Thatcher: The Iron Lady

Well, the holidays for me currently have been predominantly filled with attempting to restore my fried brain after what felt like a never-ending marathon of uni work last year. This of course means doing things like going to the cinema, and spending a lot of time relaxing near beaches attempting to use as little willpower as possible. One of the most recent films I watched was the Iron Lady. I thought this might be a good film to watch for several reasons – it’s British (I’m an anglophile), it has Meryl Streep, and politics is fun. Margaret Thatcher simply as a leader, and a politician has also always fascinated me. One of the, I believe, more controversial points of the film was the fact that the filmmakers portrayed Margaret Thatcher, in her later days, as (putting it simply) losing her mind. She is slowly succumbing to dementia in the film. I wondered what the point might be of portraying her in this way. She is certainly humanized, there is no doubt about that.

However, I found that I still couldn’t let go of the fact that, in reality, I know Margaret Thatcher to be an awful public figure. She enforced and stood for some of the most disgraceful legislation and human rights violations in Britain to date. Yet, she was a feminist. In the film, we are not encouraged to take a good hard look at her political life, but we are encouraged to see her taking a good hard look at it. In other words, no matter what atrocities she has committed she was a woman with a conscience. Many of us would like to draw a black and white veil over political life, but anyone that has spent the least amount of time following any forms of national or international politics would know that this impossible. I believe that film would have us believe that Margaret Thatcher was a product of this. She is not a black and white public figure, nor is she a black and white human being. No liberal British person today would tell you that Thatcher was correct in her actions, but she was an interesting person, and I think that it always pays to attempt to understand what is behind the veil of public life.