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.
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| 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.
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| 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!
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
