Margaret Thatcher’s dramatic life has the makings of a great movie. The Iron Lady isn’t it. Somewhere between a third and half of the movie ignores her career and portrays her as a hallucinating old woman trying to justify herself to her dead husband. It’s insulting to a still living woman and a way for director Phyllida Lloyd and screenwriter Abi Morgan to sneak in a shockingly anti-feminist critique of Thatcher. It’s unforgivable that they twisted events, as Virginia Postrel observed:
We see Thatcher giving her teenage daughter, Carol, a driving lesson. They have a wild time on the road. Thatcher grabs the steering wheel, forcing the car to swerve right (get it?) to avoid an oncoming driver who is dangerously straddling the center line. Mother and daughter come into the house laughing. But this happy bonding quickly breaks down when Margaret announces her intention to run for Conservative Party leader.“I thought I was having a driving lesson, but it was all about my mother!” yells Carol, storming out of the room.
Denis, still alive in this flashback, then reminds his wife that he’s told her that “business is a bit rocky and the doctor says I need a rest.” Insensitive to his problems, she prattles on about running for party leader. “You’re insufferable, Margaret,” he says. “You know that?”
When she responds with talk of duty and public service, he snaps, “Don’t call it duty! It’s ambition that’s got you this far — ambition! The rest of us — me, the children, we can all go to hell! Don’t worry about me,” he concludes, with a mixture of resignation and sarcasm, “I’ll be fine.”
Greasy Pole
Recalling the scene, the phantom Denis asks how many days it took her to realize he’d gone to South Africa. “When did I lose track of everyone?” she muses.
And here comes the moral: “You were too busy climbing the greasy pole.”
No wonder she wound up lonely and demented. The Iron Lady was just out for herself, a self-centered rat who missed the important things in life. At least that’s what a viewer who knew only the movie might suppose.
This crucial scene is worse than fabricated. It twists real events to make its moralistic point.
In the real world, Denis Thatcher, who was something of a workaholic himself, did in fact take a sabbatical in South Africa and Switzerland — in 1964, a full decade before Margaret ran for party leader and for reasons that had little to do with his wife. On his return, he sold the family business to a larger company.
And Margaret Thatcher did indeed give her daughter driving lessons. After a professional instructor terrified Carol with a rush-hour trip through London’s busy Sloane Square, Margaret persuaded her daughter not to give up. “Thanks to her,” Carol Thatcher writes in her 2008 memoir “A Swim-on Part in the Goldfish Bowl,” “I eventually passed my test.” That, too, happened years before Thatcher ran for party leader. Her children, born in 1953, were adults during Thatcher’s years as head of the Conservative Party. Carol was in fact taking her law exams as the Tories were casting their party-leader votes — a nice bit of parallel tension that the movie skips.
Denis Thatcher was long his wife’s greatest cheerleader. As a young and nervous candidate, Mrs. Thatcher was once paralyzed on the stump until Denis started his friends cheering for her. For the rest of her career, Denis was always leading the cheering section (even at an American Enterprise Institute event years after she left active politics). Denis was the rare man who disproved Katherine Anne Porter’s assessment of men and marriage:
I know that when a woman loves a man, she builds him up and supports him. I never knew a man who loved a woman enough for this. He cannot help it, it is his deepest instinct to destroy, quite often subtly, insidiously, but constantly and endlessly, her very center of her being, her confidence in herself as a woman.
Lloyd and Morgan have shoehorned poor Denis Thatcher into this worldview that was wildly not his own. Disgraceful.
Here are some things that really should have been in the movie:
Thatcher was a ferocious enemy of the Soviet Union, to the point where Pravda gave her the nickname “The Iron Lady.” Thatcher appropriated the intended smear and made it stick: it’s the title of the film. Why did they leave this out?
Note that the above trailer closes with a scene that didn’t actually make the movie: Thatcher asking the men at a state dinner, “Gentleman, shall we join the ladies?” Particularly given the early scenes where young Margaret Roberts had to leave the room while the men talked, this is the sort of elementary contrast that needs to be in a film. Thatcher actually did say this, so leaving it out is yet another sign of incompetent film making.
We see her take questions in Parliament, but only once as a junior minister and never as Prime Minister. She was consistently better prepared and regularly smashed the leader of the opposition, Neil Kinnock. In the above clip, we see the actual Thatcher’s last time at Prime Minister’s questions. She had already been knifed in the back by her own party, and even here, she can roll with raucous and overcome her opposition. Prime Minister’s questions is one of the places where Thatcher shined: she loved it and excelled at it. When she was challenged abroad by a panel of Soviet politicians, she demonstrated that she knew more about the Soviet economy than they did. It would have been a wonderful contrast to see her as Prime Minister dominating where she had once floundered, and the film makers simply gloss over it.
Thatcher is consistently portrayed as a headstrong and near reckless leader. But the real woman was often shrewd and cautious and perfectly willing to concede fights that she was not yet able to win. We never see Arthur Scargill, the Stalinist leader of the mining unions, but he was one of her chief antagonists. Shortly after she she became Prime Minister, he called a general strike and Thatcher more or less gave him everything he wanted because the government was in no position to break the strike. She carefully laid down stockpiles of coal—a three years supply of it!—so when he started another general strike later, she was able to break the miner’s union (The movie Billy Elliot uses this conflict as a backdrop). Thatcher took a long view, made a strategy, and overcame the most powerful man in Britain who wasn’t an MP.
As a young woman, Thatcher was a research chemist who actually patented methods for preserving ice cream. We see her campaigning amongst ice cream workers, but the film makers missed an opportunity to show a woman coming full circle.
The film makers show the IRA bombing of the conservative convention at Brighton, but they only show Thatcher’s initial and horrified reaction. Far more important, the next day she carried on with the speech she had been editing, which she delivered without changes. Thatcher made the point that we carry on despite terror. This was again lost.
The above are major points. Here are some minor things that would have been nice:
Geoffrey Howe is seriously underdeveloped as a character. He was sometimes right, particularly in his Thatcher’s early days as her Chancellor of the Exchequer, and sometimes wrong, particularly on the single currency, and Thatcher did mistreat him, but we’re left with the impression that he’s just a squish, which he wasn’t. Given that his resignation eventually led to Thatcher’s own downfall, the audience needed some more development of his character. And by cutting away from the leadership race too soon, they leave the impression that the Tory Wet challenger Michael Heseltine won it, when it was actually won by John Major, another Tory Dry.
Other key members of Thatcher’s cabinet in particular and British politics in general aren’t developed. Norman Tebbit, whose wife was crippled by the Brighton bombing, is nowhere to be seen, but he would have been excellent and colorful addition. Ted Heath needed to be built up more so we can see him as an antagonist better. Enoch Powell, her most formidable critic on the right (just as Barry Goldwater paved the way for Ronald Reagan, so did Powell cut the trail for Thatcher) should have had some lines—even if only his cutting remark about her principles, “A pity she doesn’t understand them!” Neil Kinnock, leader of the opposition, also needed some screen time.
And how could the film makers have left out Willie Whitelaw? He was Heath’s deputy and then Thatcher’s, a Tory Wet who nevertheless backed Thatcher’s Tory Drys. He was so loyal and useful to her that she once exclaimed “Every Prime Minister needs a Willie!” It would have been a much needed bit of comic relief in a film that took itself far too seriously. Further, his departure to the House of Lords meant that Thatcher lost one of her key sounding boards; he was a critic she respected enough to listen to, and losing him meant losing her eyes and ears.
Ronald Reagan was Thatcher’s ideological soulmate and needed to be here. Just as he backed her during the Falklands crisis, she was the only European leader who backed his retaliation against Gaddafi. We do see Thatcher tearing Al Haig to pieces, but that was only a small part of the relationship between the US and the UK.
British Prime Ministers, unlike American presidents, have very few personal aides. When cabinet meetings went late at Downing Street, Thatcher would regularly cook eggs and bacon for people working late. That’s the sort of thing that should be in a film that’s meant to be humanizing. But we don’t get the actual Thatcher: we get a Lloyd and Morgan’s caricature.
You’ve got to have a heart of stone not to find this hilarious:
My favorite bits are at 1:04-1:07, and at 11:30, when Gaga says she could be friends with ghosts and then the translator explains that “Japanese ghosts are pretty scary.”
Ron Radosh reviews some of the recent ignorant journalism regarding Bob Dylan’s trip to China. The quote in the title is from this post, and is my take away from this whole thing. I am an enormous fan Dylan fan and a native English speaker, yet he has entire albums whose meanings escape me. I went to a Dylan concert, and I simply don’t think it was possible, if you didn’t already know the songs, to make heads or tales of what he was singing.
Yet somewhere in China an office of Commie bureaucrats, who almost certainly speak marginal English, read through the thousand or so songs in Dylan’s repetoire to decide which ones were subversive and which ones weren’t. That’s an awesome thought.
Texas appears to be moving toward making teenage sexting not a felony. The attorney general says he’s not aware of any teenagers being prosecuted for kiddy porn under existing law, which is a good thing, but we shouldn’t leave bad laws laying around waiting for some jackass prosecutor to try to be the first to use.
Still, I can’t help but feel that the laudable current effort is still several years behind the mores of our times:
[State Senator Kirk ] Watson and [Attorney General Greg] Abbott said the new provision covering parents is designed to allow parents to be involved in court-ordered programs about the dangers of sexting. Abbott said he suspects that most of the teenagers who are sending sexually explicit images “don’t understand the consequences of what they’re doing.”
By sending explicit photos of themselves, he said, “they are exposing themselves around the world.”
The thought that would make Watson’s and Abbot’s skin crawl is this: the teenagers are perfectly aware of the consquences of what they are doing. We’re not dealing with illiterate babes in the woods being exploited here, we’re dealing with tech savvy kids loaded with hormones who are exchanging pictures with people exactly like themselves. I doubt there’s one out of twenty sexters who would be surprised to learn that their pictures could get beyond the original audience. As I’ve long said,* there’s a changing culture regarding nude and explicit pictures. In 20 years, I suspect these sexting teenagers will look back not with horror, like today’s serious adults expect, but with bemusement.
*That post is from 2007, but the bitter counterfactual it references looms much larger today. Then it only dealt with a senate seat. Now we can look back and think that if only Seven of Nine had fewer hangups about having sex with complete strangers back in the 90s, we’d have a different president today. It’s like I lost out twice.
I’m not sure why Meghan McCain is a public figure now, but she should cut it out.
A few weeks ago Dorothy and I saw her book in a Barnes & Noble. I said, “I’m going to open to a random page and the first sentence I read will be stupid.” I opened somewhere in the middle, where, I take it, it’s talking about the 2008 campaign. The sentence I read was (this may not be verbatim, but it’s not far off) “I thought that after the convention the campaign would slow down.” What kind of moron believes that presidential campaigns slow down after the nominating convention?
This multi-zillionaire heiress has a published book, allowing her to make money off of objectively stupid thoughts. And she’s on TV shows. And has a gazillion people following her Twitter feed. Now that Christine O’Donnell’s gone, I hope all the people who are so concerned about the rise of moronic women in the Republican party will turn their attention to Miss McCain.
I’ll venture slightly into the poppest of pop culture.
Camille Paglia’s attacks on Lady Gaga are the most tone deaf cultural criticisms of pop culture I’ve seen since Pat Buchanan left the main national stage. All along, Gaga has been extraordinarily open about the fact that she’s doing what she’s doing in order to be famous. Her first album was named “The Fame,” and her second “Fame Monster,” with songs like “Paparazzi,” “Beautiful, Dirty, Rich,” and “Money Honey.” She has created a persona that is, entirely, a critique of modern celebrity culture and designed to take advantage of that culture to advance her own fame. For Paglia to attack her as nothing more than a copy of prior pop figures strikes me a lot like going to a Beatles tribute band concert and complaining that they’re not really The Beatles. Well duh.
Moreover, the attack that Gaga is “stripped of genuine eroticism” misses the single most remarkable thing about Gaga. Objectively, she’s a reasonably attractive woman, and she is constantly wearing the skimpiest of outfits, or borderline nude. But she is never, ever, sexy. Ever. It’s the damnedest thing, and I can’t think of anyone else who comes remotely close to pulling that off. An attractive woman performing sexualized dances in revealing clothing who’d leave Quagmire flaccid. Talk about a rare skill!
So when Paglia says that Gaga is a hackneyed, unsexy attention whore, all I can imagine is Gaga saying back, “What do I need to do to emphasize that that’s the point, wear a skimpy dress made out of raw meat and a flank steak on my head?” (Seriously, look at how much taught flesh she shows without being sexy in the least.)
I think that Paglia is finally getting old. It’s not a bad thing – she’s had a good couple of decades, and one can’t forever stay on top of an evolving pop culture. But I don’t think she has the correct tools to deal with a creature as thoroughly postmodern as Lady Gaga.
Apollo posted this at 9:07 PM HKT on Friday, September 17th, 2010 as Pop Culture Is Filth
Somehow I suspect that there’s a tax deduction here, and I suspect that it would turn my stomach if I knew the actual details. I hope it doesn’t make me some radical Marxist to insist that Tom Brady should buy his own car rather than getting a tax-payer subsidized V10 freebie.
P.S. This isn’t the only example of the Volkswagen Group providing hilariously offensive subsidies to those who least need it. The Bugatti Veyron is hugely unprofitable, but VW made it to serve as an R&D project for their Lamborghini and Audi divisions. So each time you see some college kid cruising around in a Jetta, think to yourself, “He’s helping to support Simon Cowell’s 1001 horsepower funmobile, which helped develop Tom Brady’s 444 horsepower freebie.”
Apollo posted this at 11:41 AM HKT on Sunday, September 12th, 2010 as Pop Culture Is Filth
After the last eight years, it’s great to have a President who knows what a library is.
Of all the possible idiotic Bush is Stupid comments, I think this is the most idiotic yet. Why? First, As Human Events points out, W had two degrees, which is exactly two more than McCartney. More fundamentally:
Not to mention Bush is married to a librarian.
P.S. At what point in the future will “the last eight years” not refer to the Bush presidency? W was only president for 6.5 of the last 8 years. And when discussing fault for current problems, it never dawns on anyone that Democrats have now been in control of Congress for almost four years. I suspect that in the mid-2020s we will still hear “the last eight years” used to describe the Bush presidency.
This story about Danny Glover getting booed during a commencement address highlights a growing problem in the American academy.
For Morgan Jackson, who came to watch her cousin Sidney Allen graduate, the constant booing a few rows behind her was “irritating.”
“You would think you could let this be about the people who were graduating today,” she said of the hecklers, who “probably didn’t know anyone graduating and only came to cause a scene.”
She wanted the hecklers to “let this be about the people who were graduating,” but what did Glover ramble on about?
The celebrity’s speech, which highlighted many advances for minorities in the past 63 years since Glover’s birth, was inspirational, said Allen, who is black.
Glover, who has been criticized for his friendship with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, told the class of 2010 that global warming is real and that climate change is a human-rights issue, as well as an environmental issue.
A UNICEF good-will ambassador, Glover talked about the dangers of Arizona’s proposed immigration Senate Bill 1070 and about his efforts to fight work-force discrimination and poverty in places such as Haiti.
So, basically, Glover talked about everything under the sun except for “the people who were graduating.” Why the hecklers should be restrained by the situation when the speaker isn’t is beyond me.
But at a more fundamental level, why was Glover even there? He has no connection to the college, no connection to the students, has pursued a career that it would be stupid to encourage others to emulate, and, to be gentle, is not a particularly wise man. Yet here a state university is using tens of thousands of dollars to pay him to come to campus and ramble about stuff that he’s done.
Every year around this time I grumble that my own college paid Bill Bradley $50,000 to speak at my graduation. His speech, to the minimal extent I remember it, was mostly about how old he was (e.g. today’s graduating class has never used an 8-track — crap like that). His life – a Rhodes scholar going into the NBA and then becoming a seantor – is significantly more praise-worthy than Glover’s, but because he had no connection to the college or the students, the speech was garbage. $50,000 garbage.
My wife’s commencement speaker the next year was Christine Whitman. Despite the fact that our college is consistently ranked among the most politically active in the nation, she spent much of her speech telling the students to register to vote. The rest of the speech was sour grapes about how extremist the Republican party had gotten, and promotion for her then-current book. I have no reason to believe that the college paid her less than Bradley (equal pay for equal non-work!), but whatever they paid her was completely wasted.
Colleges ought to cut this crap out. It’s expensive, subsidizes the egos of ego maniacal jerks like Glover and Whitman, and wastes everyone’s time at the graduation ceremony (which should be about those who are graduating, right?). If you need a speech, let a professor who is close to the students do it. It’ll mean an lot more to the students, and it won’t cost $50,000.
I thought real women had curves, and the scrawny chicks were the ones we were supposed to make fun of. Or am I a decade behind there, and we’re back to making fun of fat chicks? Whatever; I have a hard time keeping up with these sorts of things. But if there are any notions of fashion or beauty that deny that Christina Hendricks was a complete knockout in that dress, they’re wrong.
I can’t say as I too much care what the Telegraph says in its list of 100 most influential conservatives and liberal, but this paragraph about the insuffable and decidedly unfunny Wanda Sykes make me squirm only because it’s completely true:
Took her chance at the White House Correspondents Dinner to accuse conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh of treason and said she hoped his kidneys failed – prompting laughter among many liberals and a grin from Obama. That performance catapulted her into getting her own show on Fox TV.
I’m sure there are others, both conservative and liberal, who made their way onto the list through unsavory means, but that is a uniquely unflattering paragraph. Unflattering to Sykes, unflattering to Obama, unflattering to Fox. Unflattering to America.
Apollo posted this at 2:27 AM HKT on Tuesday, January 12th, 2010 as Pop Culture Is Filth