80s Hair Dramatics.
After a month in London’s Whitechapel district discussing different permutations of Jack the Ripper, including Johnny Depp’s From Hell (listen) and Michael Caine’s 1988 miniseries (listen), it’s time for Murder Made Fiction to explore a new subject: whistleblowers.
In Mike Nichols‘ 1983 drama Silkwood, Meryl Streep plays real-life activist and attempted whistleblower Karen Silkwood. The first woman to ever join the union bargaining committee at Kerr-McGee was set to expose a potentially deadly cover-up at the company’s Cimarron Plant in Crescent, Oklahoma, back in the early 70s.
Instead, after being deliberately exposed to 400 times the legal limit for plutonium contamination on Nov 5, 1974, Karen’s car was rear-ended on Nov 13. She was impaled by the steering wheel and pinned to the roof of the car in what many believe to be a (successful) attempt to keep her silent.
Screenwriters Nora Ephron and Alice Arlen don’t focus on the end of Karen Silkwood’s life, though; instead, the film is more about her radical turn to activism, the cost of her determination, including the dissolution of friendships (with Cher!) and romances (with Kurt Russell!), and the shady corporate behavior of Kerr McGee.
Listen to find out more.
Want even more Murder Made Fiction? Be sure to check out the pod’s Patreon feed, where Jenn and I have 143 hours of content, including episode-by-episode coverage of HBO’s Chernobyl miniseries (in honor of the 40th anniversary of the disaster this month), as well as the near meltdown of Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant in the aftermath of the 2011 tsunami.
