The Talkies/Silkwood Vague

...Conflicting versions of events are given about equal time, with neither receiving independent corroboration...

...The trouble is, allegation-juggling doesn't make for very compelling drama...

...I n view of these constants, the three recent studies of Andropov should therefore be judged as much for their insights into the nature of the Soviet system as for their insights into Andropov...

...But neither does it offer any real insight into her deeper values and motivation, which to me-is a more serious kind of waffling...

...For this reason, Beichman and Bernstam's clear understanding of the nature of Soviet totalitarianism makes their book exceedingly valuable...

...Little was spent for administration, which was always a weak point of the Russian system...

...To show a particular bad guy would be to personalize the evil, and suggest that human choice is a contributing factor...

...There is no right action, once we have signed our names in blood...

...Such a crisis erupted in the aftermath of Stalin's death, when Party functionaries acted to avert another dark age of terror...

...By the end of the film I began almost to resent Streep's intriguing performance, seeing it as a will,o'-the-wisp intended to lure the audience onward in the absence of any other real suspense...

...And as exiled Soviet dissident Boris Shragin reminds us in The Challenge of the Spirit (1978), his excellent study of t h e continuities in Russian nationalism: "For centuries, the government's main function was war: all its strength and resources were spent first in warding off surrounding enemies and later in territorial expansion...

...This authenticity has a lot to do with Streep...

...And Zhores Medvedev's study, despite its leftish, unilateralist stance, provides an expert account of personal rivalries in Soviet ruling circles while emphasizing the sources of the changing #quipe's fundagaental Conservatism...

...Was she mentally and emotionally capable of assessing the dangers at Kerr-McGee...

...If Silkwood was deliberately contaminated or murdered, it was not, according to this film, a crime in the ordinary sense of the word...

...decade--during which there have been endless court cases, books and plays, The China Syndrome starring Jane Fonda, Three Mile Island starring...

...We can perhaps paraphrase Lenin and say that military governance may one day be the highest stage of Communism--and its last...

...In other words, Russia and its successor state, the USSR, have been engaged in a "centuries-long arms race...

...Since the Khrushchev years there had been continuity and consensus within ~ Soviet ruling circles...

...Upon hearing this, the union honcho SURVEY Autumn-Winter Double Issue (118/119) 1983 Soviet Foreign Policy Active Measures and Political Strategy This issue includes The Plot to Kill the Pope by Paul Henze which examines the evidence on the case and Soviet media treatment of it...

...England (Tel...

...Because the film makes no effort to clarify these matters, we cannot really empathize, much less make a judgment about this particular woman's strengths and weaknesses...

...Ewing style, to bit the union or to injure Silkwood...

...Moscow's Disenchantment with l r a n Prospects in Africa Annual subscription: UKs US $39 Elsewhere s Singiccopies: UKs US$10 SURVEY Editorial Office: llford House...

...01-734 {)592) SURVEY Subscription Office: 59 St...

...Or rather, with Streep as directed by Nichols, who has the good sense not to fawn over her the way Alan Pakula did in Sophie's Choice...

...The real message of Silkwood is that by splitting the atom, we forfeit both our moral judgment and our free will...

...Here she is encouraged to be scuzzy, skinny, bitchy, and sly--all of which she does extremely well...

...we see only the consequences, as when Silkwood sets off the blaring contamination alarms...

...Evidently all these people, and a great many critics, not to mention moviegoers, feel that the story is worth retelling...

...Likewise Kerr-McGee...

...And her agent, Sam Cohen, who is responsible for drawing in such luminaries as director Mike Nichols, writer Nora Ephron, and co-star Cher...

...Lr WI R ITD...

...Any hope of a scoop, however, was thwarted when the neophyte producers had to spend two years acquiring the rights to Silkwood's story...

...Just as it was a Polish general, Jaruzelski, who saved the Communist Party in his country, so could it be a Soviet marshal with a baton in his knapsack who could represent the "Bonapartist" solution to the Soviet crisis...

...It comes as no surprise, I'm sure, that "nuclear power," i.e., "the stuff you made bombs out of," is the villain instead of Kerr-McGee...

...Tllat's not the message of these films...

...I rather think that Silkwood does the opposite: It handles the crucial facts so ambiguously, it fails to establish the story's dramatic core...

...It's a safe course, THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1984 31 but too predictable to provide the stuff of drama...

...Jimmy Carter, and a burgeoning antinuclear movement which has all but stopped the industry in its tracks...

...To a certain extent, they are right...

...So who wants to hear about Karen Silkwood now...

...Martin's L~mc...

...We feel sorry for her during the brutal scrubdown which leaves her skin raw, and the gutting and stripping of her home...

...Enghmd (Tcl...

...How can we get involved when we don't know for sure who did what, and when our minds are distracted by the clever ways the film tries to insinuate guilt without actually pointing the finger...

...So it's quite possible the honcho was merely playing on Silkwood's fears to make sure she helped get out the vote...

...The fellow claims that he is only blacking out dust spots, but Silkwood reports to the head of her national union that the company is covering up defects...

...Andropov may die before this reaches you, yet the continuities in Soviet rule and the imperatives of Soviet power will remain unchanged...

...Yet before the movie has gotten very far, we realize that this nuanced performance (and that of Kurt Russell as Silkwc " - ~yfriend) is not going to lead a e. The highly textured acting arouses r curiosity, but does not satisfy it ~ t any sort of revelation about Silkwood's reasons for making the choices she did...

...This is not to say that the movie doesn't hint in various ways that Silkwood was right...

...In different ways, these books avoid the pitfalls into which many leading U.S...

...By obscuring motivation on the part of Silkwood, and action on the part of Kerr-McGee, the film removes the drama from the universe where individuals and corporations may choose between right and wrong...

...But otherwise the characters' sixties-style alienation seems quite believable, if only as a thin cover for their native cussedness, orneriness, and anarchic individualism...

...ere is only the selfinterest of the corporation, expressed by the local union rep, who says of an early incident in which Silkwood gets blamed for a leak, "What can they do...

...33 Oxford Street...

...The film doesn't commit itself to either explanation...

...32 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1984...

...Larry Cano and Buzz Hirsch were film students at UCLA when they first read about Karen Silkwood, a worker in an Oklahoma plutonium recycling plant who became a union activist concerned with safety issues...

...Like the makers of The Day After, ABC's TV movie about nuclear war, the people who devised Silkwood don't consider specific blame to be reIevant...

...The film shows Silkwood's milieu to be vaguely countercultural, with alienated and unattached young working people drifting in and out of jobs, commitments, relationships...

...We know that Silkwood's personal life was unstable...

...01-836 4194) whispers that a single defect could lead to a chain reaction that would "wipe out millions of people, maybe even the whole state...

...We just knew it was the stuff you made bombs out of...

...It's surprising to me that so many critics, columnists, and letter writers have accused this movie of misrepresenting the actual evidence for the sake of a vivid story...

...several months litigating with Kerr-McGee (who in 1977 subpoenaed the filmmakers' accumulated materials...

...Taken one at a time, TV news reports appear fair because they are balanced in this way...

...Bias only emerges when we look at the subjects that are selected for coverage...

...The year was 1974, when, as Cano and Hirsch put it, "No one had ever done a film about radiation leaks in a factory...

...Most salient is her discovery that one of her superiors is retouching photographs of the plant's product: fuel rods for a breeder reactor in the state of Washington...

...Rather it was a kind of fate, the inevitable outcome of any situation in which a large organization possesses power, self-interest, and nuclear technology...

...Indeed, it is a most interesting phenomenon--in this day of sociologically grounded political analysis--to witness leading analysts, whose work is wedded to the paradigms of class interests, interest group politics, cultural traditions, historical continuities, and the like, abandoning many of these fundamental factors whenever the USSR faces the possibility of a succession crisis...

...London WC2N 4JS...

...This might be all right if the plot held some surprises, but after all, we already know what is going to happen...

...Those few leaders _9 who have strayed from the pillars of Party primacy, Russification, or militarism have been demoted or purged...

...Meryl Streep, for one...

...The Day After tells the story of World War III without bothering to depict the events that lead up to it...

...More uneven is the S01ovyov-Klepikova volume which is most useful for illuminating the Russian nationalist dimension of Soviet rule...

...The national leadership's concern about safety issues at Kerr-McGee declines as soon as the union wins a recertification election in Silkwood's local...

...The crucial decisions that constitute the action of the story are not made in our purview...

...How many contemporary actresses, when called upon to display genuine humor and high spirits, can produce more than a plaque-free smile...

...They can't blame themselves, so they have to blame somebody...

...And at the other end of the scale, she has moments of great beauty, sweetness, and something rarely seen on the screen nowadays: merriment...

...ThP olant manager is clearly disli the workers, but nowhere do ,. . . . . . b im plotting, J.R...

...Like television network news observing the Fairness Doctrine, Silkwood presents the claims of both sides while being formally careful not to conclude anything...

...Note the generalized terms in which Cano and Hirsch describe their original inspiration: "Back in 1974 we didn't know anything about nuclear power...

...Yet the question of who did it stays unanswered...

...It opened our eyes and made us determined to tell the story of one woman waging a war against the nuclear industry...

...For Lenin, imperialism represented the highest stage of capitalism...

...But does self-interest automatically lead to murder...

...Sovietologists have fallen in recent years...

...Was the plot directed from the KGB Department of " Wet A f f a i r s " ? SURVEY provides an analysis of the historical background to Soviet techniques of terrorism and assassination abroad and explores Soviet disinformation practices...

...THE TALKIES SILKWOOD VAGUE by Martha Bayles A t the very least, the original producers of Silkwood deserve credit for sheer perseverance...

...The courts haven't ruled on this one yet, and neither does the film...

...AS Edward Jay Epstein has pointed out, the aim of the Fairness Doctrine is not to arrive at the truth, but to achieve "balance...

...By shunting aside the entire question of what decisions were actually made, both films reveal their true assumptions about the subject: that it doesn't matter how responsibly or prudently we employ nuclear technology, because nuclear technology is the Devil...

...Thus the film does its balancing act pretty well...

...The makers of Silkwood would probably concur with ABC-TV's claim that this was the best way to deal with the subject, by being "apolitical...

...In other words, the wall hanging may come from India, but the planks underneath are 19ure Oklahoma...

...Which amounts to being amoral as well...

...The attempts to paint Andropov as a liberal-minded reformer were wrong not only because they failed to correspond to his record in the Party-state apparatus...

...The filmmakers may have been keeping an eye out for the corporation's lawyers, but that is not the most important reason why their film omits specific blame...

...I think this is one reason why defenders of the nuclear industry take exception to Silkwood: However technically evenhanded the presentation, the story the film chooses to portray is not representative...

...I'm afraid we are now at the heart of the real drama enacted by this film, which is not the particular one transpiring between an unhappy woman and a badly run facility...

...that she left her common-law husband and three children in Texas for the presumably greener pastures of Oklahoma, and had a reputation for drinking, popping pills, and sleeping around...

...Aside from having very lax safety standards for its employees, the company is not shown to be engaged in any explicit wrongdoing...

...In the course of her efforts to gather evidence against KerrMcGee Corporation, Silkwood was badly contaminated, then killed in an auto accident while driving to meet a reporter from the New York Times...

...they were wrong because in a state such as the USSR there is no possibility for a reformer to emerge, barring some major, palpable crisis...

...The only mystery is who will succeed him, and on this Beichman and Bernstam leave us with an intriguing parting thought: If the KGB is not enough, then the military will have to step in...

...and finally the past six years navigating the ups and downs of Hollywood...

...three years locating and interviewing her friends and coworkers...

...Or did she succumb to paranoia, exaggerating an already bad situation in order to get attention and act out her antisocial impulses...

...It also surveys the overall context of present Soviet strategy in world affairs, focusing on some sensitive points in the global balance of power: The USSR and the UN Central America and the Lessons of Vietnam De-coupling the Allies: Northern Europe and Japan The Soviet Union, China and Cambodia Will the Soviets Pull Out of Afghanistan...

...Yet right afterward, the film suggests another explanation for this alarmist remark...

...More likely the person will be portrayed in a superficially flattering light, in a script that sticks to the agreed-upon facts while cloaking the disputed ones in silence or ambiguity...

...I have a little trouble with Cher's lesbian lover, a wisecracking blonde who works as a beautician in a funeral home--such sitcom cuteness reminds me too vividly that the producer is ABC...

...This possibility is emotionally reinforced when the honcho's young lawyer starts a love affair with Silkwood, only to drop it as quickly as his boss drops his interest in defective fuel rods, once the election has been won...

...Silkwood's car goes off the road, and we wonder about the circumstances: Was she f o r c ~ off, or did she simply pass out from all the drugs she had been taking...

...It all adds up to almost a Martha Bayles is film critic for The American Spectator...

...It seems that at such moments all the lessons of Weber or Marx are conveniently forgotten and Freud (personality) comes to the fore...

...It is always worthwhile re-creating the background of a news story, so that we may see what sort of people it's about...

...The plant manager accuses her, while she cannot decide who to accuse--the company, the union, or a fellow worker worried about losing his job...

...Of course, filmmakers who must spend two years negotiating with the estate of a real person are not apt to come up with boldly imaginative statements about her character--even if such statements were in cinematic fashion, which they aren't...