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Thatcher, Elizabeth I, and “Aesthetic Flaws” in The Iron Lady

Peggy Noonan comments on the flaws of the Thatcher movie, The Iron Lady: Mrs. Thatcher’s political views are never granted any sympathetic legitimacy, though the movie subtly allows there may have been some legitimacy. Perhaps the great flaw is that it has too great a fear of exactly locating her greatness, and the meaning of […]

Peggy Noonan comments on the flaws of the Thatcher movie, The Iron Lady:

Mrs. Thatcher’s political views are never granted any sympathetic legitimacy, though the movie subtly allows there may have been some legitimacy. Perhaps the great flaw is that it has too great a fear of exactly locating her greatness, and the meaning of her greatness. This is not so much a political as an aesthetic flaw: In the classic movies about Elizabeth I, for instance, you knew why you were watching the movie, why she was its subject, and how she changed history.

Then again, Elizabeth I had better propagandists than Thatcher could have ever hoped to have, and in the centuries after her death there have been legions of sympathetic historians eager to present her in the most flattering light possible. This is because there are relatively few in the English-speaking world who haven’t already been brought up to believe that Elizabeth’s reign was a success, and this is closely tied to breaking with Mary’s religious policy and resisting the Spanish Armada. For most Anglophone people watching movies about Elizabeth I, her victories are “ours” because we are the inheritors of the England she helped to fashion, and so we are used to identifying with her side in the struggle and it would never occur to us to sympathize with the other side. Thatcher has no such built-in credibility with a viewing audience except among Anglosphere conservatives, because for many of the viewers her triumphs represented and still represent the success of a kind of politics they are likely never going to share. Put another way, there are probably not going to be many triumphant depictions of Elizabeth I by any traditional Catholic Spaniard artists. That isn’t an aesthetic flaw as such, but a refusal to praise policies and ideas that one does not admire.

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