Monday, July 19, 2010
Silkwood (1983)
Saw this when I was twelve and thought it was the height of movie making. With fresh 40 year old eyes the movie seems a little full of itself and full of shit. Stars Meryl Streep as a nuclear plant whistle blower with Kurt Russell playing her mechanic boyfriend and a pre-veneers Cher as the dyke roommate. Director Mike Nichols lays on the white trash working class hero bullshit a little thick; there is a lot of smoking, beer drinking, and banjo playing. The film really strains to paint Karen Silkwood as a hero, who knows if she ever did anything? She really accomplishes nothing. There was no proof she had ANY evidence against the plant. It seemed the only thing she was good at was taking tranquilizers, showing up late for work, and getting plutonium contamination. When she's killed in a car crash, the movie portrays it as a deliberate act of murder by a mysterious motorist, no doubt working on behalf of the plant. But in the movie's postscript, it states that at the time of her death she had enough alcohol and tranquilizers in her system to sedate a moose. Umm, okay...what a dipshit.
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Think what you want about the movie, the actors, the director and the script but please get your facts right about Karen Silkwood the human being. Given what she did and saw and went through, I can’t blame her for needing some sedation to cope. She was far from a “dipshit” and as far as accomplishing anything, at least she had the courage to try and make a difference. And for the record, she had neither the alcohol nor the tranquilizers in her bloodstream to sedate any animal bigger than an average house-cat. Her blood alcohol levels were appropriate for someone that had shared a bottle of wine (on the plane back from the Nuclear testing facility in Los Alamos where she had gone with Drew and Sherri to have tests to determine her plutonium contamination levels) and had some celebratory cocktails before bed the day prior, and the Methaqualone in her bloodstream was on the low end of the therapeutic index. She was en route to meet the OCAW union representative and the reporter from the New York Times. I’d imagine that she’d have wanted to be very alert, fully present and absolutely tuned in for that meeting so common sense dictates that she wouldn’t have chosen to make herself chemically tranquilized an hour before that meeting.
ReplyDeleteDoing anything or not, the plant she worked at shut down shortly after her death; all the allegations and accusations that she had made against Kerr-McGee of poor quality control, workplace hazards and safety concerns were proven factual. I think she was very brave and I think that she did quite a lot, and I’m sorry that you don’t agree