MovieChat Forums > Local Hero (1983) Discussion > Victor and the Cold War

Victor and the Cold War

posted 12 years ago by kmmuk
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I am unsure of Victor's message or role in the movie. On one hand he sings 'lonesome man' which reflects the Texan. This would suggest he recognises the downside of wealth and success.

On the other hand he later suggests that the Texan is going a good thing by making the villagers rich, which I took as a sincere compliment. In addition he gets material goods from Japan.

Written during the cold war was it a suggestion that Russians and the Americans are not that different from each other. Mac learns that Russians are nicer than he was led to believe. Mac was stand offish with Victor first but then once they got to know each other they became friends.

Was there a cold war message in there? And if so, what was it?

[–] Flanged 12 years ago

I think the message of the whole film is simply that everybody's human, and everyone has their own little foibles and failings and dreams. Mac finds out that the powerful global monoliths of the time - American capitalism (oil), the Soviets (Victor) - don't really mean much if you're stuck in a tiny village on the Scottish coast.

You expect an American oil billionaire to be crass and only interested in money, but really he's more interested in the Northern Lights. Mac expects the Russians to be as formidable and hostile as they have been portrayed in the US media, but they are just people too, trying to get by like everybody else. Many people might've expected the whole village to be stereotypically Scottish, and show themselves as stubborn and intransigent about giving up their land, like Ben is - but in fact they're pretty keen to sell up and move out. The film just playfully subverts a lot of stereotypes.

In Scotland at the time there really wasn't much difference between the Americans and the Russians from our point of view, especially if you only ran into them in the pub. They were all just taken as individuals, though unless you lived on the coast or the islands you probably wouldn't meet many Russians. The larger concerns of the Cold War didn't have a lot of psychological impact somehow, despite Trident nuclear missiles being sited here and the US Navy having a base on Holy Loch, and the NATO jets screeching overhead all the time as shown in the film.
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