Trainspotting (94 minutes)

"This was to be my final hit, but let's be clear about this. There's final hits and final hits. What kind was this to be?"

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I don’t intentionally set out to write about 90s movies as often as I do. I think anyone in my position would cover just as many because mathematically the 90s just had more (and better) short films. You can attribute this to several reasons: the limits of VHS tapes, the sheer number of movie screens in theaters increasing, and how movies were financed. I try to get creative but time and time again I find myself in the decade I became a thinking person. (In the 80s I was drunk off breast milk and learning to talk.) Which brings us to Trainspotting (1997). If you’re between the ages of 34-44, you definitely knew at least three guys in college who had this poster on their wall (...and you probably hooked up with at least one of them). 

Trainspotting is based on Irvine Welsh’s book of the same name and is told through the perspective of Mark Renton (Ewan MacGregor), a heroin addict living in a rundown part of Edinburgh. (I’m sure you’d be shocked to hear that this neighborhood, Leith, is now “home to hip creatives”.) Renton spends his time getting high with his friends Sick Boy (Jonny Lee Miller) and Spud (Ewen Bremner) in a flophouse run by drug dealer Mother Superior (Peter Mullan) and occupied by Allison (Susan Vidler) and her baby Dawn. Renton also hangs out with his non-addict friends from time to time, football enthusiast Tommy (Kevin McKidd) and raging alcoholic and conman Begbie (Robert Carlyle). Trainspotting cycles through Renton’s addiction as he tries to get clean, relapses, and tries again, all while his friends and family continue to toil away in a depressed area, trying (or not trying) to make the most of their lives. The title says it all. Trainspotting is slang for a type of boredom, born out of watching and identifying trains. 

The novel Trainspotting was long thought unadaptable until director Danny Boyle came along and encouraged Welsh to allow him to make it. This film is a watershed moment for Boyle who had mostly directed TV shows up until this point. (I think the real cinephiles will argue with me that his debut film, Shallow Grave, would be that moment but I disagree.) After its release, Trainspotting ended up putting Boyle on the map as a creative visionary because of his ability to adapt a novel told in a stream of consciousness into a film. He, of course, would not rest on these laurels and would go on to experiment with style throughout his career as a filmmaker (28 Days Later, 127 Hours, Sunshine, and Slumdog Millionaire to name a few.) 

Trainspotting is an adrenaline rush that attempts (and often succeeds) at mimicking a high. There are a few pivotal scenes that have gone down in pop culture history for both their vile and disturbing nature and also for their ingeniousness. The first is early on when Renton is getting ready to detox on his own. To begin he decides he needs one more hit before locking himself in a room. While he searches for the said hit, the detox begins and a formerly constipated Renton must find a rest room immediately. What he finds of course is labeled as ‘The Worst Toilet in Scotland”. Dank, dirty, disgusting. You think you’ve hit your limit of nausea when suddenly Renton remembers the suppositories of drugs up his ass and dives into the shit-filled toilet. And as though we’re all tripping together, we watch him continue down, down, down into the toilet until he’s swimming in the ocean. This is our first taste of Boyle’s blurring between reality and fantasy which will continue throughout the film. Like Renton and his friends, we find ourselves asking what is reality and what is just drugs.

The second blurring comes as Renton detoxes a second time, horrifically, in his childhood bedroom. He’s visited by friends and family, taunting him as he cries out to his parents for another hit. The fever dream hits its peak as Renton believes he is seeing baby Dawn, since deceased, crawling on his ceiling toward him. Dawn is a zombie, slowly closing in on Renton as he begs for her to leave him alone. (It all feels strangely like something out of a fucked up version of A Christmas Carol.) Now, I’ve never done heroin…  (I did once take an edible I thought was CBD and was actually Delta-8 and handled it so poorly I had a syncope. I literally cannot hang)... but Boyle’s ability to tap into both the joy and pleasure of a good high and the absolutely terrifying nature of coming down from one pristinely aids the narrative. 

“People think it's all about misery and desperation and death and all that shit which is not to be ignored, but what they forget is the pleasure of it. Otherwise, we wouldn't do it. After all, we're not fucking stupid. At least, we're not that fucking stupid.” 

Outside of Boyle’s terrific filmmaking, this movie landed on so many dorm room walls because of the beloved cast and the characters they breathe life into. Audiences love a merry band of friends, even if (or especially if) that friend group is toxic as fuck. After his first detox, Renton narrates, “The downside of coming off junk was I knew I would need to mix with my friends again in a state of full consciousness. It was awful. They reminded me so much of myself, that I could hardly bear to look at them.” Trainspotting looks closely at the boundaries we do and do not make for ourselves with our friends and family. When Renton finally determines that he will never be clean in Leith, he takes off to London to start anew. But of course, his friends arrive one by one, dragging him further and further away from a clean life. How do you cut people out of your life who are so engrained in it? And can you truly run away from who you are and where you’ve come from?

These are the questions of Trainspotting that stay with me the most now. I think when I was younger I took away the glorified bits of it, young and stupid as I was. (I had Pulp Fiction on my dorm room wall so I was not immune to undergrad silliness). Re-watching it again for the first time in twenty years, I can see the more granular points, the commentary on circumstance and growth. Why do we fill our lives with jobs, TVs, cars, leisurewear, mortgage payments, matching luggage, game shows, and junk food as Renton says. What are we hiding from? I think we know. I think Renton and Sick Boy and Tommy definitely know. I am sure Spud could figure it out. 

We’re hiding from ourselves.