Silkwood

There are so many movies about whistle blowers because they’re the closest thing we have to real-life superheroes. They’re smart enough to see a problem, brave enough to do something about it, usually suffer for speaking out, and must have succeeded if their story’s interesting enough to make a movie about them.

Karen Silkwood, played by Meryl Streep, works at the only major employer in her small Oklahoma town, a factory making plutonium fuel rods for a nuclear power plant. We meet her at work, suited up in white with her arms inside a glove box, working with plutonium while chewing gum. When her boss comes around, she hides her gum, and after he leaves, she blows a bubble that pops all over her face and a coworker helps her scrape it off while her hands are stuck in the glove box. Even though they’re handling dangerous nuclear material, they’re casual about safety, resent their managers, and pass the time goofing off with each other.

Karen is extremely popular. In the lunchroom she goes from table to table, chatting with everyone. An older woman named Thelma has a daughter who’s dying from cancer, so she uses dark humor to cope: “Thank God I’ve got six others.” She also complains, “You know, they’re making my daughter die next to a colored person?” Later, Karen goes home to her boyfriend Drew, played by Kurt Russell, and their best friend and roommate Dolly, played by Cher. Karen and Drew sleep under a giant Confederate flag.

These people work shitty manual labor jobs for very little pay at a factory that mistreats them, forcing them to strike to get what they need. They have no power and no future, so they blame other people rather than their actual enemies, their bosses that exploit them. And they know they’re being taken advantage of. Karen’s boss falsely accuses her of causing a contamination issue so that she could get time off. When she complains about this, a coworker tells her, “Karen, the company’s gotta blame someone, otherwise it’s their fault.”

Later Karen sees Thelma being walked down the hallway, wrapped in plastic and crying hysterically. Thelma’s “cooked” after radiation exposure. Karen watches as Thelma’s roughly hosed down and scrubbed, leaving her wet and red in a towel, vulnerable without her glasses or wig on. Dropping her usual dark humor, Thelma cries to Karen, “Now I’m going to get cancer. I’m going to die. I know something about this, Karen.” Later, another coworker says Thelma getting cooked is her own fault because her mind hasn’t been on her work since her daughter got cancer. Not even poor Thelma gets any sympathy from these miserable factory workers.

Upset about Thelma, Karen picks a fight with her friend Dolly. Drew settles them down and darkly notes they’ll probably all get cancer anyway. He tells Karen if she’s worried about cancer, she should stop smoking. Karen smokes constantly. Drew drinks constantly. These are not healthy, happy people.

Working late, Karen is about to leave, so she waves her hand in front of the contamination detector and it blares an alarm. Now she’s the one getting roughly scrubbed down.

But Karen’s smarter than she looks. She tells Drew her mom wanted her to take home ec, but she jokes that she took science instead because that’s where the men were. She reads union material about plutonium and learns that, contrary to what the company has been saying, it really does cause cancer. She tells Dolly it causes genetic damage, “Meaning it goes down into your kids. Says here, ‘gross physical and mental defects.’” Dolly responds with more dark humor: “I already got them.”

Karen is transferred to a new department that makes fuel rods and then checks for defects in photographs of them. She asks her boss why he’s removing white spots from a negative, and he tells her that they’re just flaws in the photo, but she doesn’t believe him.

Karen decides to get involved with the union. She flies to D.C. to meet with atomic agency officials. She complains about their poor working conditions and shoddy safety, but they’re not interested until she mentions the potentially doctored photo of fuel rods. They tell her that this could cause a major meltdown and that it’s a “moral imperative” that she get proof.

Back home, Karen tells Drew all about it, but he’s just worried about people losing their jobs. She tells him it’s a “moral imperative,” but he says, “Don’t give me a problem I can’t solve.” They break up and he moves out, to Dolly’s dismay.

Karen and the union bring in a scientist to explain to the workers that they’ve been misled by the company, that the amount of plutonium they’ve been told is safe is actually 150,000 times too high. Thelma asks if you can get plutonium out of your lungs, and the scientist tells her the only way to do that would be to remove your lung. In spite of what they’re hearing, most of the workers are still more concerned about their jobs than their health.

Karen is frustrated and Dolly is upset that Drew moved out, so the two women have a vicious fight. But they quickly make up and hug and cry. Since they can’t solve their problems, they take their feelings out on each other.

At work, Karen chats with a woman whose husband has been working late and says that they’re coming up short on plutonium. Karen starts writing this down, and everyone around them leaves in disgust. The woman tells Karen to focus on raising their wages and not things that aren’t their business, shouting, “Karen, I like my job!” She used to be friends with everyone, and now everyone avoids her.

Dolly walks into Karen’s room one morning and is thrilled to see that Drew stayed the night. She jumps in bed with them and tries to convince him to move back in. Later, Karen walks into work and sets off the contamination alarm on the way in. She gets another scrub down and we watch as she gets high pressure water sprayed directly into her open eyes.

People from the company bring a geiger counter to Karen’s house and find radiation all over. They throw everything away, including her kids’ pictures, and peel off the wallpaper. Karen suspects that someone spiked her urine sample, which she accidentally spilled, contaminating the house. But when she’s told that she’s internally contaminated. She freaks out: “I’m contaminated. I’m dying.” She and Drew move into a new place and put up a brand new Confederate flag.

In spite of it all, Karen wants to go back to work so she can get proof for the D.C. officials. Drew tells her she doesn’t owe anyone anything, but she insists. After work and a union meeting, we see her driving at night when a car following close behind her blinds her in her rearview. Then we see that her car has crashed, killing her.

A postscript says her death was ruled an accident but that she had alcohol and tranquilizer in her system. A year later, the plant was shut down.

Karen Silkwood was a proud racist in a town full of them. But she tried to do a good thing, shaking off the apathy caused by living in a shitty town, working a shitty job, and never having enough money. Companies like hers have a business model based on exploiting their workers and pitting them against each other so that they resent each other instead of those in charge. Most companies do this; this one also just happened to put people in mortal danger, which is why it was shut down. The lesson of Silkwood is to join a union and fight for the workers because the companies are the real enemy.

VERDICT: NOT GUILTY