Local Hero: The Community as Protagonist

I’ve been relearning the basics of writing fiction on my way to writing a series of stories and rewriting some older works. This means that I’ve been paying more attention lately to novels and movies, comparing what I’ve learned against what they’ve written.

For example, the Steve Alcorn courses I’ve been taking discuss writing a story as a series of scenes and sequels. Scenes consist of goal, conflict, and disaster, while sequels consist of emotion, thought, decision, followed by action.

Structurally, stories consist of these seven steps. Up to 200 of them in novels, less in short stories.

Is this true? Is this a rule? Do all stories follow this pattern?

No, no, and no. Some writers follow this unconsciously. Some don’t. Sometimes, they’re mixed together. Or, a scene can be followed by a flashback with its own scene and sequel, followed by a sequel of the first scene. A nested scene / sequel.

Another thing we learn is that every story has a protagonist and an antagonist. The protagonist has a character flaw which must be overcome or dealt with to defeat the antagonist to get the happy ending, or not to create the tragedy.

You can see that in “The Sun Also Rises,” a book I have a particular fondness for. Hemingway’s Jake Barnes is in love with Lady Brett Ashley. She loves him, but there are obstacles. Due to a war injury, he can’t have intercourse with her. She also has a flaw in that she’s a party girl, flitting from scene to scene and man to man. By the end of the book, he realizes that he’ll never be able to keep her. He’ll always be a friend, a man she can rely on, but never a lover or a couple. It’s a tragedy in that respect.

Which brings me to “Local Hero,” about which I have to spoil the ending.

Local Hero (SPOILERS)

In the 1983 movie. Peter Riegert plays “Mac” Macintyre, a representative from an American oil company, sent to Scotland to buy a coastal fishing village to build a refinery. It’s a charming, very low-key movie that plays against expectations in several ways. We’re shown that building the refinery requires tearing down the entire village, but instead of objecting, the villagers are happy to sell out. They prefer being millionaires to living a hard life on the Scottish coast.

In fact, the only people who grow to appreciate the beauty and life in the village are the oil company people: Macintyre, Danny (played by a boyishly young Peter Capaldi), and Felix Happer, the billionaire owner of Knox Oil played by Burt Lancaster, an unhappy mogul whose wants to discover a comet and have it named for him. There’s a happy ending, but a complicated one. An old beachcomber whose land has been in the family for 400 years refuses to sell out. Happer flies out to negotiate with him, ends up becoming friends with the beachcomber. Seeing the stars overhead, he decides to relocate the refinery offshore and build an astronomical observatory by the village instead. But Happer changed his mind because he cared about the stars and his ego than the people living there. In fact, the owner of the local hotel grumbles something like “the rich always keep the best bits for themselves.” Worse, he sends Macintyre back to Houston and blames him for the “scheme” of buying up the village.

Capaldi’s character Danny is a big winner by not only suggesting the observatory idea to the mogul, but wins the affection of the nautical scientist who might or might be a mermaid (one of several magic realism elements in the movie).

As for the villagers, they didn’t get their million-pound payday, but they still have the village, and more work will come in from Happer’s project. In fact, the only person who loses is Macintyre, a lonely man who says a couple times he prefers to negotiate by telex, and who early in the movie is seen talking to co-workers in the same large room by phone. He even tries (and fails) to ask a secretary for a date, despite his boyish good looks and high salary ($80,000 a year, in 1983 dollars!).

At the end of the movie, Macintyre is back in his Houston apartment. He pins on the bulletin board a few photos from his trip, steps onto the balcony, and looks over the grey evening skyline of Houston.

“Local Hero” is a great movie. I define great and so-terrible-they’re-great movies by their ability to stay in the mind long afterwards. They give you something to think and talk about. There are many, many small, sometimes funny touches in “Local Hero,” such as the rabbit subplot, the abusive shrink, the droll innkeeper and his randy wife, the Russian captain. There’s a lot going on, but it’s also a slowly paced movie that wants you to look at the scenery and the characters and think about them.

Now, with regards to the structure, it was when I was apply Alcorn’s lessons that I realized who were the movie’s protagonist and antagonist.

The antagonist was “Mac” Macintyre, the lonely negotiator who has a hard time connecting with people. He wasn’t a villain, but he was directed to perform what pure-souled environmentalists would see as a villainous act.

The protagonist was the village, which stood to gain the world’s wealth but lose its imaginary soul by selling out. After all, atheists tells us there is no soul, so you can’t lose what you don’t have, right?

And this is what surprised me the most. The community was the hero. The Local Hero of the title turned out NOT to be Macintyre, the outsider who becomes an insider and lectures the villagers about what to value most. That’s a trope worthy of TVTropes. The true local hero was Knox, the lifetime resident who valued the beach, his continuity, and his self-worth too much to sell it all for mere money.

Still, you feel for Macintyre. He’s a good man, but an incomplete man. He couldn’t change, and he knows it, and at the end of the film, seeing the village’s phone booth at night, the phone ringing, and you know it’s Mac trying to reconnect the only way he knows how, and your heart breaks a little.

You want him to have his happy ever after, if not in the village, at least somewhere. That he can’t, and never will, makes you ache for him. That’s how you make a story worth telling.