Trainspotting: Beyond the Tracks

There were glimmers of Trainspotting’s postmodern flamboyance—one of the qualities that made the movie a generation-defining hit—in Boyle’s earlier work. After a period at London’s Royal Court Theatre, he made seven one-hour dramas for BBC Northern Ireland, including a Tarkovskian take on the Frank McGuinness–scripted The Hen House (1989). He also conceived and produced Alan Clarke’s masterpiece Elephant (1989), a relentless, thirty-nine-minute catalog of sectarian assassinations in Belfast. Boyle’s earthy, eerie Mr. Wroe’s Virgins (1993)—a Rashomon-ish BBC Two miniseries adapted by Jane Rogers from her novel about a religious cult in 1830s Lancashire, England—brought him to the attention of Hodge and producer Andrew Macdonald, who became two of his most important collaborators. The team’s first outing was 1994’s Shallow Grave, a parable of post-Thatcher-era avarice in the form of a sardonic Brit noir.

Just as Boyle found inspiration for Shallow Grave in the Coen brothers’ Blood Simple, he drew on other films he admired when he made Trainspotting. Renton and Spud scarper from the store guards as the Beatles scarper from bobbies in A Hard Day’s Night. The narration by Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) in Goodfellas inspired Renton’s. And the eclectic soundtrack of Pulp Fiction presaged Trainspotting’s stew of hard rock, glam rock, synth pop, alternative, Brit-pop, ambient, electronic, techno, dance, rap, and opera. The songs are not window dressing but part of the film’s musculature. Before Renton’s voice-over was recorded, editor Masahiro Hirakubo experimented with a mixtape that Welsh had given him. Hirakubo did not create rhythm by cutting MTV-style to the songs on it; instead, he added them to already edited scenes to help develop a narrative flow out of the vignettes that Hodge had extrapolated from the novel.

The heightened use of music underscores the film’s anticlassicism. Its shifts between realism and surrealism are prompted by changes in Renton’s subjectivity as he acquires self-knowledge. Thanks to cinematographer Brian Tufano (who, like Hirakubo, first worked with Boyle on Mr. Wroe’s Virgins), Trainspotting is a blizzard of expressionistic low, wide, and canted angles, sinuous handheld tracking shots, extreme long shots, and close-ups. The film’s color coding—hellish reds, queasy pale greens, excremental browns—was influenced by what Boyle has called the “in-between land, part reality, part fantasy,” of Francis Bacon’s paintings. A teasingly jaunty documentary montage of touristy images heralds Renton’s move from Edinburgh to London.

The violence that Begbie visits ferociously on strangers is stylized at no cost to its impact. In one scene, Boyle freezes in midair a dimpled beer mug, recently drained, that Begbie tosses over his shoulder from a pub balcony, giving us a moment to wince before it brains an unsuspecting woman below. The result is one of British cinema’s most troublingly funny still lifes and an apotheosis of the toxic hard-man mythos. Begbie’s brutality echoes the nihilism that his mates embody by shooting up, but Trainspotting is less a study in psychological realism than a propulsive, hyperreal satire of depleted masculinity in urban Scotland. Leading Renton, Sick Boy, and Spud on a day trip to the Highlands, Tommy is disappointed that a vista of the Leum Uilleim mountain doesn’t fill them with national pride. “It’s shite being Scottish!” Renton rants. “We’re the lowest of the low . . . Some people hate the English. I don’t. They’re just wankers. We, on the other hand, are colonized by wankers. Can’t even find a decent culture to be colonized by.”

The 1707 Act of Union and the Highland Clearances that followed the Jacobite rising of 1745, as well as Thatcher’s ravaging of industry in the 1980s, are among the English crimes against the Scots that fuel Renton’s morale-sapping sense of inferiority. American cultural imperialism has additionally eroded his and his friends’ moral integrity. Tommy’s love of Jean-Claude Van Damme movies and Iggy Pop contributes indirectly to his demise, and Sick Boy’s hollowness is indicated by his identification with Sean Connery, whose potency as a Hollywoodized icon of cool Scottish machismo had declined by the midnineties.

As a factor in the men’s addictions, the Scottish working-class condition is less easy to rationalize away than the bourgeois conformity that Renton scorns in his “choose life” monologue. The film’s source of violence and self-destructiveness is not obscure, whether the outcome is Begbie’s routine annihilation of an innocent punter or a dreamily lyrical watershed moment, like the scene in which Swanney pulls the OD’d Renton from a grave-shaped trench in the shooting gallery and dumps him on a street while Lou Reed croons “Perfect Day” on the soundtrack. Leith, the port district where the characters live, was once its own town, and was Scotland’s leader in glass, soap, and lime-juice production; lead working; sugar refining; whaling; fishing; and corn trading. In 1920, the town was merged with Edinburgh against the wishes of 86 percent of voters in a plebiscite. After World War II, Leith’s docks declined, and deindustrialization led to mass unemployment between 1975 and 1985, along with depopulation, dereliction, and impoverishment. The availability of cheap heroin from Iran and Afghanistan ramped up crime and addiction, and the Edinburgh police’s ruthless suppression of intravenous drug equipment resulted in increased needle-sharing, causing the spread of HIV. The city was subsequently dubbed the AIDS capital of Europe.

Welsh’s novel is a response to these conditions, and its success was vital in humanizing addicts. Boyle and Hodge’s empathy for the reprobates depicted in the book allows enjoyment of them, notwithstanding Renton’s narcissism and Begbie’s viciousness. The refusal to moralize about people living in a state of futility facilitates the film’s particular brand of gallows humor, which leavens the squalor and misery experienced by Renton, Allison, Spud, and Tommy. Renton uses heroin recreationally—as did Welsh for eighteen months—not to medicate himself for a trauma. His trajectory, which is the opposite of Tommy’s, requires him to ride his luck as he tries to get clean. It carries him into a peaceful sea, a return to the womb or a foreshadowing of death, that he swims in search of his shat-out heroin suppositories after he plunges into “the worst toilet in Scotland”—an image inspired by a scene in Thomas Pynchon’s novel Gravity’s Rainbow—its miasma redolent of teaspoonfuls of water browned by cooked heroin. When Renton is locked in his childhood bedroom by his long-suffering parents (played by Eileen Nicholas and James Cosmo) to undergo withdrawal, he hallucinates a guilt trip in which Allison’s dead baby crawls toward him across his ceiling with her head turned backward, like Linda Blair’s in The Exorcist. The infant’s hopeful name, Dawn, availed her nothing, but it signals Renton’s rebirth, the horrific vision ushering him onto an opioid-free path.

His way is guided by Diane (Kelly Macdonald), the film’s most significant female character. Poised and sexually autonomous, she takes Renton home in a taxi after he spies her at a club. The next morning, he sees her in her school uniform as he breakfasts with her older “roommates” and is mortified to learn that the girl he slept with the previous night is well under the age of consent. But Trainspotting eschews tabloid journalism’s sexual hypocrisy; it’s enough that Renton refuses to see Diane again—until she threatens to report him to the police. Surrounded by men who are bored, purposeless, dissolute, and variously arrogant, stupid, or savage, this fifteen-year-old stands out for her strength and intelligence. Smoking hash with Renton in his room later on, Diane urges him to grow up, because “the world’s changing. Music’s changing. Even drugs are changing.”

As Renton gets clean and hankers for a life more ordinary, he takes a job selling flats in London. A drug deal proves too lucrative for him to turn down, but even before he steals Begbie’s and Sick Boy’s shares in the loot—the whirlwind he reaps in Boyle’s T2 Trainspotting (2017), which Hodge adapted from Welsh’s 2002 novel Porno—he’s looking out for number one. “There was no such thing as society, and even if there was, I most certainly had nothing to do with it,” Renton observes, paraphrasing one of Thatcher’s speeches attacking social welfare. Selfishness and venality motivate the characters in Shallow Grave and the villains of Boyle’s Oscar-winning Slumdog Millionaire (2008). But Renton tops the lot. His decision to sell out his mates and his antiestablishment values to “be just like you”—with “the job, the family, the fucking big television,” and all the other accoutrements of social and political torpor—is the mordant final twist that keeps Trainspotting permanently on message.