Do not ask for whom the telephone rings. Make that call!
Local Hero is a movie gliding serenely along the water, whose webbed feet are peddling furiously beneath the surface. Marina and Stella are elemental names matched in the plot, and the sharing of Ben Knox's name with Knox Oil and Gas indicate that the story and characters are thematic ciphers. Thematic ciphers indicative of what?
The character of Moritz is the giveaway. He is an ego coach, or more particularly he is an ego destroyer. Perhaps his genesis is in the writer/director's financial exploits of the three years preceding the release of the movie. In 1980 gold and silver spiked sharply to new all-time highs, before crashing back down. The Silver Dollar painted onto the boat, the name Knox (reminiscent of Fort Knox) and the investment nature of Victor's relationship with Gordon indicate that Local Hero might be one long veiled allusion to Bill Forsyth's bank account.
Is Moritz a cipher for "more-it's" - representing Forsyth's having over-accumulated precious metals before the crash? The function of Moritz seems to be to address self-hatred at having been unhealthily focused on material matters. The solution is returning to a simpler and elemental way of life - symbolised by the water of Marina and the fire of Stella.
The title of the movie, Local Hero, validates these interpretations. It's not merely a reference to a man being a hero because he is bringing people a payday or because in Ben's case he refuses to sell. The beginning of the movie sees the name Knox Oil and Gas associated with corporate, financial and commodity matters, but by the end of the story our attention has been diverted to the unmaterial Ben Knox. To me it seems as if Local Hero is about a man making peace with having not sold out at the top when gold hit $850 and silver $50 in January 1980, but instead having ridden the market back down. Or then again, it could be about a man who did liquidate his investments in time who then has to wrestle with what success has done to his ego, and who yearns to transcend his appetite for more.
Either way, it is clear that the characters and plot of Local Hero are a transparent vehicle for self-exploration; they are a marked projection of a local condition, the desire to transcend materialism of the man who wrote and directed the movie. The truth of who is the hero (or heroine) is that it is the individual who localises, who internalises all of these signs, using them to wrestle with the baser self and emerge victorious with a higher self; who Rumpelstiltskinesquely transforms one Knox into a different kind of Knox.
That's the author of the piece, and by osmosis we the audience via the protagonist Mac. Ben as the Local Hero? No. Whatever Bill Forsyth might have said as an expedient on a Saturday morning phone-in, no. Ben Knox is a cipher representing the fruition of heroic character transformation. He symbolises the end-point of heroism, not the hero himself or heroic evolution.
The final scene, returning to normal life but nonetheless CHOOSING to dial Ferness 261 - it's Bill Forsyth's addition to the John Donne line that one should not "send to know for whom the bell tolls".
The phone call at the end of the movie is only superficially an intercontinental call. On a deeper level, it's the film-maker's statement that you are just one local call (to yourself) away from recovering from the alienation that material and career pressures produce. Do not send to know for whom that telephone bell rang. It tolled for thee, and it's a call that each one of us can make happer happier happen.