Trainspotting

Trainspotting. Dir. Danny Boyle. Perf. Ewan McGregor, Ewen Bremner and Johnny Lee Miller. Miramax, 1996. DVD.

Trainspotting had me right from the beginning, with Renton’s rant, which brilliantly comments upon neo-liberal ideals of consumerism and biological citizenship, from choosing marriage, a car and a “big fuckin’ TV” to choosing good health, low cholesterol and dental insurance. Heroin, of course, precludes the need for all these things, however, because addicts are decidedly waste people in the biopolitical order. They are not good consumers. They do not follow the rules of biological citizenship; quite to the contrary, the graffitied words “junky skum” “AIDS” and “plague” on Tommy’s door clearly indicate the status of drug users (who are often also marginalized in other ways - here colonialism and class play into the picture) as bad biological citizens, as a disease to be purged, as garbage to be thrown out.

Renton, though he tries to get clean, is stuck culturally, not only in a drug-culture, but in a working-class culture in Britain’s forgotten colony. There are particular expectations in this culture, especially around masculinity. Renton feels obligated to help his friends, even the utterly amoral Begbie. Even when he tries to escape to London and a white-collar life, his past and his extended/chosen family follow him there. His job as a real-estate agent, furthermore, involves a great deal of deception, showing that the business world is not really a lot more ethical than the world of drug and crime that he lived in before. As Renton puts it, “any fool could make cash from chaos and plenty did.” He invokes Thatcher’s regime, which legitimated crookery, as well as his awareness of his position in the biopolitical order when he says, “there was no such thing as society and even if there was, I most certainly had nothing to do with it.” He is not really more of a “good citizen” when he’s sober than when he isn’t. He’s still working as a crook.

Similarly, the film––especially in the scene where Renton’s friends and family members are criticizing his drug use while engaging in other unhealthy habits––juxtaposes more legitimate yet equally unhealthy forms of indulgence, such as smoking, drinking alcohol, meat-eating and the use of psychiatric drugs against heroin, showing the hypocrisy behind society’s shunning of IV drug users. (Renton says that his mother is “in her own domestic and socially acceptable way, also a drug addict” when he obtains some of her Valium to help him with withdrawl). So, it’s not only Renton and his drug-using friends who want out of or cannot cope with the expectations and stresses of neo-liberal society. Renton and his friends also play with the power the medical system has to decide between legitimate and illegitimate drug use, by manipulating that system in order to obtain legal drugs for illicit uses. Renton’s trip to the hospital in a taxi after his overdose, rather than in the ambulance whose siren we hear, further reinforces the constructed and classed difference between what kind of emergencies and problems get to be considered worthy illnesses and which do not. (Something like Cancer is a “good” illness. AIDS is decidedly a “bad” illness). Even when Renton does access main-stream detox resources, however, these are not successful for him, partly because he has learned to play the system (he skips out to get more heroin, because he’s gotten his methadone dose early) and partly because he’s still living in the same choice-less world which lead him to drugs in the first place. Interestingly, he gets clean successfully only though the help of his surprisingly non-judgemental parents, who perhaps understand his need for escapism, and for the bonds he has built with his friends though drug-use.

When Renton decides to steal from his friends, he seems to be making a clean start, but he’s stuck, in a sense, because the only way he can have a middle-class life with the TV and the marriage and all of that, is to turn his back on his working-class friends. Part of being middle class means turning a blind eye to the desperation of the working-class. His new middle-class future is also funded by “dirty” money, which shows the “dirty” roots of squeaky-clean middle class life. So though he’s “clean” from drugs, Renton is sullied by his past and his class. His ending hope for a better life, which parallels his opening rant (a rant that ends by concluding that he doesn’t need the “stuff” of consumerism and biological citizenship because he’s got heroin) suggests that he could be headed for addiction again in the future, if not addition to heroin, then to a more legitimate or "domestic" drug.