Reality, the Real, and the Margaret-Thatcher-Signifier in Two British Films of the 1980s

A disorienting but also liberating conclusion can be drawn from the debate on Thatcherism, and insofar as no actuality is easily separable from the debate, from Thatcherism itself.1 This conclusion is that historical, political, social, and cultural meanings are signifiers; unfixed, they are available to mobilizations whose outcomes are just as likely to prove distressing as encouraging. In saying this, I do not intend to vitiate ten years of sometimes bitter political experience by capturing it within some bloodless circuit of signification. What I do want to suggest is that the engagements of the 1980s in Britain made unhappily tangible some of the most pious verities of 1970s theory. Under Thatcher, developments both structural (the legacies of empire, the decline of Britain, the crisis of laborism) and topical (the voting allegiance of the skilled working class, the depiction of inner-city unrest) became as much questions of representation as anything in the traditional textual domain. In other words, what made Thatcherism such an impossible-Real object for the British culture of opposition was that it succeeded in revoking the gradualist guarantee of social progress, exposing this as premised on conditions obtaining in Britain between the 1940s and the 1970s, and replacing it with a more sectoral, more symbolic politics of support.

This is to introduce both a discussion of two British films of the 1980s (Richard Eyre and Ian McEwan's The Ploughman's Lunch and Stephen Frears and Hanif Kureishi's Sammy and Rosie Get Laid) and an argument appropriate to them, that the surviving realism of British cinema is now strongly marked by questions of representation and signification. As Peter Wollen has suggested, the work of filmmakers like Derek Jarman and Peter Greenaway represents the long-delayed, long-desired breakthrough of modernism in British cinema. I want to argue that this breakthrough enables the examination of the whole