A friend once asked me, "What makes Trainspotting so great?" Admittedly, it is loaded with profanity and the characters speak with such a heavy Scottish drawl that I have to press the stop, rewind and play button so many times when I watch it on video.
Trainspotting is an urban grunge film about a group of junkies trying to score and kick off a habit. That’s it – nothing mind-blowing or earth shattering about the plot. Why then do I think it’s such an exceptional film? Maybe it is the repartee between the characters. Maybe it is the amazing music. Or maybe it is the outrageously funny and desperate situations the characters find themselves in. Quite simply it’s the entirety, the whole treatment of the film. Trainspotting is a visual masterpiece of truth, showcasing a rawness that can hardly be seen in your average Hollywood film.
There was an uproar when the film was released. "How dare the filmmakers have the audacity to show a film with such an obvious pro-drug stand!" cried critics. On the contrary, I see it as a film that takes a hard-nosed look at the dark side of addiction. It’s just that the extreme graphic details of the drug-use makes people fail to see its implication and dismiss it. It dares take a chance in painting the real picture of what addicts go through.
Originally written as a novel by Irvine Welsh, the film follows the tale of Mark Renton, played by Ewan McGregor.He lives in a small town called Edinburgh in Scotland and hates it there. He blames Scotland for not being smart enough to be colonized by a country with a decent culture. He is a heroin addict and we follow him as he gets hooked, gets off and gets hooked again. He is surrounded by four pathetic characters he calls friends. Begbie (Robert Carlyle) is a war freak psychotic; Sick Boy is a Sean Connery conspiracy theorist obsessed drug pusher; Spud is a deliberate job-interviewee sabotager; and Tommy is into video taping his and his girlfriend’s sex life. And while they do constitute a bunch of low lifes, you can’t help but be drawn to them. Though they are bumbling idiots they are honest. They crave neither sympathy nor hatred. Even if drugs heavily influence their actions and they do cross some moral boundaries, they own up to everything (well, as much as you can own up when you’re addicted). And while there’s this desperation to better their lives, they are stuck in that desolate place they have created for themselves the moment they became addicted to drugs.
I lived a sheltered life until I went to college. I began to see the world for the milli-fraction of what it really has to offer, the ugliness and the beauty. It’s not that I wasn’t aware of its harshness and beauty before. It’s just that it had never been magnified so closely in my face. And now while I’m not saying that I have a friend who’s hooked on the hard stuff, I have hang out with people who take "recreational drugs," mostly during parties or just trying to get high at the end of a really rotten day. It used to blow my mind because all throughout my pig-tailed days in grade school and my-so-called "growing-up" years in high school, we had been nagged about the evils and perils of taking drugs. So it just didn’t make any sense that anyone would want to put those filthy stuff in one’s body.
While I am not glorifying drug use in any way, the film does give a more unbiased approach to the issue. We have been bombarded with images of druggies who are so far gone they look like deranged maniacs or lost puppies, their lives shattered. Yet we are never actually given glimpses on why they would think of taking the stuff in the first place. That’s where Danny Boyle succeeded in Trainspotting. He tells it as it is. He knows who his audience is and there is no need for sugar-coating. He shows that there is a definite high from taking the substance but coupled with that feeling is the overwhelming reality that you are destroying your life. And he does so without sounding like some public service announcement or worse, sounding too preachy like some high and mighty moral guardian.
Apart from the drug use, the film (via Mark Renton) reflects on the "commercialistic state" of today’s world and the alternative to living such a blasted life. Maybe that’s what got me hooked on the movie. Danny Boyle just gave a voice to everything I find disturbing. I’ve often wondered how some things are given greater importance while others (which might actually be the more significant ones) are relegated to the back seat. Especially in this day wherein society gives such high worth to the norm of growing up, going to school, graduating, getting a 9-to-5 job, getting married, having a kid and then dying at the end of it all. Being the bad-ass wannabe that I am, I’ve often told people that I would never succumb to that cycle. There’s always the sense that I will have a life less ordinary. But at the back of all the yearning and professing that this will never be my life, looms the dreaded notion that the mundane existence of living a "cycled" commercialized life could and would still come around. And while friends may think that having such is the ultimate prize in this game of life, I have always considered it as an encumbrance, a taxing illusion of perfection. By the end of the film, after throwing away his relationships and friendships out the window, Mark Renton decides to change (or at least proclaims that he will change) by embracing everything he despised in the beginning. He is "cleaning up and moving on, going straight and choosing life."
It’s crazy to say but in those 90 minutes of watching the film, a big wave of realization totally wiped my sanity and changed my life’s thesis (well, in some ways, anyway). Maybe I want all of those things as well. And maybe there’s nothing wrong with wanting them. "The big TV, the 9-to-5 job, the family Christmas, the car, the washing machines." It was my Mark Renton moment of clarity. Sometimes we try to look for that event that would give life an exciting edge and it leads some to getting hooked on different things. And stay there, as an escape from a life of expecting the extraordinary, an escape from the conventional. But that’s just dense.What I failed to realize before is that fancying boring and mind-numbing things isn’t so bad. Because in spite of everything common and ordinary that we have, it doesn’t make life any less extraordinary.