In 1953 a film was made in which a tough American executive comes to Scotland and is softened by his encounter with the land and the people to the extent that he sheds his suit, dons the garb of a fisherman and eventually sacrifices his property to save a beat-up old Clyde puffer boat. In 1983 a film was made in which a tough American executive comes to Scotland and is softened by his encounter with the land and the people to the extent that he sheds his suit, dons the garb of a fisherman and his company eventually abandons the plans it had to build an oil terminal in Scotland and instead creates an observatory and a marine life sanctuary.

The 1953 film is, of course, Alexander Mackendrick (1912–93)'s The Maggie and the 1983 film Bill Forsyth's Local Hero. Since Bill Forsyth had apparently not seen The Maggie before making his film, what, then, might be the explanation for the two films’ similarity? Not the similarity of their respective plots, which is relatively unimportant, but the fact that they land on exactly the same ideological spot, equating Scotland and the Scots with Nature and suggesting that to encounter both is to be transformed from a materialistic into a spiritual being.

My argument is that when they came to make their films, both Mackendrick and Forsyth fell under the sway of the Scottish Discursive Unconscious, a mechanism which, potentially at least, comes into play when anyone seeks to represent Scotland and the Scots in any sign system: literature, easel painting, music, photography, advertising, journalism and, of course, film and television.

The Scottish Discursive Unconscious is a theoretical construct, invented to try to explain a phenomenon otherwise inexplicable, that is, why those seeking to tell stories about Scotland will often move into automatic pilot, so to speak. The storytellers in question will have their hands guided unconsciously by one or other of several powerful, pre-existing narratives about Scotland which they may have internalised to the extent that those narratives have become ‘natural’ to their eyes.