MELTDOWNS AND IDEOLOGIES
Hausknecht, Murray
The Three Mile Island nuclear accident occurred a bare two weeks after The China Syndrome opened at first-run theaters—as always, life imitating bad art. Since the dramatic center of the movie...
...Even before the release of the film the industry attacked it, and the attack was skillfully exploited by the movie's promotional campaign...
...It is not, of course, the person "who runs a company" who places profit above safety...
...The China Syndrome reflects an ideology that turns attention away from economic institutions to the behavior of "bad" people and thereby presents the economic system as unproblematic, quite as much as the nuclear system...
...The role of the press and television in Watergate" is not a statement about individual behavior but about institutions...
...The head of the company is first shown in his office to establish who and what he is...
...For example, an engineer, defending the nuclear power industry on the Op-Ed page of the New York Times, wrote that the public was misled about the significance of Three Mile Island by "the rage of ideologically antinuclear groups, by conservative forces opposed to change, and the coincidental release of the film 'The China Syndrome...
...This use of radicalism devalues it and blunts whatever critical edge it may have...
...The China Syndrome is a fable whose moral affirms a dominant faith: nuclear plants are efficient, safe systems whose design and functioning are unproblematic...
...He is a dwarflike figure among huge tanks and outsize pipes, an insignificant creature in an unnatural landscape...
...But that is not the sole basis of its reputation...
...In The China Syndrome, on the other hand, behavior is dependent on individual morality, and motivation is unrelated to an institutional context...
...Inside the plant, the control room, with an armed guard at the door, is surrounded by a glassenclosed balcony through which visitors can see into the room and one can communicate with its occupants only by phone...
...At the end, with good triumphant over evil, the stranger rides off into the sunset accompanied sometimes by a good woman found in the midst of battle...
...471...
...The Three Mile Island accident lent credence to the definition of the movie as a radical, negative view of nuclear power and the industry...
...with the announcement that the shutdown is assured, Lemmon dies...
...he exists only to function as a nuclear engineer...
...he lives alone, apparently unmarried and without a family...
...Finally, The China Syndrome is a variation on the old movie Westerns whose mangled remains can be seen on TV between commercials...
...They tell him they know the company has deliberately played down the seriousness of the accident, and they ask him to testify at a public hearing that the plant is not safe...
...Lemmon agrees, therefore, to send Fonda and Douglas the evidence he has uncovered...
...it was, rather, the action of outsiders, evil men...
...All this underscores his symbolic status as an outsider—very much like the movie cowboy who drifts into a lawless town on his way from here to there...
...We learn, for example, that he had come to his present job from a career in nuclear submarines...
...The messenger carrying the material is forced off the road in a near-fatal accident by hirelings of the company who, subsequently, also threaten Lemmon's life...
...As a result of his example Fonda joins in the pursuit of the truth...
...The defective equipment caused the accident and should be replaced, but the company's president has permitted only minimal repairs...
...When she asks him about the truthfulness of the company's statement he answers weakly, "It is not for me to say...
...This variation on the blurring of appearance and reality is also used by The China Syndrome...
...The character played by Lemmon represents a 468 dedication to technology...
...The China Syndrome is a "Jane Fonda movie" (as once there were Henry Fonda movies), only now the expectations are aroused by a persona not created specifically to sell movies...
...Since the dramatic center of the movie was the possibility of a meltdown, it was taken as a prescient warning of the dangers of nuclear energy and, as such, an influence on public opinion...
...In that movie the editor, once convinced that a story existed, supported and encouraged his reporters...
...it neither questions nuclear power systems nor the industry that runs them...
...With the truth finally out, Fonda turns away and receives a hug from Douglas...
...They are about evil men exploiting their weak and ineffectual neighbors who finally seek help from a stranger...
...In other scenes there are fleeting glimpses of the plant set off in barren surroundings protected by fences and guarded gates...
...On his instructions a PR man tells reporters that Lemmon was a crazed man and only the company's quick action saved the day...
...They are followed by technicians who rush to the control-room consoles...
...To talk of "transients" is to define the system qua system as unproblematic...
...BUT DOUGLAS HAS a further significance...
...Hollywood has always constructed the public persona of a star out of the typical role he or she played, and then used the created persona to arouse expectations about the movies in which the star appeared...
...His moral courage stiffens their will and eventually he leads them to victory...
...Yet, there is nothing in the film that justifies assigning it so potent a role...
...here, the cliche of "the bottom line" would be a surer and more telling guide to social reality...
...the action made it clear that editors and reporters alike defined themselves as part of an institution, "the press...
...The movie distorts reality by making the conduct of managers solely dependent upon individual morality and ignoring the imperatives of the economic order...
...It is a cavernous space and he is dressed in protective clothing, which makes him resemble an astronaut on the moon...
...The rumblings and the shaking begin to fade away...
...In one segment Lemmon is inside the plant looking for the source of the original accident...
...In desperation, he then takes over the control room of the plant at gunpoint and holds it hostage for his demand to be interviewed on television by Fonda...
...At the Cannes Festival Douglas, who is also the film's producer, said, "The first reason we made the film was to make an exciting film...
...The nuclear power system is also presented as something separate from the rest of the world...
...In the climactic control-room scenes just as Lemmon, at the beginning of the interview, assures the audience that the plant is safe, the alarms go off, the defective equipment begins to shake and buckle to the accompaniment of loud, rumbling noises throughout the plant, and the police break in and cold-bloodedly shoot Lemmon...
...In a key scene two television reporters, Jane Fonda and Michael Douglas, confront Jack Lemmon playing the role of an engineer who had been on duty in a plant when an accident occurred...
...His capacity for indignation is a result of this freedom...
...Douglas, then, is the strong, good guy among a crowd of outrightly immoral and weak people...
...Investigating on his own he has discovered that in the construction of the plant some required safety inspections of the equipment were omitted and records falsified...
...The China Syndrome is filled with suspense too...
...He is a free lance...
...Just as Dante descends into the Inferno, so Lemmon descends into the bowels of the plant to find support for his belief...
...meltdown was averted because the back-up systems had functioned according to design...
...The implication is that any disturbance of the system, any unanticipated event, is merely a passing or superficial occurrence and not to be thought of as linked to an inherent, fundamental flaw...
...Human error" makes it seem as if machines and the people who operate them are not part of the same system...
...This contrasts vividly with the portrait of a newspaper in All The President's Men...
...STILL, IT BECOMES DIFFICULT even for the faithful to maintain that an incident of the magnitude of Three Mile Island is merely the usual "transient...
...The manager of the television station refuses to run the reporters' story, and he holds onto the videotape they have made of events in the power plant's control room during the original incident...
...This sink of venality is saved by the character played by Douglas...
...he is someone not tied down to the daily routines of the marketplace, a person relatively free of the demands of an institutional structure...
...The metaphor describes a standard for measuring competence and success, and anyone in business—be it the president of a nuclear power company or the producer of an expensive Hollywood movie—is obliged to make the primary consideration profits rather than "the social good" or "art...
...Fonda, a woman interested in furthering her career, is initially not inclined to jeopardize it by bucking the manager...
...This vision of a nuclear generating plant as something apart from the rest of the world is congruent with its design as a self-regulating automatic system...
...If evil is merely the result of a person's immoral behavior, it follows that "good" people can overcome evil...
...What makes The China Syndrome different...
...it was something they, like managers watching the bottom line, were obliged to do as journalists...
...Pressed by Fonda, he finally blurts out that Lemmon was not crazy but merely trying to keep the plant running safely...
...Lemmon symbolizes this faith, and his hunt to uncover the cause of the "transient" is a search for confirmation...
...Fonda and Douglas as investigatory reporters are obviously supposed to evoke the audience's memories of press and television during 469 Watergate, an echoing of history that blurs another difference between appearance and reality...
...His discovery of the damaged equipment and false records affirms his conviction that the design of the nuclear power plant was not responsible for the accident...
...later scenes show him in the plant, usually glaring malevolently at Lemmon through the controlroom windows...
...If we assume that Fonda symbolizes a type of radical impulse, then her radicalism has been transformed by the movie into a commodity, i.e., something packaged for sale in the market...
...It is something else," he says...
...Humphrey Bogart and John Wayne, for example, were both public personalities and the names of movie roles...
...The company head is clearly the film's "heavy...
...The evil was merely a plot device for the creation of excitement and suspense...
...At Three Mile Island "human error" was the early and still favored explanation...
...He fought the greed of cattlemen protecting their ranges from sheepherders, but it really made no difference, since the substantive evil was not the point of the film...
...An outraged Fonda challenges him, and then turns to someone who had worked with Lemmon on the day of the accident...
...the idea implicitly reinforces the illusion that the system is unproblematic...
...That such systems can be built and maintained according to specification is a central tenet of a modern engineer's faith, and it is the heart of the ideology of the nuclear power industry...
...Indeed, it is doubtful that the movie is about nuclear energy at all except in the sense that the traditional cowboy movie was about cattle raising...
...It is as if the plant is a holy place with a shrine at its center tended by priests and their acolytes, whose significance depends upon the functions they perform within these sacred precincts...
...The ostensible aim of the movie is to deny the nuclear power industry's claim that a serious reactor accident is impossible...
...But the movie depicts another reality...
...The equation of "a reality in the film" with "a reality in life" confuses appearance and reality...
...Just what is the movie about...
...The faith is reflected in the jargon of the business: a malfunction in the system is called a "transient incident" or, simply, a "transient...
...That is, the pursuit of the story by individual reporters was expected and approved...
...nuclear energy is as good a gimmick "to make an exciting film" as cattle rustlers in the hills...
...Jane Fonda lends an aura of radicalism to the movie, because she is identified with anti-Vietnam protests and is the wife of a wellknown ex-leader of the New Left who now runs for public office...
...But "human error" is only a special case of a more general cultural proposition about behavior that runs through The China Syndrome...
...In the movie's final scenes the president attempts to cover up what has happened...
...But Westerns, like most movies, were rarely seen as being socially significant and hardly ever as forces molding public opinion...
...The tampering will set off alarms in the control room, distract Lemmon, and allow the police to seize him...
...If in this film there is a character who runs a company who is more concerned about the profits of the company than the safety of his employees, that is a reality of the film and a reality in life," The movie dramatizes this account...
...Although this is a selfserving portrayal (the movie, after all, was based on a book by the reporters involved), it illustrates the point that individual behavior can be dramatized as an element in the functioning of a social institution...
...Such illusions subvert genuine attempts to comprehend the problems of nuclear energy and undermine real impulses to radical action...
...That's all...
...The influence of a'60s ideology is obvious here, but it is also a traditional theme of movie reality...
...He also orders a deliberate short-circuiting of the system, over the objections of other engineers who warn that it may cause a serious "incident...
...The company president accedes to the demand, but he secretly calls the police to have them break into the control room...
...It is Douglas, the outsider, who voices moral outrage at the attempt to suppress the story and regains possession of his videotape by stealing it from the station...
...The final vindication of his faith is the successful performance of the system under the stresses of the contrived accident...
...A bearded, free-lance cameraman, he dresses in the informal style suggesting the hippie costumes of the '60s, and he has a Chicano assistant...
...Lemmon answers that the plant is safe...
...What is more, when a symbol of radical values is incorporated into the 470 public reputation of a movie, one that in fact does not contain the radical orientation being claimed for it, an illusion is created that an important public issue has been examined from a critical perspective...
Vol. 26 • September 1979 • No. 4
