The Iron (Yet Oddly Infirm) Lady...

So, I just finished watching Meryl Streep in “The Iron Lady.” 

As always, I cannot say enough good about the divine Meryl Streep—I have loved her performances in practically everything she’s done, and this is no exception. Indeed, her physicality in “The Iron Lady” made me honestly forget from time-to-time that she was not an 86 year old woman.

Yet, regarding the movie itself, I cannot help but cry out: “You’re a walking lie; and I can see right THROUGH you!”

Please note that I’m about to start discussing spoilers from the film, so, if you haven’t seen it yet, you might want to avoid the rest of this post…

“[Margaret Thatcher] made popular a host of right-wing prejudices and homilies such as comparing government expenditure to household spending, and denying the logic of Keynesian economics, stating that governments could not spend their way out of recession...Across the Atlantic, Ronald Reagan used a similar, simple language to mark a new era of government. Each sought to reconfigure the state, getting out of welfare and macroeconomic management while pouring public resources into defence, security and foreign affairs.”  ~ Gerry Hassan and Anthony Barnett, Breaking out of Britain’s Neo-Liberal State (2009)

There are two different stories being told in “The Iron Lady:” 

The first story—and the one I feel the creators want us to pay closest attention to—is that of an older woman. In the here-and-now (2011), she is seen as merely a shadow of her former self, plagued by dementia and grief-stricken over the loss of her husband (Denis) some eight years prior. This woman’s worried daughter (Carol), personal assistant(?), and absentee son (Mark) all conspire to keep her—once Britain’s first female Prime Minister—out of the public eye, while the ‘ghost’ of her dead husband follows her around and reminds her of bygone moments in her life.

The story of an older woman...

The second story—the ‘B-story,’ if you will—is more-or-less that of Margaret Thatcher’s political career. It follows her inculcation in conservative politics through her father (a lapsed liberal, more or less), touches upon her time at Oxford (where she met Denis), and glosses almost entirely over her time as a lawyer, an MP, Education Secretary, and Leader of the Opposition—i.e., approximately 26 years of her life. 

What we instead receive is a rose-colored—no, I won’t go that far—salmon-colored version of Thatcher’s time as Prime Minister. Audiences receive glimpses of the troubling Brixton Riots (1981), the divisive and socially-explosive miners’ strike (1984-85), and even a somewhat longer look at the militarized re-occupation of the Falklands (1982). But, by the end, these issues are set aside and audiences are nonetheless still left with hints at economic prosperity as a result of Thatcher’s “hard medicine,” neoliberal policies.

Thatcher (Streep) approaches No. 10 as Prime Minister

“…the core twin principles of Thatcher’s regime: the intensification of centralised executive authority and the cultivation of an elite order at ease with a politics focused on winners, wealth and corporate logic—a neo-liberal regime.” ~ Gerry Hassan and Anthony Barnett, Breaking out of Britain’s Neo-Liberal State (2009)

Okay, so just like there are two stories going on in “The Iron Lady,” I have two reactions:

My first reaction: If I allow myself to parse-out the narrative about the older woman coping with loss and our cultural treatment of the longer-lived* (thereby eliminating the problems of Thatcherism all together), then I have to say ‘kudos’ to the creators for a decent effort. 

The opening scene in the convenience store represents our collective intolerance, and the invisibility of the aged (especially women). Likewise, the scenes with the older woman’s children and assistant demonstrate the way we infantilize those of an advanced age because we assume they are mentally deficient and incapable of taking care of themselves—’cause, God knows, we can’t be bothered to actually talk to them, and find out what they’re thinking and feeling! 

He cuts her off without even seeing her...

In essence, “The Iron Lady’s” primary narrative showcases our cultural view of the elderly as a problem that we don’t quite no how to deal with (and so we don’t). Nonetheless, in the end, the film’s creators problematize that cultural assumption by having the older woman take a dose of her own “hard medicine” and send her husband’s ghost packing—literally!—thereby challenging the audience’s assumptions about her ineptitude and feebleness. 

Denis is sent off...

My second reaction: By juxtaposing Thatcher’s pernicious premiership against the dominant cultural assumptions UK/US cultures makes about longer-lived women, the film’s creators have attempted to make Thatcher’s actions (and, by extension, her neoliberal policies) seem relatively non-threatening in the grand-scheme of things. 

Similarly, by playing to ideologically-rooted—and emotionally-ladden—myths of (grand-)motherness, as well as our collective sympathies (to the extent that they exist) for the mentally infirm, audiences are left actually rooting for and excusing the actions of a woman whose tenure in office was marked by greater attention to corporate interests than the proverbial ‘little guy.’

(This is not to say that I was so distracted by such coded messages that I fell fully into the creators’ trap; but, I confess, there were times where I found myself thinking “Aww, she wasn’t so bad, really”—at which point I would promptly slap myself in the face and come back to my senses!)

So, yeah: all-in-all, there were definitely some problems with “The Iron Lady.” 

Was it worth watching? Sure. I’m a huge Meryl Streep fan, and I cannot deny that she does a remarkable job assuming the role of former PM Margaret Thatcher. Also, the makeup was superb, and what I have referred to throughout as the ‘A-story’ is very (bitter-)sweet. 

Thatcher at the Doctor's

 

I would simply caution viewers to be careful that they don’t get so swept-up in our society’s culturally-rooted ideas about age, gender, and disease, that they forget the social- and economic-reality of Thatcher’s problematic premiership.

* I think I’m reasonably safe in assuming that today’s British culture treats longer-lived persons in roughly the same way as modern US American culture.