so low, that the small house Karen shares with her boyfriend Drew (Kurt Russell) and friend Dolly (Cher), who also work at the plant, is an old clapboard farmhouse badly in need of a coat of paint and fitted out with worn appliances and cheap mismatched furniture.  And employees are susceptible to radiation poisoning because they are not well-trained in the handling of or well-educated as to the dangers of plutonium.  When a truck gets irradiated, for example, the company tells maintenance to just cut it up and bury it.  


Employees are responsible for monitoring themselves for radiation, but often fail to comply and it is little wonder.  If workers test positive, they are scrubbed raw with wire brushes and, rather than being given nasal smears to test for internal contamination, they are examined by the plant doctor, who is a veterinarian, and given mason jars for collecting urine samples at home that they bring back to the plant.  Karen doesn’t pay much attention to the lax way the company handles its radioactive materials or treats its employees until there is contamination in her section and management blames her because she had asked for time off and was refused.  When she turns to union representatives for help, she is told that they can’t do anything because their organization has no power.  In fact, the union is on the verge of being decertified, something that can only be prevented if people vote to retain it.  


Karen remains disinterested until she herself becomes contaminated and witnesses first-hand what happens to people when they get “cooked”.  She can’t go back to work until her department has been sanitized, so while sitting at home she flips through a brochure about plutonium that the union representative gave her.  When she reads that even the smallest amount of the radioactive material can lead to cancer, cause genetic damage in offspring, or both she finally begins to appreciate the danger that she and her co-workers face.  Back at work, Karen learns that she has been assigned to metallography, the section where welds in the pellet filled rods are photographed.  It will be her job to take the pictures, then her supervisor Winston (Craig T. Nelson), will examine the negatives to ascertain that the welds are good.  Winston is a misogynist who sexually harasses Karen, so she keeps a close eye on him.  When she notices him hiding defects on the negatives by touching them up with a pen, she decides that something must be done.  


She joins the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers Union (OCAW) and actively campaigns to get the local chapter recertified, which it is.  After the members choose to keep the union, they elect Karen to the bargaining committee and, as part of her duties, she accompanies two other representatives to Washington D.C. to meet with OCAW leader, Max (Josef Sommer), his aide, Paul (Ron Silver) and the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC).  Karen’s committee tries to explain that workers’ grievances include faulty respirators and an inadequate number of showers, but they are ignored.  Then, during a break, Karen approaches Max and Paul and reports Winston’s alteration of the negatives.  Fearing the potential number of deaths that could occur during a meltdown, the chief officer asks Karen to get documentation they can turn over to a reporter at the New York Times.  He tells Paul to act as her contact in D.C. and Paul and Karen end up having a brief fling.  Her association with these powerful men and being given such important duties changes Karen.  She begins to present herself more professionally and take the safety of her co-workers personally.  


Drew distrusts the union heads, however, not only because he finds out about Karen’s affair with Paul, but also because he thinks they are putting her in jeopardy.  He asks her to quit both the union and the job, but she refuses.  Fed up, he quits the plant and moves out of the house, leaving her without his emotional support.  Although more alone now than ever, Karen continues with her efforts to locate the altered negatives and document other irregularities at the plant.  Her isolation is further magnified when Paul begins refusing her calls.  Then, one day Karen’s friend Gilda (E. Katherine Kerr) comes to work exhausted and says that her husband was flushing out pipes all night because the plant is coming up short on plutonium.  When Karen begins asking for details, everyone scatters.  She once again turns to Paul for help, but the only thing he seems interested in is documentation for the New York Times article.  


Karen becomes irradiated a second time and is told to start taking urine samples every day.  She is required to leave the jars, which are handled as carelessly as everything else at the plant, unguarded on a shelf with those of the many other employees that have also been contaminated.  Worn out from all that is happening, Karen ends up hitting a deer while driving home one night and calls Drew for a tow.  He comes and gets her and takes her home with him.  Having his renewed backing should make things better for Karen, except that when she goes into work the next day, she tests positive for radiation a third time.  As a result, the company sends technicians to her house to check it for radiation; to her surprise they find contamination in the bathroom and on the bologna and cheese in her refrigerator.  The techs bag up everything in the house: pictures of her kids, food from the fridge, paper off the walls, and record the items taken before burying them.  Because Dolly and Drew were tested and results came out negative, the doctor asks Karen if she intentionally contaminated herself.  She tries to explain that she spilled her urine sample and touched it while cleaning up, which probably caused the readings, but the doctor points out that her nasal smear also came back positive which means she is likely contaminated internally.  Karen’s boss, Mr. Hurley (Bruce McGill) promises to help her if she admits to intentionally poisoning herself, but she refuses and leaves.  


Later in the day Drew comes by the house looking for Karen and sees that the interior is stripped bare.  While he is there Winston stops by, tells Drew what happened, and after giving Karen’s tormentor a good hard punch, Drew goes home to find her waiting for him.  Frightened for Karen, Dolly, and himself, he insists they fly to Los Alamos to be examined by people who know what they are doing.  During the flight, Karen informs them that she has learned there is plutonium missing from nearly every nuclear plant in the country.   In Los Alamos, the three are given a good once over after which the doctor (James Rebhorn) reports that Dolly and Drew are okay, but that Karen has plutonium in both lungs.  Even though her numbers are in the acceptable range, he goes on to explain that the results could be off by as much as 300%.  At this point Karen decides that she has enough evidence for the New York Times; she calls Paul and tells him she is ready for the reporter.  They agree to meet in Oklahoma City so she can hand over the evidence.   


Karen tells Drew that she needs to get something from the plant and meet with other union members before heading into the city.  She asks him to pick up Paul and the reporter at the airport and go to the designated meeting place where she will join them.  Although he doesn’t like it, Drew agrees.  The gathering with fellow union members runs late and it is dark before Karen can get away.  As she drives along the lonely road that will take her to Oklahoma City, a car races toward her from the rear.  What happens then is not shown; the next scene depicts her wrecked car surrounded by the flashing lights of emergency vehicles and her co-workers watching an ambulance pull away from the site of the crash.   


A short statement at the end of the film explains that no documents were found in Karen’s car and the cause of the crash is unknown.  Since blood tests indicated that, along with alcohol, she had taken tranquilizers, the state police ruled the incident a single car accident caused when she fell asleep at the wheel.  The plant shut down a year later.  Per Wikipedia, Karen’s father and children sued Kerr-McGee for negligence in her contamination and originally won over $500 thousand in damages and $10 million in punitive damages.  After appeals from both sides, the company settled the lawsuit for $1.38 million.  


Silkwood and Missing both introduced audiences to ordinary people who died for their extraordinary actions.  Karen Silkwood, a single mother in a low paying job risked her life to take on Kerr-McGee, one of the most powerful companies in Oklahoma, to protect people from the owners’ greed and cavalier handling of deadly plutonium.  She was only twenty-eight when she died.  Charles Horman, a free-lance journalist living in a foreign country, began to question the possibility that the American Government was illegally involved in Chile’s coup which resulted in the deaths of innocent citizens, including the country’s president, and the replacement of a democratic government with a dictatorship.  He was thirty-one at the time of his death.  But another thread that ties the two films together is misogyny.


Even though her friends and the audience accept Beth’s version of Charles’ disappearance as accurate, the men she turns to for help attempt to discredit her through tactics like harassment and criticism.  The police, for instance, demand that she answer the same questions repeatedly, and Ed’s powerful contacts in New York complain that she is causing problems by spreading rumors that her husband was arrested rather than simply hiding out.  Throughout the first half of the film, Ed shrugs off his daughter-in-law’s concerns even though she was an eyewitness to the coup; instead he implies that she and his son are anti-establishment radicals and elitist hypocrites.   In the end, however, Ed changes his opinion of Beth by recognizing her as a strong intelligent advocate for her husband. 


The movie Silkwood, likewise, shows Karen’s male counterparts as disrespectful toward her.  Seemingly adopting Kerr-McGee’s argument that Karen Silkwood was promiscuous, her character is slut-shamed throughout the film.  She is portrayed taking food from men’s lunches, flashing bare breasts, sitting in male co-worker’s laps, leading Dolly, who is a lesbian, on, and having an affair with Paul while in a relationship with Drew.   When Winston tries to come onto Dolly in his office, for example, Dolly’s automatic response is that he should try Karen, which he does repeatedly.  Karen is also portrayed as an inept mother, a girl who chose to take science classes in high school only because that’s where the boys were, and so unaware that plutonium is dangerous she never bothers to monitor herself for contamination.  This depiction of Karen as a loose ignorant woman might have been intended to emphasize the growth she experienced as a union representative and whistleblower, but since the movie didn’t really do much to rehabilitate her character, it primarily served to overshadow the real woman’s intelligence, bravery, and dedication to her cause.
  

Neither one of these movies is streaming right now, but both can be purchased online from places like Amazon or Best Buy.  If you want to learn more about either person there are books available.   Thomas Hauser’s The Execution of Charles Horman: An American Sacrifice and Missing: The Execution of Charles Horman are for sale on Amazon.  The Killing of Karen Silkwood: The Story Behind the Kerr-McGee Plutonium Case by Richard Rashke and Who Killed Karen Silkwood? by Howard Kohn can be found on Amazon, as well.   There are also some good articles on the net.  You can see my post on Missing for sources I consulted regarding Charles Horman’s case. For Silkwood, I not only accessed overviews in Wikipedia, but also referenced “The Nuclear-Safety Activist Whose Mysterious Death Inspired a Movie” by Jennifer Latson, November 13, 2014 on the Time Magazine website and  “Karen Silkwood: The Case of An Activist’s Death” by Howard Kohn, January 13, 1977 on the Rolling Stone website.  


That’s all for now.  I’ll be back in a couple of weeks to talk about another favorite movie, although I am not sure which one.  There are so many to choose from, it can be hard to decide.  In the meantime…enjoy a bunch of good flicks.