Twenty-five years later, director Danny Boyle’s darkly comic take on heroin addicts in Edinburgh remains a masterpiece.
Twenty-five years later, director Danny Boyle’s darkly comic take on heroin addicts in Edinburgh remains a masterpiece.
A long with Pulp Fiction and Goodfellas, Trainspotting remains one of my three favorite films of the 90s. Twenty-five years after it first blew me away when I saw it at the Ritzy Cinemas in Brixton, London, in the summer of 1996, I watched it yet again, for what must be at least the twelfth time. I’ve seen it in all formats — at the movies, on a VCR, on a DVD, streaming— and it still fills me with a giddy appreciation for its director Danny Boyle’s frisky energy, wit, and agility.
The movie starts out weighed down by a major problem that it casts off within three minutes: How do you make an audience care about a gang of heroin-addicted wastrels? With a nod toward Martin Scorsese’s voiceover-meets-jukebox method, Boyle simply lets us hear Mark Renton’s thoughts as he crashes through the streets of Edinburgh. Boyle defines the scene by the rock song he blasts over it: Iggy Pop’s jittery dance-punk blowout “Lust for Life.” The sneering swagger of Pop’s vocals and the rolling-thunder explosiveness of the drums define Renton even better than his own words do: Behold this barely fed, shaved-down civet, a rodent on the run. He is forced to stop by a car that nearly hits him, and he laughs at . . . what exactly? Avoiding death, for the moment? The fun of being a bad boy? The absurdity of his existence?
Renton tells us who he is by telling us who he isn’t. “Choose life” are the ironic first words out of his mouth, and he then ticks off a list of middle-class aspirational goodies before informing us, “I chose something else.” The reasons? “There are no reasons when you’ve got heroin.” Wham.
For all of his anarchic spirit and seeming freedom, Renton is actually a prisoner; he’s everyone who has ever fallen prey to a force he can’t control. Already we know him intimately. He’s the honest rogue who asks for no sympathy and acknowledges every flaw. We want him to kick the junk and survive, because we sense there is something decent and human in him, but even if he self-destructs he promises to do so with a showman’s flair. His life is a PSA: Don’t do what Renton does, kids.
As with the following year’s Boogie Nights, which reduces existence to a pleasure-seeking surface with no more direction than a stack of disco singles, it hardly matters that the movie basically has no plot. (“A young Scot tries to kick heroin” would be the TV Guide summary, I guess.) It’s essentially a series of black-comic set pieces and fantasias, with one emotionally gripping journey to the void and back. When Renton overdoses and nearly dies, Boyle captures his feeling of disappearing from himself by showing him plummeting through a solid surface to the sound of Lou Reed’s lovely piano ballad “Perfect Day.” The song’s blissful lyrics operate in delicate counterbalance with its somber piano chords: ideal mood music for heroin, a path to a joyous death. The song throws itself sharply into reverse with its last words— “You’re gonna reap just what you sow” — to underline what Renton has learned, or should have learned, or may never learn.
The film’s title, never explained, refers to the well-known British hobby of obsessively and pointlessly logging train arrival and departure times in a journal. The word hit me in a different way on my latest viewing: I’d always considered it to be a metaphor for the obsessiveness and pointlessness of heroin addiction, but only now does it occur to me that this is one of the handful of films whose title is the opposite of its subject (others include Todd Solondz’s Happiness and, come to think of it, GoodFellas). Trainspotting is a harmless, middle-class exercise; Trainspotting is a rejection of all things harmless and middle class — at least until its final twist, which amounts to a simple, weary acceptance of what we all must learn in making peace with adult life.
It may be that if you don’t see Trainspotting when you’re young, you won’t get it, but to what young person has it not occurred that following the rules is a dead end, a surrender to all things mediocre and dull? What middle-class youth has not looked at his parents’ lives and said, “I must do the opposite of all that”? If your options, like most people’s, do not include greatness, why not choose the other extreme? Even for inveterate rule-followers and box-checkers, there is a romantic appeal to nihilistic rejection, to the life less ordinary. I immediately understood Renton and felt his dilemma, and I suspect most young people do, too.
When the movie does, in its final minutes, turn to conventional plotting, its sudden adoption of structure mirrors Renton’s decision to put some direction into his life. Unlike Renton, his friend Begbie contains nothing worth redeeming. Played with tungsten-forged hard-man menace by Robert Carlyle, Begbie represents everything Renton must break with. In order to escape the danger of addiction, Renton has to do something even more dangerous: rob Begbie. Dashing off into his future with a bag of money, Renton understands that Begbie will kill him if the pair ever meet again. (This matter is the subject of a dreadful sequel, T2, whose existence I prefer not to acknowledge.)
In the disarming final seconds, Renton reworks his “Choose life” opening monologue, but this time his sarcasm takes a softer edge. What we have just watched is a 90-minute lesson in why a bourgeois existence is as good as it gets. Renton’s final thoughts are a lovely transmutation of hard-earned maturity into a disarming little poem:
Walks in the park, nine to five.
Good at golf, washing the car.
Choice of sweaters, family Christmas.
Indexed pension,
tax exemption.
Clearing the gutters,
getting by.
Looking ahead,
the day you die.
The sweet ambiguity of this valedictory is needlessly demolished by T2, in which we find out that Renton has in fact carved out a successful career and stayed clean. Why Boyle would want to go back and destroy perfection with embellishment is a mystery, but I suppose Michelangelo could have been talked into doing a Sistine Rec Room if the money had been right.
Renton’s thoughts gain force from another sublime choice of backing music: a then-little-known electronica song that the movie would propel nearly to the top of the British singles chart. Underworld’s “Born Slippy” — a wonderfully Rentonesque title — is in its lyrics a replication of the confusion of being drunk. The words equal Renton’s previous life, the one he is abandoning for good, but the music contains his future. The steady synth rhythm evokes the drug-inflected stupefaction of clubbing but also, crucially, open-ended persistence — a heartbeat, as Boyle once put it. Amid all of the unspeakably dull middle-class things Renton lists, he sneaks in the phrases that make sense of all of them: “Getting by, looking ahead.” This is a new Renton. Getting by means settling for the middle way instead of the sublimation/destruction of heroin. Looking ahead means planning more than twelve hours into the future. The movie’s first and last lines of dialogue — “Choose life . . . the day you die” — are bookends to be considered in reverse: When we first meet Renton, being heedless of death, he is careening toward it; when we part ways, respectful of death, he has, actually, chosen life.
