Margaret Thatcher whitewashed on film

This is a music video of an Elvis Costello song on Margaret Thatcher.

By Chris Marsden in Britain:

The Iron Lady: What were they thinking?

10 January 2012

Directed by Phyllida Lloyd, written by Abi Morgan

The Iron Lady, a fictional account of former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher’s rise and fall, should have been at the very least interesting, even an important work. So how did it, with the sole exception of a truly remarkable performance by Meryl Streep as Thatcher, end up as such a spectacular misfire? …

The treatment of the only other substantially developed character, Denis Thatcher, played by Broadbent as a jovial old curmudgeon, is particularly ludicrous. Thatcher was a fairly horrible man, a multimillionaire anti-communist, an admirer of South African apartheid, who described the population of Brixton in south London as “Fuzzy-Wuzzies”. This reality makes his use as a loveable foil to the cold and austere Thatcher saccharine, at times nauseatingly so. …

The only political event given greater attention is the Falklands-Malvinas War. Here we see the most naked whitewash of Thatcher. After showing her as a child during the Luftwaffe’s bombing of Grantham, and as the victim of terrorism at the hands of the IRA, The Iron Lady offers us a version of the British prime minister as a new Winston Churchill. The open admirer of Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet, Thatcher is seen passionately pledging her determination to defeat the “fascists” of the Argentine Junta. The sinking of the ARA General Belgrano in May 1982, with 323 Argentine lives lost, while it was sailing away from and outside of Britain’s declared exclusion zone, is justified in the film by the military’s telling Thatcher that the ship could easily turn back and carry out a pincer movement. …

The Iron Lady is released as David Cameron’s Tory-Liberal Democrat coalition is imposing savage austerity measures to make workers pay for the collapse facilitated by the free market nostrums on which Thatcher’s historical reputation depends. Under these conditions, to adopt a pose of impartiality in dealing with her life is not simply an artistic choice. It suggests a desire to produce something generally acceptable to the ruling elite, which plans to provide her a state funeral and wants no questioning of her legacy in such tense political and social circumstances.

Other reviews of this film are here. And here.

Miners’ wives and other women supporters of the 1984-5 Miners’ Strike unfurled a banner last Friday outside the first Chesterfield showing of the new film about Margaret Thatcher. The film is called The Iron Lady—but the women say they are “The Real Iron Ladies”: here.

Although the slogan “Maggie Thatcher – Milk Snatcher” has achieved iconic status, Arthur [Jones from Wales] was arguably the first to coin it: here.

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