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.
