The Coincidence
The China Syndrome premiered on March 16, 1979. It deals with a potential nuclear meltdown at a nuclear power plant. Jane Fonda's in it. The nuclear power industry got into a tizzy about the film, calling it "sheer fiction." Fonda was outspoken about her opposition to nuclear power. Still, her costar, Michael Douglas, had produced the film with his production company, so the oppositional blame should've gone his way, too, but Jane Fonda's a woman; plus she has a reputation, since the Vietnam War years, for being a pain in the establishment's ass, although not so much since the 1970s.
The film, directed by James Bridges (The Paper Chase, Urban Cowboy), got boosted twelve days after its release by a real nuclear power plant accident at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania. As it's written in Wikipedia:
"The accident began with failures in the non-nuclear secondary system, followed by a stuck-open pilot-operated relief valve in the primary system, which allowed large amounts of nuclear reactor coolant to escape...The partial meltdown resulted in the release of radioactive gases and radioactive iodine into the environment."
Nothing to worry about.
The cleanup took fourteen years, costing about a billion dollars. One of the two nuclear generating stations is still used, the other isn't.
The movie, described two days after its release as "a character assassination of an entire industry" by nuclear power advocates, just accidentally timed itself with the Three Mile Island scare, but it also depicts the workings of a powerful corporation as it builds an additional nuclear power plant (with over a billion dollars on the line). The corporation has been successfully operating the first plant, which Kimberly Wells (Fonda), a TV reporter, and her freelance cameraman, Richard Adams (Michael Douglas) get a tour of just as it undergoes a small "event." Rumblings from the reactor, I guess. My limited knowledge of the workings of nuclear power prevent me from going into much detail here as to what exactly happens in the two events (the first small, the second a big one) depicted in the film.
Jack Godell (Jack Lemmon), the plant supervisor, goes from worry to worry. He's at first a background figure in Wells' and Adams' journalism, but Adams secretly records the accident through a viewing window during their tour. He gets a nuclear physicist and a nuclear power expert to examine the images, to explain what's going on in the control room. The experts are convinced that something major could happen, that the first event presages a possible catastrophe, something along the lines of what happened at Chernobyl in 1986.
The TV station is reluctant to go along with this scoop, preferring that Kimberly Wells keep doing the fluff pieces she's best known for. The sexism she encounters at work is institutional. Her coanchor is a typical shit male superior type always ready with the sex jokes and put downs. She is not taken seriously, a great hindrance considering the gravity of the story she most wants to work on. Southern California getting poisoned with radiation merits attention--a corporation willing to go to lethal lengths to prevent news of its bad safety practices from getting out should be exposed.
Godell's life, meanwhile, gets buffeted by an ever intensifying surveillance. The distrust of authority figures prevalent in American 1970s cinema goes strongly in The China Syndrome. These days, in post-9/11 world, authority figures tend to be the heroes, to have TV shows written around them. Fight the terrorists, fight crime. The way to be subversive is to adapt comic books and graphic novels in order to make allegorical this current era's darkness. The few years following 9/11 saw an embarrassing patriotic gush of pro-governnment TV shows, a similar phenomenon to the Reagan decade of the 1980s, when U.S. militarism was celebrated. In The China Syndrome, only a few years after the end of the Vietnam War and Watergate, there's no reluctance to show the corporation operating the plant as a criminally negligent entity. As Mitt Romney said on on the campaign trail in 2012, "Corporations are people, my friend." Yes, and some people are sociopaths.
Edward Teller, one of the great brains who gave us the hydrogen bomb, lobbied against Jane Fonda's anti-nuclear efforts. He had a heart attack as the anti-nuke movement picked up steam after the Three Mile Island accident. He said jokingly that he was the only person whose health was affected by Three Mile Island.
Jack Lemmon is good as the plant supervisor. He was one of those multi-faceted actors who could perform comedy and drama with equal facility. You can see the potential horror of what might happen at the plant written on his face. Michael Douglas is intense, a bit over the top, not quite settled into the strong acting skills he showed in his later years, as in Basic Instinct. Jane Fonda, hair dyed red, is good as always. Her character's personal life is paired with Lemmon's. They both live alone, most of their lives consist of working, there's a lack of personal connection outside what they do for their livings. It's little things like this that make the film a solid dramatic effort. The nuclear power plant and its issues are the main focus, but somehow TV sensationalism plays a role in illuminating the pros and cons of how we get much of our basic needs, like electricity. While egos in TV and in the nuclear world clash, the danger of a malfunctioning nuclear reactor could get the last word, but TV journalism will be there, covering it, just as it benefits, ratings-wise, from hurricanes and wars.
Vic Neptune
The China Syndrome premiered on March 16, 1979. It deals with a potential nuclear meltdown at a nuclear power plant. Jane Fonda's in it. The nuclear power industry got into a tizzy about the film, calling it "sheer fiction." Fonda was outspoken about her opposition to nuclear power. Still, her costar, Michael Douglas, had produced the film with his production company, so the oppositional blame should've gone his way, too, but Jane Fonda's a woman; plus she has a reputation, since the Vietnam War years, for being a pain in the establishment's ass, although not so much since the 1970s.
The film, directed by James Bridges (The Paper Chase, Urban Cowboy), got boosted twelve days after its release by a real nuclear power plant accident at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania. As it's written in Wikipedia:
"The accident began with failures in the non-nuclear secondary system, followed by a stuck-open pilot-operated relief valve in the primary system, which allowed large amounts of nuclear reactor coolant to escape...The partial meltdown resulted in the release of radioactive gases and radioactive iodine into the environment."
Nothing to worry about.
The cleanup took fourteen years, costing about a billion dollars. One of the two nuclear generating stations is still used, the other isn't.
The movie, described two days after its release as "a character assassination of an entire industry" by nuclear power advocates, just accidentally timed itself with the Three Mile Island scare, but it also depicts the workings of a powerful corporation as it builds an additional nuclear power plant (with over a billion dollars on the line). The corporation has been successfully operating the first plant, which Kimberly Wells (Fonda), a TV reporter, and her freelance cameraman, Richard Adams (Michael Douglas) get a tour of just as it undergoes a small "event." Rumblings from the reactor, I guess. My limited knowledge of the workings of nuclear power prevent me from going into much detail here as to what exactly happens in the two events (the first small, the second a big one) depicted in the film.
Jack Godell (Jack Lemmon), the plant supervisor, goes from worry to worry. He's at first a background figure in Wells' and Adams' journalism, but Adams secretly records the accident through a viewing window during their tour. He gets a nuclear physicist and a nuclear power expert to examine the images, to explain what's going on in the control room. The experts are convinced that something major could happen, that the first event presages a possible catastrophe, something along the lines of what happened at Chernobyl in 1986.
The TV station is reluctant to go along with this scoop, preferring that Kimberly Wells keep doing the fluff pieces she's best known for. The sexism she encounters at work is institutional. Her coanchor is a typical shit male superior type always ready with the sex jokes and put downs. She is not taken seriously, a great hindrance considering the gravity of the story she most wants to work on. Southern California getting poisoned with radiation merits attention--a corporation willing to go to lethal lengths to prevent news of its bad safety practices from getting out should be exposed.
Godell's life, meanwhile, gets buffeted by an ever intensifying surveillance. The distrust of authority figures prevalent in American 1970s cinema goes strongly in The China Syndrome. These days, in post-9/11 world, authority figures tend to be the heroes, to have TV shows written around them. Fight the terrorists, fight crime. The way to be subversive is to adapt comic books and graphic novels in order to make allegorical this current era's darkness. The few years following 9/11 saw an embarrassing patriotic gush of pro-governnment TV shows, a similar phenomenon to the Reagan decade of the 1980s, when U.S. militarism was celebrated. In The China Syndrome, only a few years after the end of the Vietnam War and Watergate, there's no reluctance to show the corporation operating the plant as a criminally negligent entity. As Mitt Romney said on on the campaign trail in 2012, "Corporations are people, my friend." Yes, and some people are sociopaths.
Edward Teller, one of the great brains who gave us the hydrogen bomb, lobbied against Jane Fonda's anti-nuclear efforts. He had a heart attack as the anti-nuke movement picked up steam after the Three Mile Island accident. He said jokingly that he was the only person whose health was affected by Three Mile Island.
Jack Lemmon is good as the plant supervisor. He was one of those multi-faceted actors who could perform comedy and drama with equal facility. You can see the potential horror of what might happen at the plant written on his face. Michael Douglas is intense, a bit over the top, not quite settled into the strong acting skills he showed in his later years, as in Basic Instinct. Jane Fonda, hair dyed red, is good as always. Her character's personal life is paired with Lemmon's. They both live alone, most of their lives consist of working, there's a lack of personal connection outside what they do for their livings. It's little things like this that make the film a solid dramatic effort. The nuclear power plant and its issues are the main focus, but somehow TV sensationalism plays a role in illuminating the pros and cons of how we get much of our basic needs, like electricity. While egos in TV and in the nuclear world clash, the danger of a malfunctioning nuclear reactor could get the last word, but TV journalism will be there, covering it, just as it benefits, ratings-wise, from hurricanes and wars.
Vic Neptune
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