TRAINSPOTTING the movie was a phenomenon, selling posters, soundtracks and Irvine Welsh DJing in clubs. But was it any fuckn good, aye?
The worst toilet in Scotland
Renton’s forced to use a vile bookie’s toilet, though with grey shit, loses his suppositories and dives into an undersea world. What was director Danny Boyle’s point in including this jarring aquatic fantasia? What was it saying, symbolically? Was the deep artistic reason that it looked cool?
The baby
Okay, nobody was watching Trainspotting for Jurassic Park-standard effects, but your most enduring memory of the movie is quite likely a very fake baby moving along a badly-concealed track in the ceiling. Top tip: darkest nightmares are more effective if they aren’t hilarious.
The dialogue can be a problem
The nightclub scene where all the dialogue’s subtitled? For some viewers, especially Southerners and Americans, it would have helped if that were the entire film. Understanding powerfully vernacular Scottish can be a stretch.
Definitely choose heroin
It was claimed at the time the film would encourage heroin use. Bollocks. The audience was all on E. But it does suggest smack as a fantastic lifestyle choice, allowing Renton to cement lifelong friendships, shag Kelly Macdonald, and look cool in snakeskin print jeans rather than an utter cock.
There’s no plot
The lives of heroin addicts are rather plotless. There’s no holy quest for an object, except for smack every single day. But still you’ve got a film where essentially nothing happens until Tommy dies and everyone lucks into a fortuitous drug deal right at the very end.
The maths at the end
Renton steals £16,000 from his mates, gives Spud £4,000, and legs it to Amsterdam. Even in the 90s the cost of travel, hotels, a flat in Amsterdam etcetera would very soon leave him with piss-all. If they’d trebled the sum it wouldn’t have been troubling us to this day. And if you’re looking to get off the smack, why Amsterdam? Instead of, say, Zurich?
