AO Scott

In the endlessly popular musical Billy Elliot, the villain is played not by an actor but by a larger-than-life puppet with a gigantic head, an effigy of the kind that sometimes still appears at European protest rallies. This one has a beaked nose, a pronounced overbite and upswept blond hair, a visage immediately familiar to anyone who remembers the 1980s, and one that theatergoers are eager to boo. ?Who was that lady?? one of my children asked as we departed a recent matinee performance, not having recognised the Iron Lady.

Kids these days! How could they not know Margaret Thatcher?

I was a college student during part of Thatcher?s tenure at 10 Downing Street (including the years of the bitter coal-miners? strike that is the backdrop of both the film and the stage versions of Billy Elliot). I was an earnest poseur who combed the import bins of record stores and sought out movies about unhappy people with bad teeth and impenetrable accents?in short, an aesthetic Anglophile particularly drawn to the art and literature of frustration and self-loathing that flourished in the Thatcher years. She seemed to be the negative inspiration for everything that inspired me: the romantic anger of the Clash, the analytical fury of Gang of Four, the apocalyptic wit of Martin Amis, the decadent, multiculturalist ardor of My Beautiful Laundrette and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid. And also, more directly, she was the funniest, most belligerent puppet on Spitting Image, that brilliant lost link between The Muppet Show and The Daily Show. When she finally stepped?or as they say in Britain, stood ?down as prime minister, Spitting Image gave her a fitting send-off, with her puppet double singing a version of My Way that remains both horrifying and weirdly touching.

The actual Margaret Thatcher, reportedly suffering from Alzheimer?s disease, has retired from public life. But like Reagan, her great friend and ideological soul mate, she has had a robust political afterlife, her legacy a perpetual subject of revision and debate. Much of the American right is now vocally if not avowedly Thatcherite in its glorification of the market, its demonisation of the welfare state and its hostility to public-sector unions. When Thatcher declined to meet with Sarah Palin last spring, she denied Palin a publicity coup and robbed countless hacks and headline writers of a chance to drag out the only morsel of Karl Marx anyone bothers to cite anymore: the bit from The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte about history repeating itself first as tragedy, then as farce.

This summer?s riots in England brought a similar sense of dreary d?j? vu, coming as they did almost exactly 30 years after the disturbances (in London, Leeds, Liverpool and Birmingham) that marked the first major domestic crisis of Thatcher?s rule. David Cameron calling for law and order looked like a petulant boarding-school prefect, when what was needed was a stern and uncompromising headmistress. Cameron, fairly or not, is likely to be dogged by the slogan ?hug a hoodie? and by the spectacle of his notional ?big society? shrunk by austerity and dented by anarchy. Thatcher famously dismissed the very idea of society as a nanny-state fantasy??there is no such thing? ? and no offer of a hug could be inferred from her signature phrase, uttered during an early wave of popular discontent with her policies: ?The lady?s not for turning.?

In a few months, movie audiences will be able to hear those words in the voice of Meryl Streep, as Lady Thatcher receives the bio-pic treatment in The Iron Lady. Directed by Phyllida Lloyd (Mamma Mia!) and distributed in North America by the Weinstein Company? which brilliantly exploited the American fascination with British power when it turned The King?s Speech into an unlikely blockbuster?The Iron Lady is sure to spark a fresh round of argument about its heroine?s personal life and political career. Was she a feminist heroine or a reactionary monster? Apostle of liberty or avatar of selfishness? Or all of the above?

The Streepified Thatcher may well become, like the letter-perfect Julia Child of Julie & Julia and the plausibly deniable Anna Wintour of The Devil Wears Prada, a more vivid and accessible version of the real thing. But however truthfully The Iron Lady represents Thatcher?s personal life and political career, it is quite unlikely that any film could properly register her impact as a cultural figure.

And this is partly because those seismic readings were taken in real time, recorded on records and in movies and the pages of novels. The Thatcher years were a time of remarkable cultural ferment, in which the energies of an extraordinarily diverse roster of musicians, novelists, playwrights, critics and filmmakers?to say nothing of television comedians and puppeteers?were unleashed in opposition, glum and passionate, explicit and overt, to the prime minister herself.

Her ascendancy was a result of tensions and contradictions within British society that also produced a singularly vibrant culture of opposition. Those forces predated her 1979 election: punk rock, realist television dramas, agitprop theater and caustically satirical fiction were all features of the earlier ?70s, when the country was governed by Edward Heath and James Callaghan, two of the least charismatic statesmen in modern European history. But Thatcher deepened and sharpened the contradictions. Her impatient, confrontational populism can be seen as a reaction against the disorder amplified and travestied by punk, but her impatience with decorum and hypocrisy, her assault on customs and institutions, was itself a form of punk.

Punk was dead by the time she took office. Its iconoclastic fury mutated into the Manchester melancholy later popularized by Joy Division and the Smiths and into the abrasive dialectics of Gang of Four, whose 1979 album Entertainment! remains the most incisive expression of the political impotence and creative ingenuity that Thatcher provoked. The album was a trenchant critique of the commodity form in the form of an irresistible commodity. It told a story of alienation and empty consumerism that you couldn?t get out of your head: ?this heaven gives me migraine.?

The signature anti-Thatcher ballad of the 1980s is probably Elvis Costello?s Tramp the Dirt Down, released in the last year of her term and in no small part a hymn to its own ineffectuality. The best the speaker can manage is to look forward to her death and to assess her legacy with the help of some dubious rhymes: When England was the whore of the world, Margaret was her madam/And the future was as bright and as clear as the black tar macadam.

This kind of passionate, brainy almost-nihilism has held up rather well, at least to my aging ears and sensibility. The tensions and contradictions that propelled Thatcher?s rise and fueled the eloquent, impotent resistance to her rule have not gone away. You can see them in Billy Elliot, which, for all its bitterness at Thatcher?s war against the working class, also celebrates the individualism, the melting away of class distinctions, that even Martin Amis eventually admitted was a large part of her legacy. Billy, the coal miner?s son from County Durham, may have some kinship with Maggie, the grocer?s daughter from Grantham, who also insisted on going where British society told her she did not belong.

As Margaret Thatcher recedes into history, perhaps her image will soften, as happens to even the most consequential and controversial political leaders. That would be a shame. She was both admired and hated, and it was the people who hated her ? and whose contempt she was happy to cultivate ? who built her best and most durable monument.