Trainspotting

Murray Smith

• Publisher: British Film Institute
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781839022173
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Historia y crítica cinematográficas

In 1996 Trainspotting was the biggest thing in British culture. Brilliantly and aggressively marketed, it crossed into the mainstream despite being a black comedy set against the backdrop of heroin addiction in Edinburgh. Produced by Andrew Macdonald, scripted by John Hodge and directed by Danny Boyle, the team behind Shallow Grave (1994), Trainspotting was an adaptation of Irvine Welsh's barbed novel of the same title. The film is crucial for understanding British culture in the context of devolution and the rise of 'Cool Britannia'. Murray Smith unpicks the processes that led to Trainspotting 's enormous success. He isolates various factors – the film's eclectic soundtrack, its depiction of Scottish identity, its attitude to deprivation, drugs and violence, its traffic with American cultural forms, its synthesis of realist and fantastic elements, and its complicated relationship to 'heritage' – that make Trainspotting such a vivid document of its time. Although it heralded a false dawn for British film-making, Trainspotting is, Smith concludes, both authentically vernacular and yet transnational in its influences and ambitions. In his afterword to this new edition, Murray Smith reflects on the original film 25 years after its release, and its 2017 sequel T2: Trainspotting also directed by Boyle. Smith also considers Danny Boyle's subsequent directorial career, with highlights including Slumdog Millionaire (2008) and the 2012 London Olympics opening ceremony.

1 Arriving

train-spotter

a.One (esp. a small boy) whose hobby is observing trains and recording railway locomotive numbers. Hence train-spotting vbl. n; trains-spot v. intr.

b.Also transf. (freq. derog), a person who enthusiastically studies the minutiae of any subject; a collector of trivial information.

main-line

1. a. The principal line of a railway.

b. A principal route, connection, conduit, family, etc.

c. A large or principal vein, into which drugs can readily be injected; hence, an intravenous injection of drugs; the act or habit of making such an injection.

Oxford English Dictionary

Once upon a time, ‘trainspotting’ – spending endless hours watching for trains and ticking them off compendious lists – was a lowly, rather pathetic activity widely held in great contempt. Now, ‘trainspotting’ is a byword for cool. What happened?

The answer, in brief, is that Irvine Welsh wrote a novel called Trainspotting, on the basis of which screenwriter John Hodge, producer Andrew Macdonald and director Danny Boyle made a film called Trainspotting.¹ The film tells the story of five Edinburgh male twenty-somethings – Renton (Ewan McGregor), Spud (Ewen Bremner), Begbie (Robert Carlyle), Sick Boy (Jonny Lee Miller) and Tommy (Kevin McKidd) – and their larger circle of friends, relatives and associates. Almost all of them are ‘schemies’, their lives defined by the housing schemes in Leith, the poor port district of Edinburgh. The opening of the film plunges us directly into the hell-raising, transgressive lives led by the gang, as Renton, Spud and Sick Boy career through central Edinburgh, racing away from pursuing security guards. Renton’s caustic voiceover puts the chase in context: ‘Choose your future. Choose life. But why would I want to do a thing like that? I chose not to choose life, I chose somethin’ else – and the reasons? There are no reasons. Who needs reasons when you’ve got heroin?’

These boys are junkies, and they run out of desperation and exhilaration. After a half-hearted attempt to come off the ‘skag’, the law catches up with Renton and Spud, an event which propels Renton more forcefully out of his junkie orbit – as far as London. Tommy’s death brings Renton back to Edinburgh, where Begbie and Sick Boy cook up a plan for the gang to ‘punt’ a large amount of heroin to a big-time dealer in London. Renton’s second visit to London proves altogether more decisive, the film ending as he walks off into the sunrise – along with the stolen proceeds of the deal.

The novel Trainspotting was published in 1993. Initially published as a small print run of 3,000, the novel far outstripped the expectations of both its author and publisher, amassing sales of 100,000 copies by the time of the film’s release (doubtless helped along by a successful stage adaptation of the novel). The high profile of the film helped to push the sales of the novel to still another level; at the time of writing, total UK sales have reached 800,000. The initial success of the novel can perhaps be accounted for by its appeal both to a sector of the traditional literary audience, appreciative of its exploration of dialect, its episodic form and shifts of voice, as well as a ‘non-literary’ readership – an audience of clubgoers and music fans who recognised in the novel their generation, their attitudes, their enthusiasms, their culture.

Trainspotting the film was released in February 1996 to considerable hoopla, Welsh in effect giving his blessing to the project by taking on the cameo role of dodgy dealer Mikey Forrester – who better to torture Renton than the author of the original novel (‘slow release – perfect for your needs’)? In terms of the nature of its production, Trainspotting was significant for several reasons. The film emerged at a moment when not only British cinema, but Scottish cinema, as a distinct entity, possessed an unusual degree of visibility, activity and momentum. The previous year, 1995, witnessed the box-office success of two Scottish films, the historical epic Rob Roy, directed by Michael Caton-Jones, and the contemporary thriller Shallow Grave, the first feature by Macdonald, Hodge and Boyle, and the UK’s highest-grossing British release of the year. Shallow Grave in turn became the springboard for the high-profile making of Trainspotting (financed – uniquely at the time – wholly by Channel Four, the budget of £1.7 million exceeding the company’s investment in any other single film). The film was one of four new features in production over the course of 1995 which could lay claim to being Scottish. Trainspotting thus took its place at the centre of a resurgent Scottish cultural and political nationalism, consolidated by the establishment of the Scottish Parliament in 1998. It is worth remembering that when Trainspotting was released, the Tory government were about to enter the last, bitter year of what would ultimately be an eighteen-year reign of power in Britain. By this point Tory support in Scotland had entirely collapsed. The themes and values of Trainspotting are deeply marked by this era.

Irvine Welsh as Mikey Forrester

As a film emerging from a self-consciously nationalist context, based on a cult novel, and supported financially by Channel Four, one might have expected Trainspotting to be a typical piece of art cinema: sober, slowly paced, ostentatiously highbrow, ‘challenging’, directed to a relatively small audience. Trainspotting overturns most of these expectations, beginning with the level of its commercial success. Trainspotting took over £12 million at the UK box office, and went on to become the most successful independent release in the US in 1996, taking $16.5 million in box-office receipts by March 1997. These successes were echoed in many other countries; total worldwide returns thus far are estimated at $72 million. And yet it would not be wrong to see Trainspotting as an art film – albeit a kind of art film which tempers its high-cultural ambitions with a desire to reach a much broader audience than that traditionally associated with European art cinema. The model here is less European art cinema than the American art cinema tradition – not only the work of New Hollywood film-makers like Scorsese and Tarantino, but also that of earlier directors like Orson Welles, the bravura stylist whose legacy can be detected in Trainspotting.

The most obvious index of this desire for a large audience was the aggressive and canny marketing of the film. The film-makers exploited the worldwide interest in British popular culture in the mid-1990s, not only by basing the film on a novel arising out of that culture, but by constructing a soundtrack which mixed contemporary Britpop and dance tracks with some of the countercultural classics of the 1970s, thus tapping into the musical and fashion enthusiasms of several generations of potential viewers. The film’s distributor, PolyGram Filmed Entertainment, launched an expensive publicity campaign (£850,000, or half as much as the film’s production costs, for the UK launch) which resembled the heavy publicity associated with the Hollywood ‘event’ movie more than the modest campaigns associated with ‘small’ European releases. It is not hard to think of a ‘high concept’ pitch for the film: drug addiction with songs; Drugstore Cowboy (Gus Von Sant, 1989) meets American Graffiti (George Lucas, 1973); heroin as consumer choice. Indeed, the publicity for the film showed a wry awareness of its own nature, exhorting us to ‘Believe the Hype!’ Rather than using the channels and spaces typically used by the large American distributors, however, PolyGram invested in outlets and employed a design consultancy (Stylorouge) associated with pop and rock music culture. The company also collaborated with its competitor EMI in order to ensure an effective launch of the soundtrack CD tie-in.

Another sign of the film-makers’ desire for a broad audience was the manner of the adaptation. Hodge has noted that the first difficulty he encountered in contemplating a screenplay was the episodic nature of the novel, splintered as it is through several characters, each narrating in their own idiolect. Hodge’s solution – making Renton the central character, streamlining the story around him and fusing several other characters – is both ingenious, and a measure of the mainstream audience the film-makers were seeking. The shifts in character perspective and the somewhat fragmented structure of the novel are hardly unknown in film – indeed, they are staples of art cinema and ‘indie’ cinema, fully exemplified by Welsh’s self-scripted The Acid House (Paul McGuigan, 1998). Nothing stopped Hodge, Macdonald and Boyle from pursuing a version of Trainspotting which retained the multiple perspective and vignette structure of Welsh’s novel, other than their intuitive sense that such a film would be unlikely to reach a large audience,² and might compound the risk of the film becoming trapped in the ‘drug film ghetto’ occupied by self-consciously ‘hardcore’ drug films like Christiane F. (Uli Edel, 1981) and Pusher (Nicolas Winding Refn, 1996).

There can be no doubting the enormous cultural significance of Trainspotting, the impact of which still reverberates in Britain and beyond. The film acted as a lightning rod for debate across a wide array of social, cultural and aesthetic matters, including ‘laddishness’, male sexual inadequacy, and musical and footballing obsessiveness. The idea of the ‘New Lad’ came to prominence in the early 1990s, marking a reassertion of traditional male values and prerogatives, following their abeyance in the 1980s (the decade of the sensitive ‘New Man’) and indeed in the wake of modern feminism as a whole. Some measure of the importance of this cultural trend can be gleaned from the rise of Nick Hornby, whose novels play variations on laddish, adolescent men coming up against and coming to terms with adult responsibilities and values. (More even than Welsh, Hornby made the trainspotterish list – ‘Top five American films …’ – the symbol of obsessive, self-involved masculinity.³) The successful television sitcom Men Behaving Badly (1992–2014) dwelt in broader comic mode on the same tensions; and more broadly still, parodic comic Viz offered up Sid the Sexist and the Fat Slags, twinned figures of archaic, if knowing, misogyny. Laddism also took centre stage with the rise of Oasis, whose reputation often played up the beery pleasures of traditional masculinity, the Gallagher brothers seeming to relish rehashing every sorry cliché about the bad boys of rock ’n’ roll.

But the tone of ‘lad’ culture has not been limited to the humorous. The vicious, predatory and sometimes narcissistic sexuality associated with this rejuvenated ‘masculinism’ was explored in many fictions, ranging from Mike Leigh’s abrasive film Naked (1994) to Trainspotting’s Begbie and the sinister television drama Men Only (2001). Other works focused on the sources of laddism in the dimunition of actual male power. Numerous films dealt with the phenomenon of working-class men displaced from their economic, and thus their social and psychological, roles, including Raining Stones (Ken Loach, 1993), Brassed Off (Mark Herman, 1996), The Fully Monty (Peter Cattaneo, 1997) and Billy Elliot (Stephen Daldry, 2000). These concerns intersected with anxieties about poverty, youth and class, especially in relation to the ‘lawless’ culture of council estates, isolated from an increasingly affluent middle class and trapped – economically and topographically – in areas of extraordinarily high levels of male unemployment. Following the riots and confrontations on housing estates in 1991 and 1992, joyriding and ram-raiding became emblems of this emerging underclass of disaffected youth, the film Shopping (Paul Anderson, 1994) creating a vision of apocalyptic anomie.

The wider context for these anxieties was the idea that youth culture had entered a moment of exceptional disillusionment and diminished expectation, and turned its back as much on conventional forms of political protest as on mainstream existence. This notion was reflected in a range of new buzz words: the slacker, the loser, Generation X, and most pertinently here, ‘the chemical generation’ – a new youth counterculture revolving around clubbing, raves and Ecstasy. The Criminal Justice Act of 1994 was a response not only to the civil unrest of the early 1990s in general, but specifically criminalised underground raves. This new counterculture was nowhere given more articulate expression than in the novels by Irvine Welsh which followed Trainspotting. The film of Trainspotting ‘updated’ the novel by incorporating a scene in which Renton and Begbie go to a rave, as well as several songs by dance and dance-rock acts, including Scots band Primal Scream, another important participant in the Scottish cultural renaissance. Welsh had collaborated with the band, providing lyrics for the single ‘The Big Man and the Scream Team Meet the Barmy Army Uptown’, while the band composed the instrumental ‘Trainspotting’, which appears in the film’s patchwork of songs, underscoring Renton and Sick Boy’s slack in the park. The combination of the film’s intense colour scheme, pulsating soundtrack and kinetic style has been likened to the sensuous experience of contempor...