Freeze!

Hollywood climate propaganda goes nuclear

Freeze verb

1: to become congealed into ice by cold

2: to become chilled with cold

3: to become fixed or motionless (e.g. The Nuclear Freeze Movement)

It was very tempting to start this mini-series of essays on Hollywood’s contribution to climate hysteria with a discussion of “The China Syndrome”, the mother of all climate activism movies. No other film has had a more significant or enduring impact on public opinion about how we create the energy which powers our nation than Michael Douglas’ first serious effort as a Movie Star-Producer hypenate. And while I have never been the type to live down to expectations, at some point, you’ve got to play the hits.

So let’s do it. Let’s discuss the GOAT. The most notorious climate hysteria movie of all time.

One of the most cost-effective, most efficient ways to generate the energy America needs to fuel its homes, economy, industries and entertainment is Nuclear Power. But for the last forty-five years it has been very difficult to build a new nuclear power station here in America. We can’t even build spent nuclear fuel storage depots deep underground and hundreds of miles from where any human would ever want to live without a million lawsuits gumming up the works, in some cases for as long as forty years. In my own state of California, Gavin Newsom’s government has been actively shutting down the few nuclear plants currently in operation and producing cheap reliable electricity. As a result, nuclear power remains mostly a novelty in the United States.

Why?

Three words.

“The China Syndrome.”

“The China Syndrome” is the story of a Los Angeles network TV news host (Jane Fonda) who, along with her cameraman (Michael Douglas), witnesses a nuclear accident at a local power plant. A heroic shift supervisor (Jack Lemon) saves the day, but Fonda and Douglas race back to the station with unauthorized footage of what they are certain is a terrifying and explosive scoop. Under pressure from powerful business interests who have another nuclear facility in the approval pipeline, the network spikes the story. Meanwhile the Nuclear Regulatory Commission does a pro-forma investigation which sweeps the near-disaster under the rug and gives the plant a greenlight to go back online immediately. Unsettled, Jack Lemon begins his own private investigation in which he discovers a massive cover-up of serious safety issues and resolves to bring the truth to the public. But an attempt on his life by “security forces” employed by the power company sends him back to the plant where he steals a gun from a security guard and takes the entire facility hostage, demanding Fonda be allowed inside with her camera crew so that he can tell his story, live on TV.

In the first of this mini-series of essays on Hollywood climate propaganda, published at The Pipeline, I wrote about the difference between great movies and great propaganda, and how the best agitprop combines the two in a way that is extremely rare, but devastatingly effective. Alongside movies like “JFK” and “All The President’s Men”, “The China Syndrome” is just such a movie.

It’s full of incredible actors, for one thing… and not just Lemon, Fonda and a very young Michael Douglas… the supporting roles, too, are filled by all-timer character actors like Wilford Brimley, Peter Donat, James Karen and Richard Herd. Collectively, this cast would go on to amass a collection of Academy hardwear so vast it could sink a WW2-era battleship.

It’s also a very effective thriller, despite the fact that the filmmakers’ thumbs are on the scale. The film features a cadre of craven mustache-twirling villains who transition from subterfuge to outright murder in a breathless heartbeat in a way that seems a little silly, and it incorporates constant cutaways to passionate nuclear freeze protestors, with whom the filmmakers sympathies very obviously lie. But that’s why you hire great actors… they have the skills to close the sale despite the heavy-handed messaging. And this cast could sell sand to a Bedouin.

On top of everything else the film has going for it, it’s also a fantastic example of the old saying that “it’s sometimes better to be lucky than good.”

The movie was released on March 16^th, 1979. On the 28th of March, a mere twelve days later, reactor #2 at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania experienced a partial meltdown and America’s first nuclear panic was born. As marketing tie-ins go, the studio (Columbia Pictures) could hardly have hoped for better. The movie was an enormous hit, grossing almost ten times its budget at the domestic box office. Movie stars were minted, producers cashed backend checks and the anti-nuclear movement quickly came of age.

Still, all things being equal, the nuclear energy business might have recovered from this strange confluence of events. All the standard caveats about the untrustworthiness of Government officials aside, it does appear as if the official story, that the amount of radiation ejected during the Three Mile Island incident was minimal and not particularly dangerous, was true. But then, seven years later, a much more serious incident at a plant called “Chernobyl”, near the town of Prypiat in The Ukraine, would realize the sum of all the “No Nukes!” faction’s fears.

In 1987, the nuclear reactor at Chernobyl experienced a much more serious meltdown and an explosion in one of its reactor cores. The disaster killed dozens in the initial blast and an unknown number of Russians died later from radiation exposure and long-term disease… a number that probably landed in the thousands.

Well, you can imagine how badly Chernobyl must have terrified the American Left. Back in ‘87, they already believed that the Soviets did everything better than we did anyway, so if a Soviet nuclear power plant could go kablooey, kill thousands of Russians and paint huge swaths of the country in enough radiation to make it uninhabitable for generations, what did that say about the American nuclear industry? How many more ticking time bombs might be waiting to go off right here in the decadent West? Hadn’t we just seen a movie about this very thing a couple years ago?

After the twin disasters at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, the anti-nuke activists were able to successfully leverage public fear of nuclear catastrophe and freeze the nuclear power industry in its tracks.

CUT TO: 50 YEARS LATER…

As a result, we now sit on top of a national electrical grid that is wofeully unprepared to meet the demands of America’s energy requirements, even as our “elites” attempt to nudge (force?) us into more-and-more electrically powered vehicles and appliances which require an increasingly massive and impossibly reliable grid. In a sane world, the realities of this situation would have begun to change the way we think about nculear power in the broader culture.

Unfortunately, we do not appear to live in such a world. One of the secondary propaganda results of “The China Syndrome” was that it froze in people’s minds what state-of-the-art nuclear technology looks like. It’s been forty-five years since the movie was released, nuclear power plant safety systems are much more sophisticated now than they were back then. Critical control systems are no longer monitored by blinking plastic annunciator lights, for one thing. Nor are they controlled by enormous Castle Frankenstein-style manual levers and switches. Nevertheless, I suspect too many people believe that modern nuclear power plants still look and operate the same way they did way back in 1979.

As far as Hollywood propaganda goes, it would be almost a half-century before HBO and Craig Maizin would produce “Chernobyl”, a mini-series which made the heretofore-heretical argument that Chernobyl melted down not because nuclear power plants are an inherently dangerous propsition, but because Communism breeds malevolence, corruption, incompetence and carelessness on an industrial scale. But in those intervening years, the anti-nuclear movement held sway over all. From 1978 to 2012, not a single new nuclear power plant was built anywhere in the United States.

Nevertheless, I see cause for optimism in HBO’s effort. Perhaps it’s a sign times really are changing that Maizin, a fairly down-the-middle Hollywood liberal judging by his public persona, not only avoided cancellation for his heresy in creating “Chernobyl”, but was rewarded with the reins to produce a subsequent mini-series based on a much-beloved zombie apocalypse video game called “The Last of Us.” That series too would go on to become a massive hit and Maizin continues to be one of the most sought-after writers in town, despite his heresies with regard to Soviet Communism.

Combine this with the fact that Texas’ over-reliance on wind and solar could not save it from a once-in-a-century freeze in 2021, the growing realization that you can’t build solar panels or lithium batteries without environmentally and socially destructive mineral mines and the occassional devastating fire, that the EV market has finally begun its final bubble burst, or the reality that off-shore wind turbines have a nasty habit of exploding and showering poisonous ejecta all over the beach-front property of some very wealthy assholes… it might just be the case that we are in the middle of what the kids call a “vibe shift.”

Always assuming, of course, that we don’t “freeze!” ourselves to death first.

If you enjoyed this essay and would like to support the work we do here at The Continental Congress, please consider subscribing or sending a link to The Congress to a pop-culture lover in your orbit. You can also pre-order Michael Walsh’s upcoming collection of essays “Against the Corporate Media” to which George contributed an entry. Thank you, so much, for your time and your patronage!