Silkwood (1983)
It is rare that a Hollywood director of Mike Nichols’ stature should remain silent for more than eight years, as Nichols did between 1975, the year in which he released The Fortune, and 1983, when Silkwood appeared. It is rarer still that the silence is not the concentration of an artist upon some grand project that requires a longer gestation. Nichols had proven himself to be a quite dependable and efficient filmmaker, delivering six films in nine years—a steady rate of production that would cheer any executive producer. While Nichols was away, he was hardly inactive—just not making films. “‘Of course, I’ve had slumps in my work,” he says, “but at the time, I just couldn’t find a movie I wanted to do.’”1 Nichols worked with Neil Simon on a script called Bogart Slept Here and actually commenced a first week of shooting with Robert De Niro in the lead, but he and Warner Bros. mutually agreed to pull the plug, and Simon later revised the script into The Goodbye Girl. Nichols re-grounded himself in Broadway, directing George C. Scott in Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, debuting David Rabe’s Vietnam drama Streamers (later adapted for the screen by Robert Altman), and making a mint as a producer of the blockbuster musical, Annie. He also dabbled in television production (ABC’s drama Family) and made a feature-length film recording of Gilda Radner’s live stage show, released in 1980. While he was away, however, Hollywood changed irrevocably. The Fortune was released the same year that Steven Spielberg made his first fortune, with Jaws; Spielberg’s friend George Lucas inadvertently introduced a new corporate franchise model two years later with Star Wars (1977), and Hollywood has been unrepentantly chasing the big blockbusters ever since. His accidental mega-success with The Graduate notwithstanding, Nichols is not a blockbuster director. His themes are too relentlessly “adult,” his characters talk a great deal (except when, thematically, they don’t), and “action” in the Hollywood-generic sense is something that often takes place off-screen, when it takes place at all. During Nichols’ eight-year hiatus from Hollywood, the concept of the A-list director shifted in meaningful ways. He was an A-list director before his hiatus, and he was again after, but by then there was an A-plus list for the likes of Spielberg and Lucas (and later filmmakers like Robert Zemeckis and James Cameron). Nichols took his post-Graduate cache and moved temporarily to Mexico to film a literary phenomenon. More than his eight years away in the late 1970s and early 1980s, his year away on location south of the border, making a film no one could warm to, shifted Nichols’ place in Hollywood.
Silkwood serves as an apt transition from Nichols’ first phase to the much longer, entrenched second phase. Silkwood is as much a chamber drama as Carnal Knowledge or Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Most of Silkwood’s drama unfolds in a shotgun house in Oklahoma and a couple of rooms of a nuclear production facility. Silkwood is about the evolution of its title character. Leonard Quart and Albert Auster argue “the film spends more time, using long takes and medium two-shots, to capture atmospheric detail—the clutter of her collapsing house—and realistically limn her difficult relationships […] than in conveying the machinations of the nuclear power industry.”2
Silkwood is a major film by a different filmmaker than the celebrity auteur of 1960s Hollywood. While the great films of Nichols’ first phase as a director, from Virginia Woolf through Carnal Knowledge, are “idea” films, making grand statements about the culture, Silkwood introduces a filmmaker intent upon character, in which the particular ills or flaws in the culture recede from subject to setting. Silkwood’s story happens to take place within the world of nuclear power administration and accountability. Yet it is not an “idea” film, about the ethics of nuclear power, as The Graduate, for instance, was an “idea” film about what Lyndon Johnson called, in his “Great Society” speech, “soulless wealth,” and as Catch-22 was an “idea” film about the commodification of the enlisted man within the military-industrial complex. Nichols returned to filmmaking after losing his way by reinventing himself based on the insights he’d had about himself as an artist while making Catch-22. All the grand, sweeping statements about the Generation Gap (The Graduate) and The War (Catch-22) and the Sexual Revolution (Carnal Knowledge) and Governmental Abuses of Power (The Day of the Dolphin) that precede Silkwood in Nichols’ oeuvre would suggest that a film chronicling the life and times of a nuclear-power industry whistle blower would be a referendum on the dangers of nuclear energy. Lee Hill writes, “Although Silkwood was an ostensibly ’60s film dealing with corporate corruption, political activism, class and gender, the film was, at its core, a character study about a woman and her friendships.”3 Nora Ephron and Alice Arlen’s screenplay conveys a cautionary sobriety about this enormous issue, yet (as is typical of Ephron’s work in the first of two consecutive collaborations with Nichols as she moved towards directing her own films) the narrative focus is centered upon the personal, with whatever political resonances emerging as a consequence of this focus. Silkwood’s focus is on the title character, Karen Silkwood (Meryl Streep, in the first of her four collaborations with Nichols) awakening slowly to her reified status as a human resource of the nuclear-power industry, a resource capable of absorbing “permissible” amounts of radioactive contagion per industry regulations. “‘As I began to talk to Nora and Alice about it,’” says Nichols, “‘I got interested in it being about an awakening and discovered that it was my own awakening [as an artist]’”4
The film’s subject is not about firmer nuclear regulation but feminist empowerment. Although a significantly better and more substantial film than Nichols’ next release, Heartburn (1986), which was also a collaboration with Ephron and Streep, Silkwood is nonetheless in important ways the same film: the narrative of a callow woman’s dawning recognition that the world rewards callowness and disavows the assertion of personal and political responsibility. What makes the difference between the two films is ultimately tonal: Silkwood takes the extra time to know all its main characters as more than mere types, embracing the languorous Okie pace in the long takes and slow burbling of the banjo over Georges Delerue’s orchestral score. Nichols was so committed to the storytelling formula he embarked upon in his second career phase with Silkwood that he moved from Heartburn to other films—Biloxi Blues (1988), Working Girl (1988), Regarding Henry (1991), The Birdcage (1996), and Primary Colors (1998)—that feature characters wrestling with reified awareness and the difficult choices that result either in characters’ numbed conformity or reactive transformation.
Karen Silkwood’s story takes a different form than any of Nichols’ previous films, because it has a definitive biographical arc, up to and including her suspicious death.5 Benjamin and Elaine are objects of ironic incredulity at the end of The Graduate, in a different key than Freddie and the boys as The Fortune closes; George and Martha in Virginia Woolf carry themselves with chastened, tragic dignity as they confront their disillusionment, while Jake Terrell sits with Maggie in exiled shame at the end of Dolphin, knowing he should have listened to her. Jonathan in Carnal Knowledge festers in a hell of reflexive self-defense; Yossarian is a holy fool, beating a retreat from the absurdity of convention. In the context of the growing spectrum of Nichols’ characters and their responses to reified reality, Karen Silkwood is Nichols’ first martyred saint of enlightenment. Maggie Terrell is a harbinger of this new kind of Nichols character, the humble vessel of moral authority whom the other characters ignore at everyone’s peril, including their own. What vests Karen with authority for an anti-authoritarian visionary like Nichols is how relatively little of the time Karen spends in certitude about the authority the film confers upon her (beginning with its title). “It is that complexity,” writes Tom Doherty, “the refusal to hew to a party line, that makes Silkwood stand apart from so many ideologically correct, emotionally dry films.”6 Karen remains the prey of reifying impulses throughout the film, fishing for commodifying sexual reassurances of her value from nearly every man with whom she has meaningful contact, even as she frequently discounts or ignores the frustrated sexual longing of her friend and housemate Dolly (Cher, in an Oscar-nominated performance). In narrative terms, Karen’s politicized disappearance affords her an eloquence and nobility she could never have consistently sustained in additional decades of life (had she lived that long with her “internal contagion”).
Silkwood thus shares an essential narrative shape with Catch-22: the common person at war—direct, logical odds—with the prevailing culture. But while Catch-22 delivers its narrative via surrealistic, slapstick farce, Silkwood presents a strange and affecting hybrid of gentle, even lyrical realism (in its domestic sub-plots) juxtaposed to a thriller formula (in its evocation of Karen’s growing understanding of the Kerr McGee operation and her fact-finding about the nuclear-power industry). Nichols as a filmmaker in his first phase did not present his films in a realist’s style. Taking expressionist cues from the suburban-campus “exorcism” at the climax of Edward Albee’s great play, Nichols launched a vernacular with roots in the comic lampooning used by traditional Hollywood comedy and the art-house formalism of European masters like Bergman, Fellini, and Antonioni: each tradition was in its own way a stylized response to and fun-house reflection of reality. In his first phase, Nichols could accurately be called a Hollywood Expressionist, in the tradition of such eminences as Preston Sturges and especially Billy Wilder, two social satirists working in the heart of Hollywood in consecutive eras. Neither Sturges nor Wilder made films like Silkwood—earnest, even pious character study. Nor did Nichols himself turn exclusively to such films—but the shift away from formal expressionism and the assertion of a clearer, less ambiguous moral resolution in some of his films would provide a contrast to the murky dystopian sensibility of the early films, in which heroes are hard to find and even harder to hold on to.
* * *
The pastoral opening image of Silkwood belongs to a different film than the one that ensues, which is the point: in its long, slow duration before we eventually meet the film’s main characters, the opening (with Georges Delerue’s soundtrack score) conveys a melancholic elegy for America’s agrarian past. This is Oklahoma, but it could be Kansas, or Missouri, or Iowa, or Indiana, or Ohio. In its unassuming way, it’s an image that might recall other solitary houses in American iconography: the isolated Victorian farmhouses in Hopper or Wyeth canvases, the Clutter house on the Kansas prairie in Richard Brooks’ In Cold Blood (1967) or the solitary mansions in George Stevens’ Giant (1956) or Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven (1978). Yet this house is less gothic in its isolation than merely modest, a house that once overlooked a farm but no longer does. Three industrial migrant workers live here, their roots as tenuous as their profession—they assist in the production of nuclear energy. The view is from down a road very much like the one we see Karen Silkwood travel in the film’s final shot, the view in her rear-view mirror, as it were: a suitable coda on a narrative and a way of life. This bucolic vista is a romantic illusion, a nostalgic evocation of a time when individuals might negotiate a life on their own terms in relationship to the natural world, small prairie communities of such individuals knitting themselves together with crops and livestock and family Bibles. The people who live in this house now and in other such houses along these rural routes come across the miles to the same destination, the true civic center of their economic well being, and in the sequence of shots from which that first pastoral image proceeds, we travel that route in company with a humble economy car that ultimately reaches its destination when it turns in at the drive marked by the “Kerr McGee Corporation’s CIMARRON FACILITY Nuclear Division” sign. The first three words are relatively small on the sign, the final two relatively microscopic. What the sign celebrates is its greater locality, and thus the neighbors it welcomes to work every day. It is window-dressing against the reality of what its neighbors—the workforce of the Kerr McGee plant—encounter. They have been encouraged by Kerr McGee to take their lives in their hands for the good of their own household solvency and the economic future of their hometown.
When we first meet her, Karen Silkwood is hardly an admirable subject. Hoping to find someone to take an approaching weekend shift to free her for a trip to see her children in the neighboring state of Texas, she whines at and cajoles her co-workers to take her shift. There is an easy camaraderie she hopes to exploit—salt-of-the-earth types she buzzes among in the workroom and lunchroom without settling anywhere for long. We overhear flirtations, gossip, and, as a kind of sub-conscious reflection of their unspoken professional uneasiness, their shared discussions of bodily distresses, ailments, and oddities. We learn that, in Karen’s workroom, they mix uranium and plutonium by hand in the “proper ratios,” sifting for “impurities.” We watch in horror as Karen, blowing bubble gum, has to call on Wesley (David Straithairn) to peel the gum off her face with a hand he’s just removed from a secured glove; he pops part of the gum into her mouth, the rest (to general merriment) into his own, casual and unconcerned with shared contagions; the risks of what they are doing are purely abstract to most of them. We meet Thelma, a middle-aged woman wearing a very obvious wig, who worries that her daughter will have a cancer relapse. Her daughter is likely Karen’s age. At lunch, we see that Karen is “with” Drew (as much as she’s with anyone), and overhear his conversation about a “contaminated truck.” While the others lament that the truck’s operators “didn’t monitor” for radiation exposure, Karen can only bemoan her own inconvenience about not finding a substitute for the weekend shift.
Karen in the film’s opening scenes is as self-interested and myopic as the industry that employs her. When a safety drill ensues, reminding them to review protocols for emergencies, the company overrides the standard precaution, and Morgan (Fred Ward) muses, “Can’t do the drill—might stop production for ten minutes.” No one seems terribly perturbed at this cavalier approach the facility takes to its human resources, but Karen’s solipsism is grotesquely distended: she’s in tears with the frustration that the alarm has not signaled a genuine contamination. “If it had been the real thing,” she moans, “they woulda shut down the plant. I coulda had the whole weekend.” Karen’s bind is economic, but in her defense, she has learned to sell herself wholesale because of Kerr McGee’s methods. If Karen simply asks for a weekend off, she will be interpreted as having lost interest in her employment and will therefore be replaced by another prospective worker lined up for the next available job. In the limited options of a grateful local economy, Kerr McGee has assumed an enormous and spiritually devastating measure of control over the formation of individual identity. Needing jobs to live, the workers at Kerr McGee refuse to look at the prospects they face in juggling uranium and plutonium full-time. Silkwood presents a rural America in which people are dying for work.
Karen manages to extract from her friend Gilda a promise to take her shift; later that night, she comes out of the plant to her car but, distracted by noise and light at the other end of the parking lot, peers through chain-link fencing at a tractor-trailer being chopped down into parts. She appears to make no connection to what she’d overheard her own boyfriend discussing with friends that day. Making innocuous inquiry, she’s shooed by a man on the other side of the fence, and she moves docilely away. There is no anxiety in Karen, no sense that she has been manipulated by socio-economic circumstance into her current bind. She seems unable to think causally about anything further removed in future time than “the weekend”—she can sense no irony, for instance, in lighting a long succession of cigarettes throughout her days, and certainly senses no irony in her vain “hope” to see the facility’s work stopped by radiation poisoning. Her self-interest is nearly total, but her self-value all but non-existent.
The trip to see her children intensifies this portrait of Karen, but it also clarifies the quality of comradeship she shares with Drew and Dolly, both of whom are, in their own ways, more admirable than Karen as the narrative begins and thus, as we warm to the narrative through them, reflect well on Karen herself. They care for her more than she seems to care for herself—there must be something more to Karen than we have yet seen. Even among the powerless, Karen is particularly disenfranchised: arriving at her common-law ex-husband’s house in Texas, she finds that he has made alternate plans for the children and she can only take them to lunch. The rainy drive back to Oklahoma introduces the easy camaraderie of their threesome: Drew pensively plucking at the banjo Delerue has woven into the soundtrack, Dolly quietly faithful in the back seat, and Karen singing “Amazing Grace” as a group lullaby. Nichols revisits Karen’s plaintive rendition at film’s end. The encore would have resonance enough simply by virtue of its placement (and Streep’s performance), yet we’re further cued to its significance as testimonial by a variation in its end lines: “was blind, but now I see,” the more familiar John Newton lyric, appears as usual, but then is replaced by “was bound, but now I’m free.” In the context of the ruined trip to Texas, the variation is an unintentional critique of her haplessness as a mother. In self-pitying effusion, she says of her children: “I had ‘em in the car. I could just’ve headed straight for Oklahoma.” Drew’s response is not so much cruel as clear-headed: “What would you have done with ‘em?” In fact, the children probably are better off in the hands of Linda (Tess Harper), who seems to have more compassion for the kids and Karen than Karen herself. Karen has no innate instinct for responsibility (it is the basis of her transformation in the film). The best she can muster is a suspicion that she ought, as an adult, to possess such an instinct.
The way Karen adopts an air of caring for Thelma suggests her first halting attempts at trying on responsibility. Of all the people with whom Karen works, Thelma with her aggressively unfashionable eyeglasses and ungainly wigs and plaintive, rasping voice of woe is a kind of signifier for the life they’re all leading—or, more aptly, where life is leading them. Karen’s concern remains an abstraction until the day Thelma is “cooked” and given a thorough scouring to eliminate her external contamination by radiation, yet Karen’s only wisdom is to tell Thelma, “Honey, try not to cry—salt’s gonna make it worse.” Karen comes home after Thelma’s ordeal and takes her latent fear and frustration out on Dolly and Drew: suddenly the careless, frat-house squalor of ripening leftovers in the refrigerator and scattered marijuana seeds on the table feels to her like a creeping contagion, and the c-word escapes into open air: “If anybody around here’s going to get cancer, we’re all gonna get cancer.” For the first time, Karen has broached the unspoken subject of the danger they all confront each day, but Drew, albeit gently, provides her his typical reality check: You just waking up to this? What do you think we’re working with over there, puffed wheat?” Like a scolded child, she mutters, “I was just asking a question,” and Drew rejoins, “If you’re really worried about it, stop smoking.”
At this point in the narrative, Drew is awake to the reality of their lives in ways Karen will apprehend only in stages, yet Drew’s vision will prove far more limited than Karen’s. He can’t think beyond the union of Karen and Drew. (His Confederate flag flown large above the bed is an indirect comment on his position regarding larger Unions, of which he wants no part.) Meanwhile, Karen comes to believe in a Union that encompasses the welfare of all. This includes the unfortunate likes of Thelma, but Karen’s “Union” unconsciously took in its very first member when Karen adopted Dolly, whose sexual orientation would make her a pariah in small-town America (and even a figure of patronizing fun to Drew and Karen, who genuinely love Dolly, when Dolly brings Angela back to the house for the first time and Drew and Karen can hear faintly through the walls the sounds of their lovemaking). In the scene where Karen and Drew sit on the porch step and Drew chides Karen’s uncritical perspective on the health risks of her job and smoking habit, Nichols makes sure we see Dolly as odd woman out when Drew and Karen retire to their sexual consolations. Dolly remains in moody isolation, and when Karen apologizes for the previous night’s churlishness about Dolly’s refrigerated mystery leftovers, the two women engage in an emotional tug-of-war (made tangible by the belt of Karen’s bathrobe) over the gulf in their affections. If we’d had any doubts, the scene dispels them: Dolly has long carried an unrequited torch for Karen, and while Karen could be accused of leading Dolly on (and her immature craving for attention is probably one small subconscious reason to keep Dolly around), the scene ultimately plays out as Karen’s unwillingness to discard Dolly simply because they are fundamentally unalike. What Karen can return are Dolly’s loyal feelings; in their own way, they exchange avowals of love that not even Drew full comprehends. Dolly’s and Drew’s love for Karen does her credit, but Karen’s love for them does her good. Her kindness to Dolly offers seeds for future redemptive transformation.
The discussion with Drew—his reference to her “waking up,” in particular—cues a new Karen at work. She chides herself for not remembering the importance of a nasal smear for Thelma, and loudly reminds Thelma in the Kerr McGee parking lot to insist upon this examination. Hurley approaches when Karen, with unintentionally comic timing, intones her paranoid’s warning, “there’s a lot of liars around here.” Yet Karen remains childishly careless at work. Nichols and O’Steen cut to a shot of a birthday cake for Gilda, displayed on a rolling waste barrel labeled, “Contaminated Material.” Hurley chides them less for breaching the workroom with food (that’s on them to protect themselves) than for stealing company time on a project three months and a million dollars behind schedule, and in their haste to get back to work, cake spills on the floor. Hurley orders them to clean up after shift, but Karen impetuously picks up a hunk and stuffs it into Gilda’s mouth. It’s during the post-shift cleanup that Karen gets to experience the intensity of contamination and its scouring aftermath, initiating both her and us into the gravity of the plant. Casually, almost flippantly waving her limbs before the monitors, she sets off the alarms, and then curls herself tightly against the wall to await the cleanup crew and its total violation.
An ironic contrast emerges in the film between the treatment of nudity on Karen’s own terms and on company terms. With Drew in her own bedroom, Karen is comfortable in her own skin (abetted by Drew’s adoration). Yet Karen is aware of her objecthood beyond the intimate poses she strikes for Drew. Enraged by the facility-wide assumption that she deliberately contaminated the plant to get out of work (an unjustified charge on its face since she’d wheedled Gilda into substituting for her), Karen storms through the plant to find Drew and complain. She finds him in a room crawling with men, including Quincy Bissell (Henderson Forsythe), head of the fledgling Union initiative at the plant; Curtis (J. C. Quinn), Gilda’s overbearing husband; and Zachary (Norm Colvin). Karen stands out in this workroom not only because of her righteous agitation but also by gender. Zachary’s undisguised ogling adds to Karen’s agitation as she vents her frustration at Drew, with Quincy on a raised platform a story over her head. Drew and Quincy good-naturedly peer down at Karen, ribbing her, and Quincy takes the opportunity to interject traditional Union rhetoric: “The company’s gotta blame somebody—otherwise it’s their fault.” The camera angles—up on Drew and Quincy and down on Karen—reinforce her undeserving victimhood and imply the gendered assumptions of their social environment. With an eyeline shot reestablished on her, Karen targets Zachary: “What’re you lookin’ at, Zachary?” She minces around him, posing, then flashes him by tearing open her coverall to expose a breast. “Get lost, okay?” she says, and Zachary flees. “Hey, Karen,” Quincy deadpans, “you ever thought about going into politics?”
The gesture reveals Karen’s awareness of a socially derived power she may access at will (and at peril for her self-worth). Her objectification as a vessel of desire is something she uses at various times in the film—to cast a spell on Winston (Craig T. Nelson), to be noticed by Paul Stone (Ron Silver)—but it is, of course, a fleeting power that will erode as swiftly as her physical youth and beauty. In this particular case, it is power wielded expressly in a moment of powerlessness—a cynical reduction of her person to manipulative weapon for punishing someone even more vulnerable at that moment than herself: dim-witted, idly lusting Zachary. The introduction of nudity as another strategy in the filmmaker’s rhetorical toolkit of options also indicates the substantial ways Hollywood had changed since Nichols began making films. Perhaps, during their bitter “conversation” at the Taft Hotel, Benjamin and Mrs. Robinson’s brief exposure of one another’s vulnerabilities might have been most accurately represented by physically exposing the actors; 1967 standards of practice instead mandated that their emotional exposure be depicted using measured camera placement and framing, judicious cutting, and a thin bed sheet. Certainly when Mrs. Robinson forbids Benjamin to see Elaine and he rips the sheet out of her hands and down to the foot of the bed, this moment of exposure would have found an apt analogy in the shock of Anne Bancroft’s nudity. Karen’s willful self-exposure in a workroom full of men signals both her complicit objecthood and her awareness of (and submerged rage at) her objectification—two vital conditions of reification—she has yet fully to grasp. By the end of the film, she has awakened to reification’s insight, and this moment of self-exposed exploitation with Zachary is echoed in the film’s closing scene, when Karen, defiantly headed (against Drew’s stated will) to her interview with the New York Times reporter, “flashes” Drew not skin but a reminder of that earlier exposure. She is simultaneously playful with her lover and purposeful in referencing a former self; she references who she was and who she is from a self-aware position of redeemed identity and faith in individual agency. The first gesture, an act of aggression aimed at Zachary but intended for hegemony, reveals nothing but an awareness that manipulation is our common currency, and she will trade on her own sexual desirability as the only capital she has. The second gesture reveals much more: the tenderness she feels about the secret history she and Drew share, her awareness of who she once was (someone who could prey upon a sorry little man like Zachary as payback for her own victimhood), an acknowledgement of the more meaningful exposures she’s since come to embrace as a part of her responsibility.
Ephron and Arlen cleverly use Quincy’s wisecrack about politics to foreshadow this last and most meaningful dimension of the recapitulated gesture—her acknowledgement of her politicized consciousness about and obligation to the truth of her experience. Karen has, of course, never considered politics for a moment (and if she had, would have assumed it was a right of patriarchy not open to her), but she is on her way to being politicized by her experience. Until now, that experience has been abstract: an uncomprehending glimpse of a “hot” truck being buried, a distant, pitying glimpse through glass of Thelma’s old body being scraped clean of its contamination. It is significant that, while Thelma’s body is exposed to the camera’s eye, Karen’s body in the showers is not. The violation is expressed instead via the shriek of the alarm and the close-up of her face pressed against the streaming tiled wall. We are not afforded a clinical medium shot of Karen, as Karen (and thus we) saw Thelma. The violation is immediate, total, personal. Delerue’s score, necessarily rendered beneath the insistent rhythm of the alarm, is merely a handful of chords, played by low strings, and they resolve at the end of the shower scene in the eerily reminiscent manner of Bernard Herrmann’s bass strings at the end of the most famous (and harrowing) of all shower scenes in film history, when Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) is hacked to death by “Mother” in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960). The tight close-up of Karen’s face against the tile, enduring the assault, is another near-quote from the Hitchcock classic. While in Psycho the symbolism of “cleansing” fails to provide any solace against the random eruption of madness, the madness in Silkwood is anything but random: needy communities clamor for the privilege of endangering themselves in plants like Kerr McGee. Marion’s “cleansing” produces the opposite effect: she’s nothing but waste when the shower is done, her lifeblood swirling down the drain, her remains fit only to be slid into the swamp. But Karen’s “cleansing” is more ambiguous. She is pronounced “clean” at its end, but she becomes increasingly skeptical about whether such regimens have any effect when countering devastating nuclear potency. The industry has scoured her into experience. If there is indisputable cleansing in this scene (and the two other, equally painful assaults she endures in the Kerr McGee showers), it is the scouring of illusion from her mind about whether the work they are performing is dangerous and whether those who administer the industry are to be trusted—or even whether they are competent. “I’m supposed to pee in it at home,” she says, summarizing the company physician’s instructions about the weekly urinalysis kits she’s being handed. The kits will monitor whether she has internal contamination, but if a test yields a positive result, having conducted the test at home will confirm that she has spread the contagion beyond the “secure” boundaries of the facility.
Yet Ephron and Arlen’s screenplay takes pains to remind us of the socio-economic bind of these rural Oklahomans dependent upon the “largesse” of the company to sustain these compromised homes they’ve made on the poor prairie. At home after her first ordeal in the Kerr McGee showers, we glimpse Karen after a very different kind of shower, daubing herself with lotions to heal the abrasions to her skin. She’s talking with Drew, and the subject is reduced opportunity, the only kind they’ve ever known. “I wish I could take better care of you,” he says. The comment reflects his reified assumptions of his role as the patriarchal master, compromised by economic vicissitudes. Karen reminisces about her mother’s having urged home-economics classes upon her to “meet some nice boy,” to package herself for social consumption as a marriageable commodity. But Karen says she defied her mother to take “science,” although her motive was far from intellectual advancement (with its consequent hope of social advancement). She simply had a more practical understanding of where the boys are, a more practical approach to marketing herself. The feminist vision of Karen Silkwood’s story as rendered by Nichols comes in the immediately succeeding sequence of scenes, in which Karen becomes politicized: reviewing Union handouts, asking questions at her new facility posting in the metallography workroom (using her flirtations with Winston not to build status or esteem but to gather information), and volunteering at the next Union meeting. Drew wishes he could take better care of her, but this is, first and foremost, Karen’s own responsibility, and she has begun to assume it.
Karen Silkwood (Meryl Streep, in the first of her four Nichols films) passes through radiation sensors at the front door of the Kerr McGee nuclear production plant. Karen has set off the detectors before, upon exit, and been subjected to a corrosive “cleaning” regimen; now she is stopped on her way in, carrying toxins that endanger the industry. The detection and cleaning scenes in Silkwood use visual and sonic tropes from horror, particularly Psycho (Hitchcock, 1960) to underscore Karen’s victimhood—which she manages to transcend via reified “awakening” (as Nichols calls it) about herself and her world.
Ephron and Arlen introduce a sub-plot nearly an hour into the film involving Angela, the mortuary beautician Dolly brings into their shared home and into her bed. The sub-plot offers the filmmakers an opportunity to explore Karen’s (and Drew’s) tolerance while at the same time giving Angela an outspoken outsider’s perspective on the predicament of Kerr McGee employees. “Karen, you ever been downtown?” she says, while practicing her trade on Dolly’s face, covering Cher’s olive complexion in a deathly pallor. “There are two big streets. One’s called Kerr, and one’s called McGee, and that’s how I see it. They own the state, they own everybody in this state, and they own practically everybody I work on.” It’s as bald a statement of the reified system of socio-economic determinism as the film will allow any of its characters, who typically are less verbal, and terrified to utter the truth. An awkward comic moment ensues when Drew, having had a mini-tantrum about Karen’s increasing activism, describes Angela’s make-up job on Dolly as making her look like a “corpse,” then learns that Angela works for Thayer’s Funeral Home. “You know, Drew,” she says, “I can always tell when a dead person I beautify worked for Kerr McGee, because they all look like they died before they died.” The comment seems to have little effect on its intended target, but it weighs on Karen, and she says so. It’s Drew’s worst moment in the film; even when he leaves Karen later, his motive is at least partially to leave behind their dangerous work environment. But his other motive, and the only force driving his actions in the current moment, is his profound sense of threat at Karen’s awakening to political responsibility. He reduces himself to what he almost never is elsewhere in the film: a thick-headed redneck lout. Bare-chested and covered in car grease, standing at the refrigerator drinking the last beer, he hears Karen shifting gears into her newly familiar activist’s mode and pours the remainder of the can over his head. As twin rhetorical flourishes, he tosses the can casually into a corner of the room and exits with a resonant belch. It is a self-consciously artificial performance that degrades both performer and audience. Silkwood follows this scene with another that taps their objectified gender stereotypes. This time, Drew is out in the yard chopping wood, while Karen tries to make him see how “important” it is that she chooses the proper clothes for her first Union trip to Washington. He remains steadfastly dismissive, and Karen is reduced to accepting Angela’s fashion advice.
The meeting Karen, Morgan, and Quincy have with Stone and Richter (Josef Sommer) in Washington is strictly pro forma until Karen takes the two Union organizers aside and tells them about Winston’s doctored negatives in metallography. Nichols and his Director of Photography, Miroslav Ondricek, shoot the scene with Karen off-screen, tucked into an office while Stone and Richter stand together in the doorway. Her voice is timid, her manner hesitant, but as Richter asks the question, “Can you get documentation?” Nichols cuts to a close-up of Karen, followed by reverse shots of the two men: she’s come into focus in the scene, suddenly worthy of the men’s attention. Richter’s talk of an interview with the New York Times and increased Union leverage in contract talks with the plant makes Karen even squirmier, and Richter increases the rhetoric: “The point is that if you’re right, they could kill off two million people” as a result of knowingly producing defective fuel rods for breeder reactors and tampering with the evidence in metallography. Nichols and O’Steen cut back to Karen in appropriately startled close-up as Richter concludes, “It’s a moral imperative involved here.” Karen and Stone return to his office, where Morgan and Quincy are delighted to be watching the superficial pageantry of Washington as it parades by the window. Stone’s matter-of-fact summation that he will “go over your statements for the AEC meeting and then, later, you and I will go over yours” registers as a concealment of motives: Karen has become Stone’s political and sexual object. The final cut of the sequence is over Stone’s shoulder, as Karen meets his gaze, shifts her eyes anxiously to the two Union brethren she’s just upstaged via feminine wiles, then smiles in demure satisfaction. She has just packaged herself to a better class of man. Silkwood’s ironic point of view leaves us in no doubt about the continued transactional commodification of her encounters with men. The film is exactly at its midpoint, and its titular character, although she has learned a great deal, still has much left to learn about her complicity in her objecthood.
For Quincy, “head of the Union” at Kerr McGee, the journey to Washington is the stuff of after-dinner slide shows, in which store-bought slides of landmarks (including a blindingly snowbound Capitol Hill) are interchangeable with slides of their own visit, posing before monuments and on their hotel’s steps. (Earlier, we’d even seen him snap a photo of their flight attendant as she served their lunch on the plane.) And so the “harmless” photo of Karen and Paul Stone, in a night shot arm in arm outside the hotel looking elegant, relaxed, and comfortably intimate, is merely another in the long log of their days, though Drew, seated with Karen in the dark, reads the photo’s subtext instantly and withdraws his arm from around her. Actually, we learn soon enough that Drew has withdrawn even further: he’s resigned from Kerr McGee. In the car, traveling home from Quincy’s, Karen parrots Richter’s line in countering Drew’s concern about people losing jobs: “There’s a moral imperative here.” She used to belong to the company (and to Drew); now she’s a “stand-up girl” (Richter’s celebratory but condescending phrase) who belongs to the Union (and to Paul Stone). Her using Richter’s phrase is a studied performance of rhetoric, not yet a hard-won demonstration of conviction. Drew isn’t fooled by it. He gives her the option to “quit and come away with me.” While Karen’s contention that she “can’t quit now” is complicated by her mixed motivations, there is nonetheless little of the callow Karen left, whining her wish for a convenient plant contamination to ease her life. They part with the understanding that Drew wants no part of “a problem I can’t solve,” a polar opposition to Karen’s naïve faith that she can be a part of a solution (and have an important Washington boyfriend, too). The next morning, his things moved out, Karen attempts one last tug at his heartstrings, and he says, “Sweetheart, it’s like you’re two people. I’m in love with one of them, but the other one’s …” It’s fitting that he can’t quite bring himself to finish the sentence, since Karen is in transition—he only knows one of her identities, as the simple, needy mess of a woman to whom he’s become attached. The new Karen finishes the sentence he’s too loving and confused to complete himself: “… a big old pain in the ass.” Paul Stone’s desirability may be an undercurrent of her attraction to her new life; she’d choose Drew and activism if they hadn’t been made mutually exclusive philosophical positions. Karen is the woman Drew loves, but now she’s something more. She has come to understand herself as “not simply aimed at changing company policy, but also motivated by an unstated desire to realize a greater sense of self.”7 The challenge of the short remainder of her life is for her (and Drew, as it turns out) to determine what, exactly, she has added to her identity.
So begins Karen’s short, unhappy career as a Union operative. The cut to a disorienting close-up of a woman rooting through a drawer clarifies the consequences of her choice. This is the “other” Karen, the one who steals damning evidence and then, when caught, self-righteously retorts, “Well, I think you should take a person’s word for something.” (She takes Paul Stone at his word and winds up jilted, except of course as an operative providing useful intelligence.) The “other” Karen helps arrange scarifying information sessions to rally Union support. The Union’s scientific expert (Graham Jarvis) terrorizes familiar and unfamiliar faces in the crowd, including Thelma and Gilda, each of whom has willingly avoided to this point confronting these stark realities: “What we don’t know is how little plutonium causes cancer. The government says that the maximum permissible body burden for your lifetime is 40 nanocures. Let me tell you how much that is: that is the size of a tiny dot on a piece of paper. We say that that’s too much. We say that it takes less than that to kill you. We don’t say it’s twice too much, three times too much; we think that that is 115,000 times too much. […] When you inhale it, and it lodges in your lungs, you’re married to cancer.” The homespun romantic metaphor is juxtaposed against a two-shot of Karen and Paul, unofficial Union “couple,” though Paul will throw her over because of the primacy of his own marriage to the Union. The film posits the organic necessity of interdependence, and as such the agreement to disagree that eventually facilitates Drew’s return—their loving contention about her activism that they’re still debating in their very last exchange—marks a definable evolution in them both.
Ephron and Arlen litter this section of the film with broken relationships—not only Drew’s departure from their shared home, but also Karen’s inability to get past Stone’s answering machine, and Angela’s dumping Dolly to return to her husband. Initially Karen and Dolly lash out at each other in their abandonment and self-pity, blaming each other (rather than themselves) for their breakups. Dolly trumps all insults when she asserts, “You took about as good care of Drew as you did of your kids.” Yet this argument resolves itself on the porch, with Karen cuddling Dolly to her breast like a distraught child and soothing her with a lullaby; what is of ultimate value is not the social labels that restrict them but the alternative family they have created together. Delerue’s lamenting strings segue from generic soaring to modify themselves as an accompaniment to Karen’s song, a moving formal assertion of Karen’s personhood in the narrative, in a way the soundtrack has previously privileged Drew’s banjo and the shriek of the contamination alarms. Nichols cuts to a wide shot of the surrounding darkness and the spare light in which the two women huddle together on the porch, affording them the privacy of their disappointment and their solace.
This idyll of connection seems to be continued in the camaraderie of the Kerr McGee lunchroom, but Karen’s desire to record stray remarks as potential evidence of the company’s dereliction of its moral responsibility to its workers and the world quickly provokes strain. Karen learns from Gilda that her husband Curtis has been called to extra shifts four nights running, “flushing the pipes.” In a paraphrase of a conversation between Nately and Yossarian in Catch-22, Gilda hisses, “Why don’t you just concentrate on uppin’ our wages, and skip what is none of our business?” Karen deadpans the double meaning back at her: “This is our business, honey.” Increasingly, Karen’s isolation at the plant derives not only from a hostile management but also from her peers, and her second contamination, while “very slight” and of an “acceptable level,” results in the paranoia of the daily urinalysis. An accident at night—when she hits a deer—leaves her woozy in a ditch and thus in a weakened moment of willingness to call Drew, who recognizes the first Karen, the one he loves and who needs him: he stays the night, their last peaceful night. Her return to work in the morning brings the most serious evidence of contamination so far: she sets off the alarms as she enters the facility. Karen Silkwood is now a contagious danger to Kerr McGee. The shower that ensues is the most violent in the film, the camera literally in her face as she begs for the multiple “cleaners” to stop. It is palpably a rape. Drew, Dolly, and Karen’s domestic life is over, their house stripped and quarantined by HAZMAT workers in space suits, Dolly torn away by her secret deal with the company. “Where am I gonna go now?” says Karen. “I don’t have any place to go now.” Hurley looms over her in her tiny car in the dirt drive before her ruined house, an ambiguous bear of a man. “We’re getting a room for Dolly,” he says. “We can help you. We want to help you. We can help you with a place to stay. We can help you with money.” He waits expectantly for her to default to dependence, to surrender herself to the company for keeps, and her resistance and, ultimately, her refusal to capitulate to their systemic will is as soul-searching an act in its own way as was refusing Drew’s call for her to quit. When Drew does a walk-through afterwards, it’s given the cinematic treatment of the grieving lover, the banjo returned to a soundtrack whose lamentations have always featured a hint of resigned finality. Their makeshift family’s troika of intimacy is revisited in a tight shot of the three of them together on the plane to Los Alamos for contamination testing by more sophisticated censors and screens, yet their intimacy has been contaminated by compromise and paranoia. Karen asks point-blank if Dolly, in any of her HAZMAT debriefings, told “the company about the New York Times” or “about the X-rays” she’s been angling to steal. Dolly’s reply, “Karen, they know everything about us,” is well calculated to deflect blame by enflaming anxiety. Karen never does get a straight answer as to whether or not Dolly has betrayed her; we’re left to ponder the significance of Hurley’s citing Dolly in trying to capture Karen’s signed name on the clipboard. Dolly, it would seem, told Hurley what he wanted to hear in order to secure company patronage. Dolly fades from the film soon after. During the final montage as Karen’s ruined car is towed back through town, hers is one of the faces of loss, likely complicated by her compromised actions of self-interest.
The brief New Mexico pilgrimage brings only confirmation of worst suspicions: the more sophisticated the infrastructure of the nuclear industry, the more sophisticated the packaging of conveniently arbitrary “truths.” Dolly and Drew are “well below permissible levels of contamination,” according to the examining doctor (James Rebhorn, at his most ominously bureaucratic). Americium, produced during the disintegration of plutonium, is present in Karen’s lungs and chest. “We estimate you have an internal contamination of six nanocures of plutonium. Now, the maximum permissible body burden for occupational exposure is 40 nanocures, so as you can see, you are well under that level.” This is, of course, a very different interpretation of the data than Karen’s own expert, invited to inform the Union rank and file of their accepted risk in the plant. The white-coated arbiters of what is “permissible” allow that, despite their methodological and technological sophistication, they could be missing her exact statistical contamination “by plus or minus 300 percent at this level.” Karen seizes at the hopefulness of having less contamination, but is tempered by the reminder it could be more. “But even that,” he adds, “would be underneath the maximum permissible body burden.” Nichols allows a suite of four silent shots to render the devastation of these lives: the close-up of Karen’s startled face as it dawns on her there are merely smoother confidence men than Hurley and the other Kerr McGee bosses, working their shell game of “permissible” plutonium poisoning; a return to the smug reporting physician; a close-up of Drew, who also now understands it’s been a wasted trip, no comfort to any of them; and finally back to Karen, a condemned woman beginning her premature calculus of the end of days. What follows is coda, “a postscript without any inflated theatrics about the triumph of individual courage and virtue over the evil corporation.”8 Ephron and Arlen take us to the end of the trail of Karen Silkwood’s historical record, all ambiguities firmly intact: the commitment to the Times interview; the uncertainty about whether she held company documents constituting a smoking gun; the inconclusiveness about the circumstances surrounding her death in the “single car accident.” The film provides only the barest hint of possibility of another car on the dark road where Karen Silkwood died, and this could merely have been her paranoia. It gives no evidence of condemning documents in her possession, nor does it suggest when the alcohol and Quaaludes would have entered her bloodstream.
From the Albuquerque airport, Karen calls Stone to set up the Times interview; having just left the coolly calculated statisticians of Los Alamos, she’s on the phone with a man who can only think of the metallography X-rays and expresses no concern about where she’s just been or what she’s learned about her health. Her objecthood is rarely more pronounced with the company than it is here, with the Union. On the plane ride back to Oklahoma, Drew can still enthuse, looking out over the marvelous expanses of the desert Southwest, “Man, I love it here. I love this country. I’d like to stay here forever.” Back at his place, he continues on this theme of a new life in the West, the one Karen had idly mused upon while comforting Dolly on the porch after their fight, when she’d wondered if Drew was “right” and they should “quit and move someplace clean.” But Karen knows there is no such thing as a “clean” place: men protecting nuclear interests have just cynically condescended to them in the deserts of southern New Mexico, site of some of the most infamous atomic tests ever conducted by her nation. At the most literal as well as the most metaphoric levels, contamination is everywhere, both internal and external, within the company and the Union and even within one’s closest, neediest friends like Dolly, who sold Karen out to be kept by the company. On this subject of her contamination, Drew gets one more chance to say, “I don’t care,” but unlike before, when he was rejecting not only the company but also Karen’s willingness to begin perceiving the truth in all its consequences, he is fighting past her defenses now that they both have the truth. It’s his best moment, still quintessentially Drew, but the better class of boyfriend Karen has always secretly hoped for: Drew-plus. “I know,” she says.
Karen’s last day is, in Silkwood’s estimation, a triumph, no matter what the ambiguities of its outcome. “The filmmakers,” writes David Denby, “refuse us any kind of catharsis—a big, angry speech, an emotional confrontation with corrupt officials.”9 That last lovers’ quarrel on Drew’s steps offers us Drew and Karen in perpetuity, ever themselves, but new and improved. Drew unrepentantly refuses to cooperate with her activist agenda; to his familiar, patriarchal “I don’t want you doin’ that,” Karen joyously replies, “Well, I’m doin’ it,” Streep’s beauty given its rare full radiance through the typically hardscrabble de-glamorization to which the drama has accustomed us. They agree to disagree, adults at last, and he quips, “We can always have a fight later.” She gets his attention a last time before climbing into the car and driving away via “flashing” him his own borrowed shirt, self-referencing that earlier Karen, now forever the former Karen, whose sexuality was her only frame of reference to the world, and who could think only in terms of commodified relationships. Her reification offers her insights at which, however astringent, she refuses to blink. The closing montage—which sees the likes of Thelma now among the Union faithful as Streep’s plaintive, homespun voice reprises “Amazing Grace”—offers no consolation other than that of the transformation of the life that preceded it from blindness to sight, from one who was bound by socially constricted identity to the empowerment of liberation. And yet the final contextual note at the end of the film reports that the Kerr McGee plant closed; as Winston had argued, this is a hard victory for a town in need of economic relief. The larger commodifying burdens of socio-economic reality remain.
With Silkwood, Nichols returned to Hollywood feature filmmaking at the height of the medium’s powers, recommitted to his themes and characteristically capable of coaxing indelible performances from his cast and crew. He would remake his Hollywood reputation on the strength of the characters he portrayed and the actors he cast to portray them. As Lee Hill puts it, “Nichols the expressionist had become Nichols the seemless craftsman.”10 Streep, Cher, Ephron and Arlen, O’Steen, and Nichols himself (his third time as Best Director) were all nominated for Academy Awards, and Russell’s and Delerue’s were only the most neglected of the other sterling performances. Though indulgences and missteps would occasionally follow in the next decade and a half before he refocused through collaboration with HBO, Mike Nichols returned to filmmaking with Silkwood as good as ever.