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Published on April 12, 2012
By Herself: “The Iron Lady”
by MARK FISHER
Phyllida Law’s controversial biopic of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher,
starring Meryl Streep, is now out on DVD (The Weinstein Company). MARK FISHER
explores the politics of The Iron Lady.
The Iron Lady. Photo: Pathé Production.
It’s no doubt fitting that The Iron Lady is a strangely unmemorable film. Its point of
view is provided by a now demented former prime minister, her memory
disintegrating, kept company by phantoms from the past (most notably her late
husband Denis) as present events continually trigger recollections of earlier, more
momentous times. With its longueurs and its quiet intimacy, the inertial opening
section of the film invites us to believe that The Iron Lady might be about the
Thatcher who haunts the pages of the late Gordon Burn’s Born Yesterday: The News
as a Novel. “Where does she go in between all the times she is not being ‘Margaret
Thatcher’?”, asked Burn, who observed the ailing Thatcher while walking his dog in
Battersea Park. “The answer, sometimes, it seems, is here, where the short,
purposeful steps of her performance self are allowed to dwindle into the short,
tentative steps of pensionerdom and widowhood and she is allowed time away
from the big emphatic colours she uses to identify herself for the cameras—her
blazons” (Faber and Faber, 2008, 17–18).
The Iron Lady. Photo: Pathé Production.
Yet it’s soon clear that the scenes of the older Thatcher serve as framing for
standard biopic material. Thatcher’s improbable rise from Conservative MP to
Prime Minister (thirty years on, she remains the only woman to have held the post),
and the messy trauma of her deposal, make for an extraordinary trajectory.
Thatcher was a contradictory figure who yearned for Victorian values at the same
time as she presided over what was in effect a revolution in British society—her
defeat of the unions, privatization of nationalized industries and deregulation of
financial industries constructed a new Britain. And a new image for the ruling class.
On her rise to power, Thatcher had to overcome not only sexism, but class
prejudice—as the daughter of a Grantham grocer, she came from outside the
aristocratic Etonian set from which the Conservative Party had up until then
expected to select its leaders. Her struggles with the Conservative old guard
accounted for much of her appeal—Thatcher’s presentation of herself as someone
intolerant of vested interests of all kinds allowed her to strike an egalitarian tone
that, in turn, enabled the Conservatives to reinvent themselves as a populist party.
(It’s perhaps ironic that The Iron Lady was released at a moment when Etonians have
once again regained control of the party and the country.) All of this is intensely
dramatic material, but Law handles it in a curiously muted, offhand way. What
Thatcher’s political policies were, what motivated her to pursue them, what their
effects were: don’t go to The Iron Lady if you want to learn about any of this.
Alexandra Lloyd, who plays the young Thatcher, and Meryl Streep, who plays
Thatcher in her later years, are seen against the backdrop of historical contexts that
are staged only in the most generic way. Some of the most dramatic events in
recent British history—the Falklands War, the Miners’ Strike, the Poll Tax riots—are
rushed past, barely narrated, still less contextualized or illuminated. This has led to
The Iron Lady being accused of depoliticization, but in fact the film’s retreat itself
serves the ideological agenda of a leader who famously proclaimed that “there’s no
such thing as society.” That remark could serve as an ironic epitaph for the scenes
of the solitary old Thatcher, abandoned by all but her security minders and her
daughter.
The Iron Lady. Photo: Pathé Production.
Streep’s performance has been fanfared, not without some justification, since her
simulation of the prime minister is pleasingly lacking in ego, to the degree that one
often forgets that it is Streep onscreen, without ever believing that we are seeing
Thatcher. But the film’s portrayal of Thatcher fails in a fundamental way because
we gain no new insights either into what she was like, or what it was like to be her.
The problem is not with Streep, but with the whole conception of the film. The
biopic form—or at least Law and screenwriter Abi Morgan’s version of it—
automatically makes Thatcher, one of the most divisive figures in twentiethcentury British politics, into a sympathetic figure. As Morgan herself noted in an
interview for www.film4.com, “As a result of working on the film, I can’t help but
have incredible respect for her, realising what an incredibly strong leader she
was.” At one point, we see the older Thatcher complaining, “People don’t think
anymore. They feel. ‘How are you feeling? No, I don’t feel comfortable. I’m sorry,
we as a group we’re feeling …’ One of the great problems of our age is that we are
governed by people who care more about feelings than they do about thoughts and
ideas.” It’s a critique that has some point, not least because The Iron Lady is by no
means exempt from its strictures. In fact, it’s as if the film here achieves a moment
of self-reflexive critical awareness—even as if Streep’s Thatcher is rejecting the
terms in which the film has described her. Yet the shift from thought to feeling is
one of the no doubt unintentional effects of the unleashing of consumer libido in
the 1980s.
Thatcher herself was by no means a great thinker, but a whole intellectual lineage
went into constructing “Thatcherism,” none of which is mentioned in The Iron Lady.
Significantly, what we are instead made privy to is the construction of the Thatcher
persona, as Thatcher is trained to develop the deeper, supposedly more
authoritative voice that became one of her trademarks. The Iron Lady would have us
believe that the most significant intellectual influence on Thatcher was her
shopkeeper father. The homilies about thrift and hard work which Thatcher
learned from her father were comically irrelevant to the immense abstractions of
finance capital, yet such folk economics—understanding the financial system as if it
was a household budget—served (and continue to serve) a major ideological
function. The vicissitudes of capital are obfuscated by an emphasis on personal
responsibility. Such personological focus is an inbuilt vice of the biopic, but, at its
best, the form can show the historical forces that act upon an individual, through—
and against—which they define themselves. But, fittingly given its subject, The Iron
Lady leaves us with only the self-made, solitary individual.
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