Distorted recognition: the pleasures and uses of televisual historical caricature

Abstract

A straitjacketed figure is being wheeled on an upright trolley through a dank corridor lit by flickering fluorescent tubes. A low-angled medium closeup reveals the bottom half of a royal blue skirt, and sensible, black, high-heeled pumps. After the trolley has come to a rest, the porter removes from the figure a full-face mask, reminiscent of the one worn by Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1991). But the face revealed is not Hannibal Lecter’s; it is a woman’s. She has a red-lipsticked, thin-lipped mouth, over which a sinister, cool smile plays. She wears pastel blue eyeshadow and tasteful pearl earrings. Her strawberry blonde hair is teased into a tall perm. When she finally speaks, it is in a low, slow voice with a lilting, arhythmical cadence that allows her to emphasize firmly her increasingly strange and fervent antisocialist opinions. Any viewer familiar with the image and voice can see at once that this is supposed to be Margaret Thatcher, yet this is not an accurate impression. The hair is larger, the makeup less subtle than Thatcher’s. The voice’s soft authority is drawn out into a barely comprehensible drawl. The political sentiments voiced in the dialogue constitute a reductio ad absurdum of Thatcher’s well-known social views. This is not an impersonation of Thatcher; it is a caricature.