trainspotting

[Montgomery E. Engel]

I noticed some brief mention of Trainspotting from what must have been a
few days ago.  I was wondering if anyone's seen it and what the reaction
was.  In a summer that has featured NBC's Olympics and Independence Day,
Trainspotting is a blessing.  The intial media reaction to it was so
predictable: movie about drugs...drugs bad...bad movie.  Or that it was
pro-drug. To say this movie was pro-drug is like saying Apocalypse Now is
pro-war.

Another prevalent media reaction was to pick up on the "Choose
Life" theme (prominently featured in the previews) and say that this was
the movies' point and it couldn't possibly be that nihilistic.  The
previews and trailers were interesting in their own right as the movie is
played up as a crime movie in which the characters pull off "the biggest
scam of their lives."  Not once is heroin mentioned.  The "scam" turns out
to be a plot device in the last quarter of the movie.

Unsuprisingly, I
suppose they couldn't possibly have marketed this as a pro-heroin movie.
Anway the "choose life" theme I took to be the one of the most biting
critques of "society".  I won't give away the last line of the movie for
those who haven't seen but I thought it was profoundly ironic.

This movie
was't trying to present junky culture as good or bad, it was showing the
similarities of our own "mainstream" culture with junky culture. The main
character, Renton, says earlyon that he has decided to "cultivate a true
and sincere junk habit."  In a way he is being more true and sincere to a
culture that fosters addiction and than all the straight people around him
who don't even realize their addictions.  Being a junky is the most pure
form of an addictive sickness in our society.  THe irony is that only a
junky as the sickest form gains the knowledge of the larger picture of
societal addiction (to booze, to cigarettes, sports,gambling, tv, "love",
violence, etc.)  This movie sets up a "Them" in a similar way to Pynchon.
Perhaps you could see heroin as substitute for paranoia.

Has anyone read the novel on which it was based?  I think the novelist's
name is Irving Welsh.

Montgomery Engel
mengel at mail.wesleyan.edu