Chapter thirty-five: Silkwood

I'm sort of going out of my planned order because I want to make sure that I do this film justice. Fall break gives me the time I need to do that. So, where to begin... Well, I guess it's best to start somehow; the beginning is best. Karen Silkwood (Meryl) is a hard-working, Texan woman living in Oklahoma City with her boyfriend Drew (Kurt Russel) and lesbian best friend Dolly (Cher.) All three of them spend their days working at a plutonium plant, and have to be extremely cautious beyond measure (ex. they have to monitor themselves after they exit a room, wear gloves to handle the chemicals, and so forth,) because their chances of radioactive exposure are so great whether it be external or, heaven forbid, internal. Exposure to the plutonium is not good either way, but internal contamination can lead to cancer and not be scrubbed off. The smallest levels of plutonium can kill you. This is all information that Karen, at the moment, has not been made aware of by lack of company compassion, but will soon bring to life and use against the company she works for to protect the lives of her fellow co-workers whether they see it that way or not.

Karen's advocacy first begins when an elderly friend of hers in the same department, Thelma, gets "cooked," or contaminated. Luckily, it is externally. Later that night on the way home, Karen sees the abolishment of a company truck happening nearby and tries to get a peek at what's going on, but is shooed away. She knows even then that something is odd. She spends the weekend with her kids, and when an outbreak at the plant occurs, people start a rumor that she caused it and left for the weekend. This already causes her to be out-sourced or shunned by some. It isn't too long after that when she herself is "cooked" and forcefully scrubbed with these wire brushes in the most unhygienic of showers - horrifically terrifying. I switched to baths for a while after watching it for the first time.

Karen begins to view herself differently and has a sort of revelation that I'm sure we've all had, myself included. The sort of "I was so careful I didn't think it could happen to me, but now it did," mentality. With it, Karen takes it upon herself to get involved with The Union in their upcoming election. Her newfound involvement and relentless dedication to uncover workforce secrets makes her quite the enemy of a lot of people who, for lack of a better phrase, start tearing her a new one. It's really unfortunate and sad to watch happen, because she's just trying to do the right thing by looking out for the well-being of workers at the company, but not everybody's on board. Drew has even separated from her because he can no longer take all that Karen's wrapped up in.

She's transferred from making the pellets to metallography with just one other person. She is told that her job is essentially to alter the negatives of fuel rods to make them appear non-defective, even though they are, by using a certain type of pen. The Union pounces on this information, and all she has to do is get documentation. Ultimately, this is what The Union is most interested in because it could seriously shut the entire plant down and be featured in The New York Times.

Karen starts her investigative hunt for the negatives inside the desk of a man who, I think is her supervisor, because he instructs her on how to develop the negatives, but alters the prints himself. He catches her, but Karen has an alibi. There are nasal capsules in his desk that she stores there to combat her allergies on account of the fact that the plant doesn't allow medication. This is important to understand, because he now has access to medication that Karen ingests internally. It's a moment that has a vital connection to a later scene, that I, in my naïveté could not piece together the first time around.

Co-workers start to notice that things they say in the break room that weren't intended for Karen to write down, she writes down anyway, and they're afraid it'll put them at risk for being fired. But at the same time, what they're saying is information that Karen needs to support malpractice claims against the company and such. What bites Karen perhaps the most at this point is the fact that she's "cooked" for a second time. It's external, fortunately.

Karen continues to go to work as usual, and Drew re-enters her life. By now, it's required of her that she submits a urine sample to the company daily. On the first day, it spills all over the bathroom floor, which later becomes another important detail, because when she goes to work that morning, she's contaminated before hardly entering the building. This means it's likely internal. Her house is raided and stripped of even its own paint. There are readings all over the bathroom and on everything she touched after her sample spilled, but Drew and Dolly have come up clean. At first, she thinks it's because her urine sample container has been spiked, but then she's informed that readings are also found on her nasal sprayer. She's internally contaminated, and her boss is rather giddy because he thinks she did this to herself and this is his opportunity to help and better the image of the company. When asked for a statement, she says,

"I'm contaminated. I'm dying."

Later, Karen, Drew, and Dolly all travel to doctors in Los Alamos. Dolly and Drew haven't been exposed, and Karen is well below the maximum occupational rate. So, she continues with her work in The Union and has planned a meeting with a New York Times reporter- a meeting that she never makes it to, because of a fatal car crash on the night of November 13th, 1974. One year after her death, the Kerr-McGee Plant was shut down.

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If, like me the first time, you don't quite yet see the connection or the company's involvement, and you're under the impression that Karen herself may be at fault, I'll offer up my personal theory as to what I think happened to her, which I have hypothesized with the help of my dad: So, her metallography supervisor, whose name was Winston, saw that Karen's pills were now in his desk. I think he spiked those pills, and the effects were then transmitted to her nasal sprayer at home when she used it, or somebody also spiked the sprayer itself, and the combined impacts of both inhaled and ingested plutonium contaminated her. It wasn't caused by any form of negligence on her end, nor was anything wrong with the pills when her doctor first prescribed them to her. When Winston realized that the plutonium wasn't enough to kill her and she was fighting it, someone ran her off the side of the road. It wasn't just a coincidental accident with a drunk driver like I first thought, because Karen is said to have had papers with her in the backseat of her car from her last Union meeting that were missing upon her discovery. It's no secret that she was murdered and someone was out to get her before she got the The New York Times.

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I love this movie. I did have to rewatch it with my dad in order to grasp the plot as I have mentioned, but I appreciate it more now. It's the story of a woman trying to tell the truth, but is indirectly damned for it. That's the mastermind thinking of Nora Ephron. What's so odd though is that even with a director like her, a cast like Meryl, and an in-depth, true story like Karen's, I still couldn't find this film anywhere except Youtube. And even then, the quality wasn't very good. I am led to believe that because of the film's controversy it's almost been hidden away from society, as if years after Karen's discoveries, people are still trying to shun her in a way. I don't know; I've made this entry longer than I wanted to, so maybe I'm getting ahead of myself.

As always, thank you for the entertainment, Meryl.