by Travis Mateer
"I am haunted by waters."
-Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It
What the fuck is going on here? When I yell this question to myself, I try to keep the yelling in my head, especially now that I have a paper-thin wall and someone on the other side of it who I assume doesn’t want to hear the outbursts of someone plagued by synchronicities while trying to do somewhat normal things, like going to the bookstore, or watching a documentary.
Haunted by waters? Sure, among other things, water, and what some members of the psychopath class might be up to with it, is definitely a subject I feel a little haunted by, especially when I realized the Three Mile Island disaster happened amidst the waters of the Susquehanna river, where I spent time earlier this year. Not just that, but it was anticipated in a movie release that I find incredibly synchronistically suspect.
That’s right, less than two weeks before Three Mile Island had its little accident, a movie came out that planted the concept of a nuclear power plant experiencing a catastrophic meltdown that could theoretically put overheated nuclear fuel on a nuclear-heated path straight into the ground and, eventually, all the way to China.
From the link (emphasis mine):
The China Syndrome is a 1979 American disaster thriller film directed by James Bridges and written by Bridges, Mike Gray, and T. S. Cook. The film stars Jane Fonda, Jack Lemmon, Michael Douglas (who also produced), Scott Brady, James Hampton, Peter Donat, Richard Herd, and Wilford Brimley. It follows a television reporter and her cameraman who discover safety coverups at a nuclear power plant. “China syndrome” is a fanciful term that describes a fictional result of a nuclear meltdown, where reactor components melt through their containment structures and into the underlying earth, “all the way to China”.
The China Syndrome premiered at the 1979 Cannes Film Festival, where it competed for the Palme d’Or while Lemmon received the Best Actor Prize. It was theatrically released on March 16, 1979, twelve days before the Three Mile Island nuclear accident in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania, which gave the film’s subject matter an unexpected prescience.
Yes, I’d say a 12 day lag time between fiction becoming reality would have certainly given the film an “unexpected prescience” that was probably not all that appreciated by those impacted by this nuclear accident.
Is there a 2023 corollary to this event? Yes there is, and that’s the connection of the Netflix production of White Noise and the REAL train derailment. The “unexpected prescience” of this movie was hard to ignore. Here’s how the New York Post covered it (emphasis mine):
It seems that the Netflix movie “White Noise” somehow eerily predicted the train derailment in Ohio earlier this month, as the fiery crash and fictional blockbuster share some of the same details.
East Palestine, Ohio, resident Ben Ratner, who also played an evacuee extra in “White Noise,” told People that the situation was “scary.”
“Talk about art imitating life,” the 37-year-old father-of-four told the outlet.
Yes, talk about ART imitating LIFE. Or maybe, just MAYBE, time is not the linear progression our cognitively-limited brains con us into thinking it is.
So, I’ll ask again, what the fuck is going on here? And should it be explored or ignored?
Obviously, having written five posts trying to justify my approach to establishing credibility where not much currently exists (part I, part II, part III, part IV) I think this high strangeness should be explored, but I also think there is a cost, so I don’t do so lightly.
This will be the last official post for 2023, but you can still expect the week in review on Sunday, the actual last day of 2023.
And 2024? I’m not sure how frequently I’ll be posting here, but I’ve got something cooking for the first week of January that should be pretty interesting. Also, there’s my new online project to check out, so I plan on staying busy.
Thanks for reading!
“The China Syndrome” came out at the height of the international No Nukes movement. At the time, lax regulation of commercial reactors was a serious problem. In one instance, one reactor nuclear in a twin reactor project was built backwards, another on a fault
The nuclear cycle involves both so-called “civilian” or “peaceful” electric power generation from fission plants, and proliferation of nuclear weapons. There’s a reason that nuclear warhead production is under auspices of the Dept. of Energy.
What made The China Syndrome so weird was that the fictional nuclear energy reactor in the film was, it was said in dialogue, capable of rendering uninhabitable an area “the size of Pennsylvania,” a line evoking laughter in the audience because the Three Mile Island reactor that had a near meltdown and had to vent radioactive iodine as an unavoidable consequence of venting a hydrogen “bubble” at the top of the inside of the containment vessel, was happening in Hershey, Pennsylvania.
A majority of Reagan’s cabinet appointees were current or past Board members of Bechtel Corporation, the world’s most prolific builder of nuclear power plants. That included Reagan’s Secretary of State, George Schultz.
The Nuclear Freeze movement was huge globally and Reagan deemed it a creation of the USSR. Gorbachev endorsed a freeze on nuke weapons as a first step toward disarmament, whereas Ronnie Ray Gun rejected a freeze and vowed to increase the U.S. nuclear arsenal by 19,000 warheads in three years.
The USSR economy was being ravaged by the arms race. Reagan began deploying intermediate range nukes on mobile launchers in European NATO countries on the USSR’s doorstep, over the massive objections and resistance of millions of citizens of those countries. That, and the Strategic Defense Initiative (“Star Wars”) in which Reagan aggressively militarized space, led to major concessions by Gorby that paved the way for the START treaty.
The CIA manufactured an incident in which an unescorted sea-going barge loaded with weapons grade plutonium was “hijacked and stolen” by pirates who golly gee turned out to be Israel.
In the context of those times, China Syndrome/Three Mile Island-type weird coincidences were inevitable, I’d figure.