Reading comedian and actor Russell Brand’s meditations on the late Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher on my return to the States this week was a delightful experience in and of itself—reading Brand on almost any subject is a pleasure. But it also reminded me just how much terrific popular culture Thatcher inspired, and the extent to which pop culture did real battle with her ideas.

One particular place that portraits of Thatcher in pop culture congregated was in stories about teenagers and young adults, where she represented, as Brand suggested, a parental figure to be rebelled against, as well as a proponent of specific policies that characters found objectionable. In the anarchic sitcom The Young Ones, which began running in 1982, Rick, a bad poet who believes he writes for the people, threatens to bomb the UK if Thatcher “doesn’t do something to help the kids, by this afternoon,” and sees her as an enemy generally, despite the overall incoherence of his politics. In Sue Townsend’s Adrian Mole novels, the titular main character lives with Margaret Thatcher as both a scourge and as a rallying point, writing her into plays and poems with lines like “When you’re dressing in your blue, do you see the waiting queue? / Do you weep, Mrs. Thatcher, do you weep?” Her elocution lessons are, for Adrian, a sign of phoniness, her hair an object of nostalgia after John Major’s ascendance. It’s an awfully personal engagement with a political figure, a reaction that’s in part the result of a small nation being close to its leaders, and in part a response to policies that did affect teenagers and university students directly.

It wasn’t just novelists who took inspiration, and who were catalyzed by Thatcher’s policies. In a great, long piece by Aaron Lake Smith, he discusses in particular both the way that the Miners’ Strike influenced the punk band Chambawamba, and how British youth radicalism from the Thatcher era seeped into its partying culture, making underground techno parties an opportunity to invite clashes with the police:

The British Miners’ Strike, called in response to Thatcher union busting, was a decisive event in Chumbawamba’s political evolution. The group supported political bombings against South Africa’s corrupt racist leaders. This forced them to reexamine their pacifist stance. Diet and lifestyle became less important than solidarity with organized labor. The band recorded a three-track Miner’s benefit single, distributed pamphlets and food to worker’s families, and even started a theatre troupe to perform for the miner’s children…This was the first crack in what would soon become a fissure between Chumbawamba and the punk scene they were part of. No longer spouting the expected pacifist line, they were decried as “sell-outs.” Chumbawamba worked to incorporate themselves into their community in Leeds rather than to be punks standing apart from it. They chose to venture into uncomfortable situations with people who were different from them. As Chumbwamba became closer and closer with the miners, they distanced themselves from “the punks,” whom they increasingly viewed as petty, hardline, ineffective, and humorless.

Then, there’s the terrific romantic comedy Brassed Off, about the members of a brass band associated with a coal mine, based on the Grimethorpe Colliery Band, after the mine where they worked was closed as a result of policies initiated by Thatcher’s administration, as the Grimethorpe Colliery was in 1993. The main characters are former coal miner Andy (Ewan McGregor in an early star turn) and Gloria (Tara Fitzgerald), who has returned to town to research whether the mine could be made more profitable, and begins playing in the band—and reconnecting with Andy. The two of them wrestle with real issues as they commence a romantic relationship as adults, even though they’re attracted to each other. They have different political views, and different perspectives on how important the mine is to the social fabric of the town, given that Gloria is open to the prospect of shuttering it. Their coming around to the same conclusions politically is crucial to their coming around to the same conclusions about the viability of their relationship.

But the movie is also deeply engaged with one of Margaret Thatcher’s most-quoted arguments, the idea that “There is no such thing as society. There is living tapestry of men and women and people and the beauty of that tapestry and the quality of our lives will depend upon how much each of us is prepared to take responsibility for ourselves and each of us prepared to turn round and help by our own efforts those who are unfortunate.” The members of the miners’ band do the best they can to help each other through illness and severe depression, and they manage to keep the band going, giving back to a society that has made them redundant. But even though they have tremendous will to help each other, they have few of the resources that Thatcher suggests will fill the gap on issues like housing and employment. It’s hard for men and women to weave a tapestry that’s an alternative to a government-provided social safety net if they don’t have enough thread to clothe themselves.

I was unexpectedly sad two days before Christmas to learn that John Lawrence, the plaintiff Lawrence v. Texas, which overturned sodomy laws in the United States, had died in late November virtually unnoticed by the country he helped change, and to learn from that obituary that Tyron Garner, with whom he was arrested for having sex (though both men said they were never intimate) had died in 2006. The news touched me not just because I was volunteering for Freedom to Marry Massachusetts the summer the Lawrence decision came down, and so felt it as a victory in a battle I was engaged in, but because it made me think about what happens to people after they do their part to make history and memory and its failures.

Biopics of very famous people have become an extremely reliable way for acclaimed actors to finally claim the hardware that has eluded them for other parts, or to claim more hardware and a confirmation of their greatness. But we don’t really need a biopic about Margaret Thatcher, whose life and legacy seem sufficiently understood. Even a figure like Ronald Reagan, whose life and legacy are distorted almost continually, doesn’t seem particularly needy: the myths and corrections are issued quickly and forcefully. There will be no authoritative version of his life in film or otherwise—partisans on both sides are sure they have the truth already. Sometimes, a biopic does the interesting thing of illuminating a very great and famous person through someone who played a pivotal role in their life. The King’s Speech may have seemed to some people an unworthy trifle to bring in such a haul earlier this year, but it has the virtues of being a fine film about class and medicine in addition to an illumination of a king.

But how about the people who were the real sparks to history themselves—after all, if there hadn’t been Lionel Logue, there would have been someone else, and more importantly, there still would have been the speech—but are forgotten. We’ve done a better job of remembering the Little Rock Nine than we have James Lawrence and Tyron Garner, even though they’re further in the distance, but even then, we see them as elements in a collective image. We don’t know very much about what makes them decide to integrate a school. And we don’t know very much about what made a Texas medical technician decide he could carry forth as the representative of a difficult cause, and how it came to be that one of his lawyers didn’t even know he’d died after their great victory. Good biopics should do more than affirm the greatness of the great. They should tell us something about history, particularly when it fails us and fails us quickly.

If anyone’s been worried that The Iron Lady would try to play down Margaret Thatcher’s conservativism, I think that needn’t be a concern — the full-length trailer that’s just been released doesn’t stint much, and I’m curious as to how images of protestors being beaten in the U.K. in the ’80s will play against the continuing clashes between Occupy Wall Street protestors and the police:

I don’t know how much the movie will get into her foreign policy other than the Falklands — her policies on South Africa and Cambodia at the U.N. were less than admirable — or how it’ll assess her shutdowns of U.K. coal mines, a move to both break unions and get England headed towards renewable energy, but that may have simply been faster than was practical. The trailer certainly suggests that the movie will have a lot of psychology, whether Thatcher’s wrestling with her ambition and her sense of family responsibility, or asserting that the fight against sexism means she has the experience to know what the Falklands War will cost. And I’m all for portraying the impact of sexism, how women in positions of leadership have to structure everything from their haircuts to their position papers to protect themselves from its impact as much as possible.

But not everything is psychology, and not all political decisions are determined by what might be the dominant day-to-day conflict in someone’s life. I’ve felt this with Homeland, too, that as tempting as it is to reduce the roles people play in world-historical conflicts to personalities, ideology is powerful too.

It’s a pretty reasonable assumption that every time Meryl Streep steps in front of a camera, she’s gunning hard for an Academy Award, or at least a nomination. And that’s doubly true for her turn as Margaret Thatcher:

Looking at this, it struck me that there’s an odd imbalance between Best Actor and Best Actress nominations when it comes to whether the actors in question are playing real people from the U.S. or the U.K. In the last 10 years, the real-life roles for which women have been nominated have relatively evenly split between Americans and Brits. On the American side, women have been nominated for playing consumer safety advocate Erin Brockovich, semi-obscure serial killer Aileen Wuronos, singer June Carter Cash, mother of murder victim Christine Collins, football mom Leigh Anne Tuohy, and cookbook revolutionary Julia Child. On the British side, they’ve been nominated for playing Iris Murdoch, Virigina Woolf, Laura Henderson, Elizabeth I and Elizabeth II.

Men, on the other hand, if they’re nominated for biopics, are heavily nominated for playing American men. They’ve gotten nods for playing Jackson Pollock, John Nash, Muhammad Ali, Bill the Butcher, Charlie Kaufman, Ray Charles, Howard Hughes, Truman Capote, Johnny Cash, Edward R. Murrow, Chris Gardner, Harvey Milk, and Richard Nixon. The exception to the other side of the pond is Johnny Depp who was nominated for playing J.M. Barrie.

What makes the gap interesting, I think, is that the British roles for women are for the most part, so much meatier than the American ones. June Carter Cash and Julia Child are obviously both very famous, but Erin Brockovich, Leigh Anne Tuohy, Aileen Wuronos, and Christine Collins are much more minor or transitory ones, who aren’t nearly as powerful or as long-lasting as English queens or Virginia Woolf. With a few exceptions, like Chris Gardner, the American biopics for men are about men who were very famous before their stories were told on film.

It’s not like there aren’t good stories about famous American women that aren’t worth telling. How awesome would a Harriet Tubman biopic be? What about Martha Washington or Abigail Adams? If you want Terrence Malick to make something dreamy, what about Emily Dickinson? Something sensationalistic, fun, and quietly feminist? Do Annie Oakley. I’m a nerdy Anglophile, and there are a lot of awesome British women. But it’s funny that we tell more stories about powerful British women than powerful American ones.