Silkwood

SPOILER ALERT! The plot will be discussed.

Silkwood is a 1983 film which Mike Nichols directed based on a screenplay by Nora Ephron and Alice Arlen. It is based on a true story but has the same warning that the fictional The China Syndrome contained about the possible dangers of nuclear power. This movie stresses how those in charge can control, invalidate, and maybe even eliminate those far down on the capitalistic food chain. However, the main character here is not some exemplary hero, since her many flaws are on display. The movie suggests that one’s background does not invalidate a person’s exposing an injustice, and the voice of the less powerful should not be silenced.

The opening shot reveals a rural countryside and a car approaching a street sign showing the distance to Crescent and Oklahoma City. (I find it preferable when a director does not put titles to show a location but makes the revelation part of the story). Banjo music plays adding a country-western soundtrack to match the visuals. The old car riding along the road towards the camera points to a lack of affluence here. The three people in the automobile are the principal characters: Karen Silkwood (Meryl Streep, in one of her numerous Oscar nominations, here for Best Actress); Drew Stephens (Kurt Russell); and Dolly Pelliker (Cher, nominated for Best Supporting Actress). They work at a nuclear power plant owned by the Kerr-Magee company. The film (which takes place in 1974) starkly contrasts the average people living in a natural setting with this high tech and potentially dangerous facility that may be a threat to the area in which it stands.

Men in dress suits walk above the local employees on a catwalk, which denotes their superior positions removed from those below. Karen works with others, including Morgan (Fred Ward), who tell stories about the supernatural power of prayer, predictions by psychic Jeane Dixon, and freakish physical accomplishments in a place where science dominates. Karen and the others are mixing plutonium and uranium in a glove box to make radioactive pellets. The plant manager asks Karen to explain the process to a group of trainees. Since she has her back to them, she grins to her fellow workers, which shows us that what they do has become routine for them. The suppressed laughter and the fact that they chew gum suggest that they have a dislike for anything that sounds intellectually pretentious. When one of the trainees asks the manager conducting the tour about the dangers of the radioactive material, he says it’s like being out in the sun, which can be dangerous if one isn’t careful. His comparison is very flawed considering how much more lethal the exposure to these materials can be, and immediately demonstrates the company’s use of deception to downplay the risk of being around radioactive substances. 

After the group moves away, Karen has gum stuck on her face. She calls Wesley (David Strathairn) over and jokingly says she needs the help of a “trained technician” to help her remove it, again showing how they do not take themselves too seriously. At lunchtime, Karen asks for permission to get time off to see her children, so we know she doesn’t have custody, raising questions about her character. She is chastised because she wants to leave without monitoring her radiation level, which she apparently often forgets to do, suggesting carelessness on Karen’s part. 

In the lunchroom, male workers sitting with Drew talk about a rumor that there was a leak in a truck carrying radioactive material, and they say the vehicle was “cooked.” Also, based on past experiences, they say the men on the truck probably were not protected from exposure. One man wonders how they are going to safely get rid of all this toxicity. Drew talks about shooting the stuff into space or to the moon. The question of the problems associated with nuclear energy come up, but the solutions seem extreme or nonexistent. Karen circulates around the room and even flirts with Winston (Craig T. Nelson), a new x-ray technician in the Metallography Department, even though she just told her boyfriend, Drew, that she “hates” his type. She grabs the sandwich of another worker. She approaches foreman Hurley (Bruce McGill) to ask for the weekend off, but she has waited too close to the end of the week to make her request, Along with not checking her exposure, what happens in this scene shows Karen is someone who doesn't like to play by the rules. 

As Karen and her fellow employees gear up for the rest of the day’s work, she asks for someone to cover her weekend shift, but the others are busy. A loud alarm goes off, and it is just another in a series of tests. But, Wesley is suspicious, saying that the company says it’s a test, but someone probably was just “fried.” Gilda Schultz (E. Katherine Kerr) says that they have a number of tests, but don’t go through the “drills.” Without that preparation, she asks, “If this was a real airborne contamination, how we’re supposed to get out of here?” Morgan says cynically that they will not do the drills because it would slow down production. These people are just trying to make a living, but they do have their concerns. It seems they are worried that if they become vocal about the safety issues, they will be labeled troublemakers, and they may lose their jobs. Karen wishes selfishly that if there was a leak, the plant would shut down, and she could visit her kids. Gilda shows her generosity by agreeing to cover for Karen. 

Sometimes a chance occurrence can change the course of a life. According to IMDb, Meryl Streep said that Mike Nichols told her the movie is about people who were metaphorically asleep, but then something happened that caused them to wake up. In the film, Karen has her consciousness raised. This understanding starts at the end of this day, as Karen notices that men with torches are dismantling a truck. A guard comes by and she asks what is going on. The man just tells her to go away. When a person refuses to answer a harmless question, it means someone is trying to hide something. Based on the lunch conversation, the company is covertly destroying the contaminated truck. 

Drew and Karen are in their bedroom the next day. There is a large Confederate flag hung above the bed, so we can guess at the occupants’ political orientation. These are not left-wing environmental radicals that want to bring down corporations. Karen, Dolly and Drew take a trip to see Karen’s children. They cross the border into Texas, where the primary American fuel, oil, is being produced. They raise the windows on the car, and Dolly says the area “Stinks.” Karen says, “That’s home. That’s why I left.” Karen attaches the physical stench to the emotional feeling she has about the state. So far we have encountered dangerous and pollution creating forms of energy. 

Karen again makes the mistake of not following procedures by expecting to take her children to the beach for the weekend without asking the father, Pete Dawson (Ray Baker), who has made other plans for the next two days. He says she can only have their offspring for a few hours. Pete works at an oil field (those two words don’t seem to go together well), so both parents depend on the energy industry for their livelihood. She has two girls and a boy and they ask where their mommy has been, so it appears she has been derelict in her maternal duties. At the restaurant with her three kids she seems flustered in her inability to handle the children, and curses after she told Dolly not to use such words. When they bring the children back, Pete informs Karen that he will be moving farther away, closer to the Mexican border, because oil was found there. 

So, Karen has not been an empowered person in many aspects of her life. She provides another example of this fact on the way back to Oklahoma. She admits that she and Pete were underage and thought they could get married in Louisiana, but were denied permission. However, because they were considered to have a common law marriage, they did have to officially get divorced. This contradiction is not lost on Dolly who says, “Goddamn government fucks you coming and going.” Streep gets to show off her lovely voice as she sings “Amazing Grace.” The words about being saved seem to contradict the reality of her situation at that time. She says that she could have driven off with her children. Drew suggests he sees Karen’s irresponsibility when he asks, “What would you have done with them?” She shrugs and confesses she does not have a clue. It’s the idea of having a family that she likes, but she is not prepared to cope with motherhood. 

Back at work, a male friend of Karen’s, Joe (Will Patton), tells Karen he and other men were “burying” a truck a couple of days prior. The word implies a literal and figurative cover-up. Drew wants to know who the smiling Joe is, and she just says it’s a friend of a friend. But one gets the impression that Karen has been with other men, and Drew, out of jealousy, questions her whenever she speaks to other guys. 

Little details add texture to the story. One woman, Thelma (Sudie Bond), talks about her daughter borrowing her good wig because her child is battling cancer. Right after one feels sympathy for her situation, Thelma then undermines that compassion as she reveals her bigotry when she says they were letting her child die “next to a colored” person.  Gilda talks about going to church and getting sick from a casserole, which just shows everyday happenings that may occur anywhere (although getting sick from tainted food resonates with the idea that many people can be sickened by radiation from the plant). Karen finds out Gilda didn’t have to cover Karen’s shifts because the plant closed down due to contamination right after Karen left work on Friday. Gilda tells Karen that the rumor is that the company wants to blame Karen for the contamination because she wanted to get the weekend off, and had expressed the wish that the facility would shut down. 

Karen along with her fellow employees are now in hazmat gear as others scrub the walls of their work area. The other workers go along with the company line and blame her for the radiation leak in her area. When Karen visits where Drew is working she says she hates that people think she would do something dangerous like cause a toxic leak. He sarcastically tells her to quit and live off of her “savings.” His statement shows how her poverty keeps her, and by implication all the workers there, under the thumb of the company. Quincy (Henderson Forsythe), who is the local union leader, explains the scapegoat policy of the owners who have “to blame somebody, otherwise, it’s their fault.” The company can’t prove Karen is guilty, so instead those in charge spread a poisonous rumor. Quincy’s statement is not only an admission about the reality of the strength of those in power, but also the feeling that it is next to impossible to challenge them. One of the male workers gawks at Karen, and she realizes she is being objectified sexually. She flashes a breast at him to embarrass his adolescent behavior, but she also demonstrates her rule-breaking attitude. Karen’s uninhibited sexual nature is stressed in the next scene when Dolly is cleaning Winston’s office and he tries to put a move on her. She says she is “really not interested,” and that is not an exaggeration since, as we learn later, she is gay. However, she advises him to “try Karen,” which also reflects jealousy on her part concerning Karen’s sexual activity.

Dolly walks out and sees Thelma being rushed to the decontamination unit. Dolly tells Karen, who then runs to be with Thelma as she is washed down. The older woman cries that the sensor alarm went off after she suspected a leak. She has a daughter who is dying of cancer, and Thelma’s wig sitting on the table suggests that she may be joining her child. Earl Lapin (Charles Hallahan), the medical person there, says there was “no internal contamination.” But Thelma points out the man was trained as a veterinarian. It’s not very comforting to know that the company hired someone whose credentials are in doubt. 

Back home, Dolly and Drew joke as Drew says he will have to sell his body to earn enough money to open an auto and live bait shop. She says she’ll give him five dollars for his body and consider it “a charitable donation.” But Karen was rattled by what is happening at the nuclear power plant and aims displaced anger toward them. When Karen says that Thelma might get cancer, Dolly, referring to her janitorial job, says “Dolly Trashbags” is the one who will get the disease. Karen claims that Dolly makes everything about herself. The look on Dolly’s face shows that the remark hurt her. Drew says they all are equally at risk getting sick from the radiation. Outside, Drew asks the in-denial Karen if she is just “waking up” after two years to the risk they take working at the plant. He says sarcastically that they aren’t working with “puffed rice.” He points out that if she is really worried about cancer, she should stop smoking, which the film shows all the characters indulge in. Karen hesitates a minute, as if naively not realizing that health risks are all around her. As they go to bed, there is a shot of Dolly sitting by herself at the kitchen table. That loneliness carries over into the next morning as Dolly sits alone again near the living room window. Karen apologizes for being angry with her. Dolly says she loves Karen, and Karen tells her she loves her, too, but just as a friend. Dolly has clung to Karen and thus put herself in emotional jeopardy even though she has no chance at an intimate relationship.

At work, after having seen what Thelma went through, Karen starts to talk about the conditions they have to deal with. One of the male workers wants to know why Karen is now so interested in their health. She is becoming a responsible adult and is starting to “wake up” to the danger they are in. She feels guilty that she didn’t notice that Thelma wasn’t given a nasal smear to determine internal contamination. When she sees the woman outside, Karen tells Thelma to get the smear, which shows she is now thinking about the welfare of others. She says that she should make sure that they tell Thelma the readings because there are a “lot of liars around here.” She happens to say these words just as Hurley walks by, and he looks at her like she is in trouble. 

Karen helps celebrate Gilda's birthday at work, and the little bit of fun the employees are having dies down as Hurley enters their area (from above, of course, again stressing the powerful position of the boss). He rains on their parade as he complains how they are behind on production and don’t have time for a party. He threatens them with losing their jobs if they take even this small amount of time away from their duties. He is such a joyless company man that he tells Karen she should clean up the cake crumbs after her workday.

Later, Karen performs routine vacuuming after the cleaning of the contaminated area where she works. As she leaves she monitors herself and alarms go off. So, the procedures of the company to make the work area safe are inadequate. Karen now undergoes the humiliating scrubbing that she witnessed Thelma undergoing as the threat has become even more immediate to her. She must bring in urine samples on a regular basis. Back home, Karen recounts a past conversation with her mother who asked how she was taking care of her fingernails. It is a recollection to a time when that simple personal grooming item was important and now seems insignificant given her deadly exposure. She remembers when she was in school and her mother told her to take home economics, and Karen told her the boys were in science class. These seemingly simple words show what roles boys and girls were expected to assume. Even if Karen took science, it was just to meet boys, not find a career. The irony is that she works in a place created by those in the science field, and because corners were cut from the business side of science’s discoveries, she is in danger. Drew quietly says he wishes he could take better care of her, and kisses her, saying he can’t stay away from Karen, even if it risks exposing himself. It is frightening to think that it is literally dangerous to be affectionate toward someone a person cares about. 

Now that the threat has hit home, Karen pulls out information provided by the union that she did not read before, since many people in this location just need a job, and in economically depressed areas, health is put on the back burner when one must cook the food on the front ones. Karen reads to Dolly about how plutonium causes cancer and can be transmitted genetically to children. She reads that it can cause physical and mental defects. Dolly comments humorously that she already has those. It is a funny line, but it also shows how average folks tend to dismiss science in everyday life because it sounds too complicated or could be a threat to regular routines. 

Karen finds out she has been transferred to the Metallography Department, which means she can’t acquire overtime pay until she learns the new job. Her employer exposed Karen to poor safety conditions, and then punished her economically, as if for retribution for her alleged negligence. She must now work with the sleazy Winston. It is his department that checks to make sure that the welds in fuel rods containing radioactive elements are intact. However, Karen happens upon Winston doctoring x-rays, filling in white spots with a dark pen. When she questions him, he says he already checked the welds and they were fine, and he was simply correcting imperfections in the film. Here is another example of the company eliminating safety steps that would fix a dangerous problem because being thorough would result in slowing down lucrative production time. 

To add insult to contaminating injury, the company is trying to get rid of the union. Kerr-Magee obtained enough signatures from workers worried about losing their jobs if they disagreed with their employer to hold a “decertification” vote. Quincy, the union man, says the company is making one and a half billion dollars, which shows that they are raking in the profits with little regard for their employees. He also says that because of a failed workers’ strike in the prior year they lost union members. Karen volunteers to help as she moves toward labor activism. She is assigned to a negotiating committee. Drew warns her that she has to use restraint because her flashing people and cursing them will not go over well when dealing with management. We have the theme here (similar to that other movie about the plight of workers, Norma Rae) that one’s past should not diminish the facts concerning the present. 

Drew and Karen try to suppress giggles when they hear lovemaking sounds coming from Dolly’s room. In the morning they learn that Dolly hooked up with a beautician named Angela (Diana Scarwid), so Dolly’s gay status is out in the open, as opposed to the company’s desire to hide the truth. Dolly, like Karen, breaks the rules of “acceptable” society. Is she capable of evolving by attempting to detach herself from her romantic feelings for Karen, or is she hoping to make Karen jealous? After Dolly and Angela leave, Karen and Drew say there is nothing wrong with Dolly having a gay relationship, but Karen insightfully notes that talking about it means they are allowing discussion where there shouldn’t be any. However, they are not as enlightened as they pretend when they are both a bit shocked when they see Angela moving in with Dolly.

Karen is now, like Norma Rae, very involved in union business. She argues on the phone at home that the company has no right to stop them during their breaks from discussing union activities. Drew walks in, but as soon as he hears what Karen is doing, he turns right around and walks out. He does not like change, like many people, but is also feeling neglected. He is like Norma Rae’s husband played by Beau Bridges, who feels as if he is losing touch with his female companion. Angela, while applying makeup on Dolly, warns Karen about Kerr-Magee because the company is very powerful. She has learned that fact from working on their clients. An angry Drew, not happy about Angela now living there, says Dolly looks like a “corpse.” He then finds out that Angela (an angel of death?) works at the funeral home. So Drew’s comment about Dolly’s appearance takes a dark turn, which is stressed when Angela says she knows, “when a dead person I beautify worked for Kerr-Magee because they all look like they died before they died.” Her chilling comment implies that the nuclear facility drains the life out of the people who ironically are trying to make a living there. 

The foreshadowing of death continues when Angela advises Karen to wear something that will not wrinkle on her plane trip to Washington D.C. to attend a conference. Drew, not feeling comfortable with the presence of death that Angela represents, uses dark humor by telling Karen she can wear a “shroud.” 

In Washington, national union lawyer Paul Stone (Ron Silver) and union leader Max Richter (Josef Sommer) meet Karen, Quincy, and Morgan to prepare them for the meeting with the Atomic Energy Commission. Richter is polite but leaves early because all he is hearing are complaints without evidence of wrongdoing. Karen runs after the union men who have left and mentions about the altered x-ray films of rods that are meant to be shipped to a breeder reactor. Richter points out that defective fuel rods in that type of nuclear device could kill two million people. He wants her to get documentation of the falsification of the radiographs so the union can blow the whistle on the company. Karen is reluctant to go public out of fear of retribution. Karen is now like a character in a Steven Spielberg film, an ordinary person who is in extraordinary circumstances. She must decide whether to accept Richter’s challenge to act as he says the situation constitutes “a moral imperative.” 

The story jumps back to Oklahoma, where Quincy is presenting a slide show of the trip with Karen and Drew in attendance. There are pictures of the Capitol Building and the Lincoln Memorial, idealized symbols of justice which contrast with the actual disregard by the company for the citizens working at the reactor building. There are compromising shots of Karen arm-in-arm with Paul in front of the hotel Karen stayed at, and also of the two sitting very close at a dinner table. Karen and Drew look uncomfortable as they view these slides. On the way home, Karen assures Drew that nobody else knows about her spying for the union, so others are safe from detection. But her actions also leave her more on her own. She repeats the “moral imperative” line to justify what she will try to do. But she has not been moral in her own life, since it appears that she was unfaithful to Drew. His reaction is less visionary and more practical as he sees many people losing their jobs by fighting the company. 

Back home, Drew suggests that if they quit their jobs then the two could go away together. He already earns money as a car mechanic on the side. But she says she can’t leave now. The implication is that she has found a purpose beyond her personal wants. But he tells her he already quit and just wants her to himself. He is basically forcing her to make a choice between her cause or him. She walks away when he says he doesn’t “give a shit” about others, and then he says to his pessimistic, cynical, yet realistic self, “Don’t give me a problem I can’t solve.” Drew then moves out, saying Karen is now like two people, and he is in love with one of them, which is the older version. One could say he should have stayed to support Karen’s cause, but some people are just not cut out for the type of life that demands deep self-sacrifice, sometimes at the expense of loved ones.

There is some suspense when Winston catches Karen looking in one of his desk drawers. She says the company doesn’t allow her to bring in medication so she hid antihistamines there. He says he doesn’t believe her, but he finds a bottle of capsules. She may have planted them there just in case a situation such as this one occurred. At a meeting with Paul and some doctors, the workers learn that a pollen-sized bit of plutonium can cause cancer. The materials the company gave the employees note nothing about the risks of developing anything carcinogenic. Again, the big business kept knowledge a secret for exploitative purposes, and even lied about an acceptable level of exposure which the doctors say there is none. After the meeting, Winston confronts Paul and makes a good point, asking why is the union so concerned now that the company has plans to decertify, and were not trying to protect the health of the workers before? Winston says no matter what happens to the employees, Paul gets to go back to his safe job in Washington. He says that the company is rich enough that they would close the plant to avoid bad publicity and then all the workers would lose their jobs, which is what the practical Drew was telling Karen. Winston however denies the idea that the workers are in any harm since he obviously has been bought off to falsify the x-rays. 

Paul says they should not get too involved romantically, and after he leaves, Karen can’t get in touch with him anymore. She calls to tell him that the union defeated decertification but then describes how much stress she is under. However, the voicemail cuts her off. First the company used her and now so has one of the union representatives. Winston was right about Paul not really caring about its members as individuals but only about the union’s overall organization, similar to the company’s practice. The stress on Karen is evident as there is animosity between Karen and Dolly because of her focus on her local union participation. Karen calls to talk with her children, but she does so after her work shift and union activities are done for the day, so they are always asleep. She feels “alone” now, which is partly due to her own choices. 

Karen escapes her personal problems through her activism at the nuclear plant. Hurley tries to undermine the union by telling Thelma that the union will not allow blood donations for her ailing daughter. At a meeting with Hurley, who keeps delaying any negotiations with the union, he denies he lied to Thelma about the donating of blood. Karen, feeling empowered now, says she has already scheduled a bloodmobile to come to the location. 

Dolly is now feeling depressed because she misses Drew and especially because Angela went back to her husband. Dolly’s character arc mirrors Karen’s as they both try to move forward only to have lovers reject them along the way. She at first blames Angela’s leaving on Karen’s animosity toward her girlfriend. The two escalate their argument because they are both hurting. Dolly says that Drew left because Karen didn’t take care of him, the same way she didn’t meet the needs of her children. That last remark gets at what really is tearing Karen apart. Dolly, who really loves Karen, apologizes and the two sit on a swing on the porch. Karen wonders if Drew was right about quitting and moving away to some place that’s “clean.” That word stresses the toxicity of the place where they work. Dolly, still hoping for Karen's affection, asks if just the two of them can leave together. Karen smiles and shakes her head because she knows she can’t give Dolly what she wants. Dolly knows it, too, and cries. Karen holds Dolly to comfort her, and rocks her, as the two appear like a mother with her child. She even sings Dolly a lullaby.

At the job, Karen says she is not hungry, and Gilda says the same about her husband. Are the two feeling effects of radiation poisoning? Gilda says it’s due to working too much and says her husband has been working late flushing out pipes because there has been a problem with accounting for lost plutonium. Karen zeroes in on that fact while the others just seem to want to dismiss the problem. But Karen knows it means that there could be some leaking of the lethal material, and writes down what Gilda says. Gilda says Karen should just be negotiating wages and avoid what is “none of our business.” She doesn’t want to acknowledge that, as Karen says, “this is our business.” That isolation Karen spoke of earlier carries over into the workplace as fellow employees now shun Karen. They fear her protests, which are aimed at improving their working environment, but they may cause the place to shut down. The film here suggests that the rich and powerful use the poverty of the workers as a tool against themselves, creating division among their members. 

Karen finally contacts Paul by using a public phone, probably worried that hers might be tapped. She notes the many health problems of the workers, but Paul stresses that they need the x-ray falsifications. He has put her in a dangerous position, using her as a pawn, and fellow union representative Morgan warns her of the danger she is in. Hurley uses intimidation by pointing out that Karen is late coming to work and returning from breaks (she was late before earlier on, but now it is not because of bad work habits but due to her crusade against unsafe conditions). 

After going to Gilda ‘s work area to try and get more information about the plutonium, which Gilda refuses to discuss, Karen again sets off the radiation monitoring alarm. She undergoes the scrubbing procedure once more, and Earl repeats that her exposure was superficial. He says she must now provide daily urine samples. In a foreshadowing scene, Karen, not feeling well, hits a deer and her car veers off the road. She calls Drew, and the two wind up in bed together. Dolly is thrilled that he is back, as she hopes for a return to their odd form of normalcy. But Drew tells Dolly he has his own place, and the two women are welcome to go there. His offer is a form of sanctuary to that “clean” place Karen yearned for, and shows how his coming back would just be an acceptance of an unhealthy situation. The fact that Karen spills some of her urine on the bathroom floor emphasizes the unclean nature of the place.

When Karen goes to work the next day, after being asked by the guard at the entrance how she’s doing, she jokingly says she’s “in the pink,” which is supposed to mean she’s okay. But pink is a shade of red, the color of being “cooked,” and the alarms go off before she even enters the building. The cleaning occurs again, and she cries as her body feels assaulted. Men from the company show up in hazmat gear and strip Karen’s house since the Geiger counter readings register radiation. The measures they take on the house are supposed to be for health reasons, but the company has created the mess that they are now cleaning up by invading Karen’s home. She fights to try to keep the framed photos of her children, but they take them from her, symbolically wiping away her family. Hurley says that there are no significant readings coming from Drew or Dolly, and none in Karen’s car. But there are elevated readings on the toilet, sink, and even cosmetics. Hurley accuses her of deliberately bringing the plutonium home just to “hurt” the company. Karen is smart, and remembers that she spilled the urine. She believes that the kit they gave her was “spiked” with plutonium, and when she spilled it the radiation spread. But her nasal swab indicates internal contamination, which the spilling would not explain. Karen is now hysterical from fear. Hurley seems compassionate now, promising to help Dolly with a place to stay and offering money. He is attempting to shut down her attempt at exposing the company’s unsafe work environment. Karen realizes his plan and says she knows he wants her to sign a statement that would waive any claims against the plant. She refuses to sacrifice her integrity and says that she is contaminated and she knows she is dying, and then drives off. 

Drew returns to the house he shared with Karen which now looks like a decaying corpse, which mirrors what happens to those ravaged by radiation exposure. Winston arrives and says he’s just looking around, but it appears that he is gloating. Drew’s outrage at what has happened to the person he loves boils over and he slugs Winston. He finds Karen at his house and Karen says she is convinced that the company has exposed her and wants her dead.

The three of them fly to Los Alamos, New Mexico, which has a history of dealing with nuclear bombs and radiation. The place seems to have caused and then tried to deal with the literal fallout of nuclear energy. On the plane, Karen reads an article by the journalist who Paul wanted to interview Karen. The article says that there is plutonium missing from almost all nuclear facilities. The danger is not just relegated to a few people, but now seems to be the threat that Karen heard about in Washington from union boss Richter. Karen wonders if the attack on her was because Dolly mentioned about Paul dealing with the New York Times, and Karen’s knowledge about the doctored x-rays. Dolly is not convincing in her denials, and she looks guilty. 

Despite the advanced scientific research and years of studying radioactive materials, the experts say they can be off by as much as three hundred percent in their readings. Karen has lost all faith in a world that finds individuals expendable, saying all the doctors are “liars.” She calls Paul and says she wants to talk to the journalist but she doesn't admit that she doesn’t have the x-ray evidence yet. As they fly back to Oklahoma, Drew says he would love to live in the southwestern part of America “forever,” The look on Karen’s face shows that she knows that her time left has become much more finite. Later Drew still talks about moving, and even having children, which Karen doubts can be possible now. He says in New Mexico you make the shapes of the rooms in a house any way one wants. He says, “It’s not a right-angle kind of life.” Karen has always been someone who didn’t comply with standard ways of living, but the personal tragedy is that she wasn’t able to find a place that really felt like home to her. 

Karen gets up the next morning, on time now, saying she has to go into work and then later to a union meeting. Drew warns her not to try and take anything out of the plant, suspecting she is going for the x-rays. That is why she wants Drew to pick up Paul and the journalist. She doesn’t want to fight with Drew and they smile and joke for the last time. In the background Karen again sings “Amazing Grace,” but now the words seem to imply that Karen has redeemed her soul. 

When she leaves the cafe after the union meeting there is over, it is dark. There are glaring headlights approaching very close to Karen’s car. The next image is that of Karen’s wrecked car, which was foretold by the earlier accident involving the deer.  There is a shot of Karen’s tombstone, but the last image is a flashback of Karen and Drew at their final happy moment together, followed by Karen driving off. It is a fitting closure to the story that started with her driving towards us. The movie ends with notes that say that Karen had a tranquilizer and alcohol in her system. Her death was declared to be accidental. No documents were found in her ruined car. The plant later closed. But her story now lasts forever.

The next film is Some Like It Hot.