Review of The 1996 Trainspotting Movie in Reference to The Effects of Drug Use with Emphasis on The Life of Renton

Trainspotting is a 1996 film that narrates the story of a Edinburg young man called Renton, an underprivileged man who is struggling between drug intoxication and rehabilitation. Whilst the brutal horrifying side of drug addiction is greatly represented in specific ways, in general the film does not set an intense tone, rather it even involves some casual, conversational and even hilarious elements when telling the story. In that case the representation of addiction becomes questionable in terms of their ‘authenticity’; that is to say: Does the reality in real life accords with the representations in fictional world? Are there any details or facts that are intentionally removed by film producer, and why? How can spectators distinct theatrical tropes from realistic description of symptoms, as well as the boundary between regarding drug addicts as negative example or as role model? To answer these questions, throughout my essay I will try to examine the ‘precision’ and ‘authenticity’ of these visual representations of addiction that appeared in the film Trainspotting in cultural, scientific and ideological (social) terms.

First of all the idea of ‘femme fatale” which could be dated back to nineteenth century France has carried on to this late-twentieth-century movie. In the movie Trainspotting (1996) there are two main female characters who have intersections with male protagonists: Allison and Diane.

Diane as a teenager, her drug use marks the decadence of future generations. The emergence of this character and her sexual relationship with Breton are signifiers of the ‘passing down’ of this addicts tradition. Just as Breton does not know her real age at first, nobody especially the spectators is going to know what things will be happened on this girl in the future, which reminds viewers of the ‘drunk babies’ in William Hogarth’s engraving Gin Lane. Therefore she is not the one who makes audience feel sympathetic or hilarious on Breton’s experiences, she is also the one who makes this crack traditions passed down. From the character Diane, the whole movie starts to ‘fool around’ with spectators and let them question about what is true and what is not true, whilst her emergence can be seen as the exaggeration of reality, just as the tropes that Gin Lane has already been used a few centuries ago.

Saying more about the character Diane, in Trainspotting when Renton tries to quit heroin and ‘back to normal’, he is ‘arranged’ to have a crush on this 15-year-old girl and has sex with her. But after that he starts doing drugs again----probably the movie is trying to suggest that sex is not giving him as much comfort as drugs do, along with the quote from him: Ttake your best orgasm, multiply the feeling by twenty, and you're still fuckin miles off the pace.” Nevertheless this is merely a possible reading of this sex scene, rather the intersection of sex and drug addicts is the issue that worth mentioning. While Rantala in her paper “Cinematic Images of Being Addicted” concludes the sex addiction scene in movie Diary of a Sex Addict as “associated with the uncontrolled desire” (Rantala 110), this notion of “uncontrolled desire” in fact is a universal feature of all kinds of addictions, including drug addiction. Sex as an alternative to drug, Renton’s ‘illegal’ sexual relationship with this teenage girl in fact criminalize him in the same way drugs do. Sex and drugs are not merely issues about desire within this context, therefore it is clear that there is a dramatic modulation that leads to a certain direction.

The reason of the uncanny death of the daughter of Allison, another female character, is not revealed until the end of the movie, while the father of this child is also a mystery that remains unknown. It evokes of the former discussion of William Hogarth’s eighteenth-century engravings Gin Lane and Beer Street in contemporary British society, according to Mark Hallett, these works actually visualized the concern at “leap of mortality rates in the capital, particularly those of infants” (Hallett 207). Although it is an eighteenth-century visual tradition, this notion of ‘bad mother’ was reproduced and continued in this twentieth-century production, especially when considering this movie within the context of the drug law development (Boyd 207). Therefore the exact reason of this baby’s death is not what a film want to put emphasis on, the main point is the fact that her death signifies the immorality of female drug users, more importantly, the immorality of a new born baby’s mother who has caused several unrest and symbolized the breakdown of the whole society. The root cause and reality of the death is not essential to the story-telling, therefore it was intentionally omitted by the director, while the film tends to let viewers focus on the mysterious outcome it self in relation to the drug addicts.

In terms of the relationship between drug addiction and visual representations of human bodies in the film, the bodies that appear in the film are not merely the indicators of physical, medical, or more specifically, the psychological symptoms. So by contrasting bodies in film production and bodies in scientific realm, the gap between reality and virtual reality in public media can be thoroughly understood with assistance from background knowledge of contemporary social ideologies.

A character called Begbie in the film is depicted as a psychopath who also engages in heavy drug use. Representing addicts as a psychopath is not a new trope being used in late twentieth century, since this tradition could be dated back to the early time period of the century . However Lindesmith’s paper in 1940, “The Drug Addict as a Psychopath,” thoroughly criticized the close link between drug addiction and abnormal psychology. He pointed out that this traditional view on drug addicts is “not specific and is therefore unverifiable” (Lindesmith, 914). He analyzed several scientific datas to demonstrate that it is hard to tell whether one’s abnormality is the “cause of addiction” or the “result of addiction” (916). Therefore, according to Richard Huggins’ relevant paragraph that summarizes Lindesmith’s study, Lindesmith finally “hinted at the close relationship between professional, clinical, political discourses and how they map onto public accounts of the addict as weak.” (Huggins 168) That is to say, the film spontaneously creates a fusion of psychological facts and ideological norms.

Throughout the whole film, the depiction of abject bodies is almost everywhere. The movie does not stop at the stage of showing drug user’s instant emotions as well as their abject bodies on the surface, rather the ‘back and forth’ of addict’s body in most viewers eyes has further meanings than viewers thought, if we combine protagonist’s actions with some theoretical discourses. In Harold’s paper on this particular movie, Harold also discuss this notion of “abject body” that comes with another term called “bodies in flux” . To support this idea, Harold quotes Judith Butler’s paper “Bodies that Matter” especially her conception of subjectivity in relation to “repudiation of abjection”. According to Judith Butler, abjection of a human body is not merely a symbol that is marked on the surface, rather it involves people’s inner state’s struggles. A person’s denial of himself, for instance, in the movie Renton’s frequent denials of his Heroine-addicted state, in fact becomes the source of his body’s ‘abject’ since his personal identity is not stable. Whilst the physical bodies in this film can be interfered by ideological norms, the physical bodies themselves can also reflect the inner world of characters that is not visible to the audience, so the body is intentionally granted with more meanings by the film, which is far beyond the realm

When it comes to this film’s censorship issues, the discussion will be closely related to the social promotions that this movie might engage in.

In the end Renton’s taking his friend’s dirty money away to do his moral redemption can be seen as boundary-playing: the boundaries between moral and immoral. Therefore many people reamin doubtful about this movie, some considering this as glamorization of addicts and as advertising of their ‘immoral’ happiness. In biological term, indeed drugs are able to bring people so-called ‘happiness’: “The excitation (the initial period of the ingestion of alcoholic beverages, cocaine, ecstasy, or the act of gambling, sexual seduction) makes the addict happy, feeling replete with power.” (Lacerda 97) Therefore this depiction of happiness is exactly what the reality is. By looking at the quote from the director, “It does not try to hobble along with moral consensus,” however, as my personal statement, the movie does not stop at the stage of depicting their ‘happiness’, rather it combines everything as a whole

For instance, one of Renton’s friends, Tommy, was finally dead because of HIV. Since Renton and his other friends are all enrolled in National Health Service and do not share the needles, it lower their risks of getting HIV infection. However, Tommy’s exclusion from this space and his emergence in a dirty house are closely linked to his fortune of HIV infection. Therefore the death somehow is a ‘punishment’ for his ‘exclusion’ rather than outcome of a medical disease anymore. According to Boyd’s discourse on Tommy’s death in her book Hooked, she notes that “the scene is problematic because of its linking HIV and addiction with physical and moral degradation. ” (Boyd 97) Considering National Health Service as a social institution, Tommy’s death is possibly a propaganda of public sanitation. Or else to say, Tommy sacrifices for the intention of proclaiming moral goods by degrading him in a physical way in the film. Moreover, Renton finally becomes almost the only person who survives by escaping from this ‘sub-culture’. Renton’s engagement in rehabilitation programme somehow can be seen as the moral message of this movie, as what I have mentioned above.

Lastly as a side note, the film mainly consists of montage scenes. In Rantala’s paper the affective elements of montage technique is thoroughly analyzed. For instance, the close-shot of protagonist’s face in the movie in fact breaks the gap between characters and spectators. Therefore the affective elements and intentionally inserted values are vividly visualized by the film producers to he audience, by “engaging the viewer through an intimate emotional connection that merges the subjective and objective.” (Rantala 107)

In Nancy Campbell’s book Using Women: Gender, Drug Policy, and Social Justice, she puts forward an idea that drug discourse is actually isolated from “simple discussions of ‘fact’” (Campbell 38). Even for the facts that the movie vividly shows to the audience, cannot overwhelm the values that the whole movie intends to convey.

While the discussions that I have given above was mainly about the boundary between ‘exaggeration’ and ‘reality’, in substance it can be concluded as the discussion of objective and subjective elements in this film Trainspotting, as well as in the whole realm of visual culture. While the depiction of femme fatale, disease, death, imprison in relation to drug use in this movie follows the tradition of illegal-drug film which provides us “a worldview of deviance, loss of control, the need for law and order, criminalization and militarization of civil society” (Boyd, 207), this movie also involves evolutional features such as the emphasis on “normalizaed drug use” (Boyd 208) and pleasure. The educational purpose of this movie is also inevitable despite of several visual depictions of ‘happiness’ of drug use.

Possibly the playing of the vague baundries between film and reality can be concluded as the discussion of “what is art” or more specifically, “what is film as a form of art”. According to Rantala, “Cinema is a technology of affect” (Rantala 108), or else to say within the world of film spectator’s emotions are not determined by themselves. Furthermore, the way we respond to the addiction scenes in movies interfere with our perception of drug addicts in reality, and vice versa.