Trainspotting

Hi Aki,

Last night we watched Trainspotting – oddly enough I’d never seen it before. I suppose Steve’s description of the notorious ‘toilet’ scene turned me off. I liked it though.

This is the kind of movie where story is less important than style. The writer, director, set designer, and editor just put together a flashy, fun, smorgsabrod of strange cuts, weird subjective sets and shots, camera lenses that distort without being obvious about it, garish colors. The actors join the writer with cartoonish performances of over-the-top characters.

Mostly what the movie does is give me a view into a world I’d never been in. This is one of the wonders of movies, to take us where we’ve never been. The book was a sort of underground cult classic, but mostly a series of incidents and snippets rather than a story. The script tries to salvage a semi-story out of this, but it remains more of a portrait of a kind of life, that of the poor, disaffected, heroin junkies of a dying Scottish city, rather than any sort of story. There is an attempt in the writing to give us a sort of redemption along classical lines, undermined with a bit of a sarcastic twist.

This has to do with taking a speech, ‘Choose life! Choose marriage and a job and kids and washing machine and a car and CD player…’ and moving it to the opening of the movie, over a scene where the junkies are running away from a store where they’ve stolen some goods to sell for cash for heroin, and plays very ironically. At the movie’s end, the hero, having just ripped off his mates for the proceeds of a big sale of 2 kilos of heroin, walks away blithely, while the VO gives us the same speech – this time as though he is going to embrace this lifestyle (on the basis of the stolen drug-deal money) which further undermines it. And yet the film leaves us wondering if this guy Renton is really through with smack or not; as his VO says when he takes his last onscreen hit, ‘There are final hits, and final hits … which one was this going to end up being?’

Along the way a baby, seen crawling around happily amidst needles and the remains and other trash of the junkies’ life in their main hangout, dies from neglect; one of the kids gets sent to prison; another OD’s and is put into cold turkey where we get the classic (since Billy Wilder’s Lost Weekend in the 1940s) montage of the DT’s; the only one of them who is healthy and never does drugs loses his girlfriend (because our hero has stolen the sex-tape he and his girlfriend made of themselves) and takes up smack, only to contract AIDS and die of toxoplasmosis when the kitten he got to win his girlfriend back is sent back to him; the fiercest anti-drug pal (a totaly sociopath played by Robert Carlyle, the guy from The Full Monty here with dark hair and mustache) sends more than a few folks to hospital; and the hero dives into ‘the worst toilet in Scotland’ in that famous scene. And yet it’s given to us from the viewpoint of the junkies, and tries to convey some of the pleasure and crazy-wild fun they experience. It’s a comedy believe it or not. This is very refreshing, although I doubt many censors saw this as a good thing.

(25 March 2009)

PS — to read Aki's translation of this post in Japanese, click here.