John and Matthew are watching every single live-action film starring Meryl Streep.
#9 — Karen Silkwood, a real-life chemical technician turned labor union activist and whistleblower.
“Karen Silkwood has come to stand for so many things to so many people that I had to start all over again in trying to play her as a person, not a symbol. I really don't think we can know much about people after they're not there to tell us. All their real, real secrets die with them. At the end of this whole experience of making this movie, I thought about those minutes before Karen's car went off the road, and I missed her.”
— Meryl Streep, 1983
MATTHEW: Meryl Streep appears in every scene and what feels like nearly every shot of Silkwood, which marked the first but certainly not the last time that the actress would play a real person. Streep’s career was technically still in its early stages when Silkwood’s cameras began rolling in Texas in 1982, but it was already replete with shelves of awards and a peerless level of respectability that prompted co-star Cher to crack this gem about first meeting Streep: “I thought it was going to be like having an audience with the Pope”
As directed by Mike Nichols (possibly Streep’s most fruitful longtime collaborator) and co-written by Alice Arlen and Nora Ephron with her specifically in mind, Silkwood also occasioned the first unambiguously political part of the actress’ career, if not the most political, period. This is true in two senses: Karen Silkwood was stalwart in her long fight for workplace reformation, fearlessly putting herself on the line to ensure the civil rights of the men and women she worked beside at one of Kerr-McGee’s nuclear fuel production facilities outside Cimarron, Oklahoma. This same company would eventually contaminate Silkwood and, by some accounts, end her life, further enshrining her as an activistic emblem in the minds of many. But I would argue that Silkwood, a factually-adherent but nonetheless dramatic creation, is also the first film in which Streep is unequivocally the protagonist of her film, in which she plays a character whose lived experiences aren’t part of the larger fabric of someone else’s story nor filtered through the lens of another character. In Silkwood, Karen Silkwood is ultimately defined on no one else’s terms but her own.
It’s indicative of Silkwood’s idiosyncratic power that the first instances in which we see Karen are casually jocular, devoid of the reverential varnish with which biopics are usually crafted these days. Silkwood announces itself from the very beginning as a biopic of an everywoman whose life just so happened to take on heroic dimensions. This is why we see Karen blowing gum, barely able to explain directions to a group of newbie hires without smirking like a cheshire cat. Or working her way around the plant’s cafeteria with her tousled mullet and tomboy strut, picking at her coworkers’ food and fiddling with the t-shirt sleeve of Drew, her live-in boyfriend, played with beefcake sensitivity by a never-better Kurt Russell. I remember these moments as if I was in the very room where they happened. Indeed, there are scattered moments in my daily life where I will recall a joke, tic, or movement of Streep’s Karen Silkwood with a vivid clarity that is embarrassingly lacking from memories of certain friends, family, and other people I actually know. I can only chalk this up to the character-inhabiting virtuosity of Streep, who makes Karen into a rounded and restless creature of electric, sometimes febrile awareness, no matter the setting or situation, in what I consider her greatest film and performance. Care to disagree?
JOHN: I am confused by those who feel otherwise. Karen Silkwood’s political awakening remains unmatched in Streep’s filmography by several counts. Silkwood is the best Jane Fonda movie Jane Fonda never made. Literally: Fonda was attached to star as early as 1975, but legal snafus stalled the project, and Fonda instead made The China Syndrome, a more outrightly terrifying nuclear thriller. Fonda’s career-long campaign to produce politically relevant mainstream films surely paved the way for Silkwood and its clear-eyed commitment to making the personal political, but it’s especially exciting to see this firestorm of talent seize all the possibilities of the subgenre. Karen Silkwood’s consciousness-raising is rendered by Streep not as some eureka moment but rather as a logical progression of her innate, steadfast concern for others and a dogged responsibility to fight back against unconscionable evil, an “ordinary” woman who rises to the occasion of her extraordinary circumstances.
Silkwood is, by my count, Streep’s first major star turn, an admittedly oxymoronic way to describe her ascendancy from acting marvel to critically-acclaimed superstar. It’s that rare performance which not only showcases the actor to the best of her ability (and in Streep's case, we’re talking top shelf thesping), but also works as a star-text connected to Streep’s own persona. Continually chided by critics for being a “technical” actress without any personality “underneath,” Streep turns in her most full-bodied, relaxed, and lived-in performance, quelling any doubts of her abilities and providing the public with buckets of that charisma that she has always had but had never really been given the opportunity to emit until Silkwood. In an Observer interview she gave to Joyce Egginton at the time, Streep is quite candid about the affinity she felt between Karen and herself:
“I've done more literary types in the past, but Karen Silkwood is closer to what I'm really like than, say, The French Lieutenant's Woman. I'm from a small town like she was, and I, too, went to an American high school and worked for a living. Like her, I operate on my gut feelings, my emotions, not always analysing from a distance.
That helps me to understand the motives for her actions. I don't think they were always completely, pure. She was one of those people who chafed against authority; hers was the kind of personality which likes to cause trouble. Some part of her was genuinely disturbed by the sloppy conditions at the plant, and the dangers to workers, and some part of her was attracted by the headiness of the adventure. It reminded me of my own bit of political action in my college days when we were demonstrating against the Vietnam war, against the involvement of industry in scientific research; while we cared about these things it was also glamorous and exciting to be part of those demonstrations.”
Karen Silkwood is a hero with edges that can’t be smoothed down through any conventional biopic tricks. Nichols and Streep take time threading the early clues of Karen’s heroism: notice Karen scramble to get time off to see her kids in Texas, a prime instance of her untidy obligations. Or notice how Karen seems to genuinely care about Thelma and her daughter’s health problems long before she experiences similar symptoms of her own. When she happens upon employees burning a truck outside the plant, she can’t help but stick her nose in this strange cover-up. Notice too how she only slowly emerges from the frame as being just one of the ensemble before later occupying her commanding close-ups. There’s a spontaneity and excitement to Streep’s performance that feels both of its place and alien to her forbidding factory surroundings. Nichols nails the feeling of corporate domination, alienated labor, and tense espionage, but the mere presence of Karen — getting bubblegum stuck to her nose, having a cake for her co-worker Gilda’s birthday, flashing her breast to a room of men — conveys a vitality that counters the sterile and hazardous factory. Connecting the dots between Karen’s concern and gumption to her stint as a union activist makes complete sense, entirely care of Streep’s detailed and organic performance.
What are some more of your favorite moments that we haven’t touched on? Pick her best scene.
MATTHEW: Where do I even begin? I relish those scenes at the plant with her plutonium-pelleting colleagues, each of whom Streep has forged wonderfully specific and subtly shifting relationships with, from E. Katherine Kerr’s sweetly sympathetic and then finally insulted Gilda to Fred Ward’s ribald and later perturbed comrade-in-arms Morgan to Kent Broadhurst’s Carl, whose scowling, unflagging disdain for Karen always intrigues me. Streep feels empathically attuned to all of these fellow ensemble members, even in the moments when Karen’s consideration of others’ feelings leaves much to be desired. You never get the sense that a star performer has dropped in for a few hours of work with a stable of New York theater actors with whom she has interacted for just a few minutes at craft services. As she teases Gilda about her sex life, guffaws at one of Morgan’s filthy jokes, or scowls right back at Carl, I fully believe that Streep has been teasing, guffawing, and scowling with this same group of people for years.
These scenes and this environment evince the loosest and most uninhibited acting of Streep’s entire body of work up until this point. Even a gesture as potentially ignorable as her spastic, hand-waving dancing in front of the monitors is deeply rewarding because it instantly personalizes and particularizes Karen. Streep has always excelled at spiritedly fulfilling the emotional beats of a given script but her vehicles have seldom allowed her to invest a character with an interminable assortment of behavioral tics and temperamental foibles. Karen is a gloriously physical creation, which hardly makes it surprising that Streep approached the character through an external and experiential entryway (i.e. adopting Karen’s chain-smoking), as opposed to a psychological one.
However, the overall purpose of these qualities isn’t to purely draw attention to themselves in that self-conscious, Forrest Gumpian way but to vividly make up the unpredictable, variegated patchwork that is Karen’s outward-facing persona. In enacting this, Streep emits a brash, headstrong energy that could believably entice and exasperate lovers, friends, and fellow workers. Even amid sickness and increasing alienation, she puts forth a sarcastically simpering facade that becomes its own slyly-waged form of personal protest.
The character’s quieter moments feel just as astutely-judged, whether she’s silently registering that the D.C. men are underwhelmed by her workmates’ testimonies or just chatting with Cher and Russell, who make up two of the most credible, multilayered connections Streep has ever fostered on screen. There are casual minimalist touches to so many of their dialogues, as when Karen questions Dolly on the plane to Texas, post-contamination, about just how much the latter has revealed to the high-rankers at Kerr-McGee. Throughout this scene, a friendly exchange that gradually becomes an interrogation, Streep maintains patience even though we can detect that suspicion and fear are simmering right beneath the surface. Streep knows, as do Nichols and the rest of the cast, that sometimes all we need to see are suggestions of these emotions rather than their full exhibition.
These scenes with Cher and Russell also invest the film with an intimacy that is impossible to shake away. I can pinpoint my favorite scenes with each of these characters, both defined by a gesture of affection, one spoken, the other speechless. First, there’s that beautiful, briefly peacemaking dialogue between Karen and Dolly on the porch swing, the odd interruption of tranquility within these two friends’ typically bruising treatment of each other. When Streep begins stroking Cher’s hair, she encourages a tactile, interpersonal spontaneity in her co-star’s own performance as Dolly, one of American cinema’s most heartbreaking characters.
Later on in the film, Streep shares a scene in bed with Russell upon their return from testing in Texas. He’s optimistic, hastily planning their future, but she’s more anxious than ever. As Drew broaches the subject of having kids of their own, Karen reminds him that her contamination has made childbearing an impossibility. “They wouldn’t come out right,” she says. “Hell, I didn’t come out right,” he replies with joshing reassurance. “You came out okay,” she tells him and the whispering way that Streep underplays the line is devastating. Karen can already see the end but has chosen this moment to lovingly reassure somebody else — her doting, on-again/off-again man — that he is seen, heard, and appreciated, making this scene undeniably ominous but also astonishingly tender, even romantic.
What else sticks out to you?
JOHN: It's hard to find a scene that isn't special. If I had to choose my absolute favorite moment it might be Karen, post-second-shower, cigarette in hand, annoyed at the ordeal she has just endured, steeling herself for all that she knows will come. It might be Karen slinking down to the floor after setting off the radiation alarms, realizing she has been enmeshed even deeper into a mess spiraling beyond her control, waging a battle she knows she won't win. It might be Karen signing up for a union job she only half comprehends as she stumbles into a meeting that’s just finishing, or the way she waits to get Ron Silver and Josef Sommer alone in Washington before divulging information in which she only can only semi-fathom the consequences. Or it might be Karen watching a hazmat crew bag and tag her possessions, perhaps grasping for the first time the full extent of her condition, and storming off, unwilling or unable to bear the agony.
Silkwood is attuned to the personal costs of Karen’s professional ambitions, but because Streep plays Karen as a person and not a symbol, I’m still inspired by her moral compass, persistence, and dream of a better world. When I think of “the personal is political,” I often think about Karen Silkwood, smoking, pissed, her skin burning, her mullet deflated, mad as hell and not willing to take it anymore.
MATTHEW: In Silkwood, Streep’s technique is baked into the performance in a way that’s remarkably self-effacing, even sometimes self-vanquishing. It isn’t the main, foregrounded attraction, as it oftentimes is in Sophie’s Choice, a film whose existence is barely imaginable without Streep’s conspicuous displays of talent. And while her talent is certainly as commanding as ever in Silkwood, I never really notice it when I watch the film because it has been so fluidly and mutedly embedded within the character. Her body, mind, and heart are Karen’s.
This most recent watch of Silkwood was my fourth viewing of the film, which only gets stronger and more stimulating with each encounter. But I vividly remember the second time I watched it, maybe a year or so ago. I was alone and although I was certainly enjoying the film, it hadn’t elicited any especially intense emotional responses. And yet, when the film cut to its last scene — a slowed-down replay of Karen flashing and bidding one unwittingly final farewell to Drew before driving away — I felt the breath quite literally ripped out of my chest. And I began to sob, almost uncontrollably.
I had never experienced a reaction this overwhelming to any film, before or since. And while I didn’t immediately understand why, the reason is more or less clear to me now. Nichols and his editor, Sam O’Steen, could not have possibly ended on a more perfect final note: a moment of undiluted joy that captures Karen not as an activist or martyr but as a puckish, teasing prankster. Silkwood sees every single side of Karen and honors her right to be a messy and complicated human being, knowing full well that heroism rarely exists without complexity.
For two-plus hours I had been utterly immersed in Karen’s world, attaining a level of closeness to this brave, flawed woman that we only ever experience with a handful of people in our real lives, only to then have her ripped away with the cruel abruptness with which the real Karen left this earth. This is the capacity of Streep’s unparalleled mastery. My one-sided attachment to the character may very well have been an illusion, but does the artifice of cinematic role-playing actually matter if the emotions one feels are real and truthful? Karen was with me until she wasn’t. And then I missed her.
