TRAINSPOTTING (1996)

Danny Boyle’s chaotic and glorious TRAINSPOTTING (1996) careened into my life when I was 14 and has been a key cinematic touchstone for me for ten years since. There was a time in my late teens where I had watched it so many times it felt like I knew every cozy, filmy frame, the specific cadence of each line delivery in their delicious, thick Scottish accents.

TRAINSPOTTING follows a group of heroin users and general twenty-something ne’er do wells in 1990s Scotland. It’s an unrepentantly heavy film in many senses, a persistent intensity and brutal reality that washes over you in a rich, thick haze. Yet there’s an undeniable vibrancy to it all, a strangely thrilling draw. There’s an oft-mentioned, but as far as I can find, baseless, rumor that TRAINSPOTTING was made with so little money that most shots had to be completed in one take. While I find this unlikely, it is true that TRAINSPOTTING was made incredibly cheaply, yet its cult status and consistent critical acclaim points to how craftily and carefully the film is executed. Simple and sharp, often shocking, and incredibly alive, TRAINSPOTTING is the cinematic equivalent of letting off some steam—the movie version of a shitfaced night out with your friends, or an endless scream into your pillow. The notion that it was made so cheaply they had only one take per shot, even if fictional, points to the film’s visceral feeling, a piece of art that can only be felt and read as raw and immediate.

To watch TRAINSPOTTING at 14 wasn’t necessarily a rebellion. But to feel that pull to it within me, to both understand the questionable path these characters were taking and to feel that pulse of youthful invincibility humming beneath and crave it, was the rebellion.

To like the active, carefree embracing of chaos the movie presented felt like partaking in something special and illicit.

The film runs a quick and loaded 90 minutes. In the opening moments, we watch Renton (Ewan McGregor) and his gang of misfits—fellow heroin users Sick Boy (Jonny Lee Miller) and Spud (Ewen Bremner), the violent and borderline sociopathic Begbie (Robert Carlyle), the surprisingly polished and put-together Tommy (Kevin McKidd)—play a game of football with their various girlfriends cheering them on from the sidelines.

In one of TRAINSPOTTING's shining examples of its ability to present us thematic information quickly and sharply, each member’s way of playing the match introduces their character’s very essence. Spud’s fumbling as goalie sketches him as the groups endearing, but dense buddy, Sick Boy’s tripping of his opposition highlights his general selfish fuckery, Begbie’s violent skidding about presents him as the impulsive and temperamental one, Tommy’s aggressive but earnest playing reads him as the straightedge (or at least, straightedge relative to his friends) member of the group. Renton is kicked square in the head with the ball and passes out.

Over this footage, Renton rambles about the immense social pressure to “choose life”—to select a distinct path and follow it. While our characters may be readable, they do not consider themselves as fitting neatly into any acceptable social path. As the opening moments come to an end, Renton collapses on the floor of the group’s heroin den (a dingy house called Mother Superior’s) and explains that he’s found a way to cheat the system: “I chose not to choose life. I chose something else [...] Who needs reasons when you’ve got heroin?”

In Hollywood Reporter’s oral history on the film, Irvine Welsh (author of the original novel) points out, “[TRAINSPOTTING is] much more a movie about youth rather than drugs and it was about finding that vitality and optimism—you have everything to play for and you can fuck up but it doesn’t really matter because you’re still young… there’s a shot of redemption.” It’s a representation of youth that is perhaps not glamorous, but admittedly sexy.

TRAINSPOTTING is, simply put, a film entrenched in filth, in mess. Renton and his friends pick through the needles scattered on their floor in search of a clean one, they shit the bed, they climb into the toilet to chase after the methadone suppositories they accidentally pushed out. When they must appear as upstanding citizens—for court, a funeral of a friend, or a half-hearted job interview—their suits hang off them like tall children playing dress up. These kids fuck around and fuck up with incredible intensity—drinking, drugs, sex, partying, stealing, lying, and cheating.

They also regularly reap the consequences of their riskier actions; prison for some, death for others, grief beyond your wildest conception, overdoses followed by sweaty, vomit-filled withdrawals.

To say that this movie encourages drug use is almost laughable, though many attempted to spin it that way upon its original release.

Most famously, Bob Dole claimed that TRAINSPOTTING was a film that glorified heroin use during his presidential campaign (something I find hard to believe considering Renton’s horrific withdrawal scene alone, as he sweats and screams and suffers horrific hallucinations).

Dole later admitted to not having seen the movie at all—a pretty unsurprising twist to his claim.

As the film progresses, as some characters get better while others fare much worse, Renton gets on and off and on and off heroin repeatedly, with a newfound determination in each announcement to quit and a newfound “fuck it” freedom in his inevitable return to Mother Superior’s den. This constant cycle of bouncing back and falling forward encapsulates the unique power of youth to its extreme, the specific sensation somehow perfectly presented in the insanity that is TRAINSPOTTING — the ability to have a body strong enough and a future open enough to push such limits again and again, and to not just survive, but continually hold hope.

In an era where films with clear and tidy, almost spoon-fed messages are becoming the persistent and sometimes boring norm, TRAINSPOTTING shines as an example of nuanced stories and ideals without hand-holding its audience. TRAINSPOTTING trusts in our basic empathy, believes that we can hold two truths at once — in this case, that these characters can be downright assholes, unlikable, selfish twenty-somethings, but that they certainly don’t deserve the pain placed upon them for their substance use troubles or chaotic, impulsive, young actions.

It lets you like them, laugh with them, feel like you’re partaking in some of their youthful fucking around, and ache for them as they stumble about the universally complicated (but, in their cases, particularly brutal) era of your twenties.

TRAINSPOTTING sits in the balance between sharp truth and youthful fantasy, horror and play, chaos and consequence — all without overcomplicating the matter, all without morally posturing, all while valuing, more than anything, being a plain-and-simple good film. There’s a lot of options out there these days. My watchlist grows to alarming numbers. But if I got my say, I’d insist that we all choose TRAINSPOTTING at least once. Choose to throw yourself headfirst into the thrill and horror of being young, wild, and free. Choose to let it simultaneously scare you senseless and seduce you. Much like the heroin Renton so breathlessly and romantically describes, there’s nothing else quite like it out there.