Choose life, then the drop
Iggy Pop’s Lust for Life hits before Edinburgh has time to introduce itself. Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting, released in Britain in February 1996, opens at a sprint: Ewan McGregor as Renton, feet on a street, a monologue that itemizes ordinary life in order to refuse it. John Hodge’s script, drawn from Irvine Welsh’s 1993 novel, does not pause to explain heroin to anyone who already knows the joke. The joke is that there isn’t one, and the camera still runs.
Much of the city on screen is Glasgow standing in for Leith. The cheat does not matter. What matters is the gang, filmed as a weather system. Ewen Bremner’s Spud apologizes with his whole body. Jonny Lee Miller’s Sick Boy treats charm as a weapon. Robert Carlyle’s Begbie needs no drugs to be the most dangerous man in the room. Kelly Macdonald’s Diane arrives later and looks at them as if she has already read the ending. Boyle cuts like a single, too fast and too precise, the edit of a culture that had just learned to dance to guitars again and did not trust the morning.
The soundtrack is the other director. Lou Reed’s Perfect Day lies down over an overdose and makes the horror look like a postcard. Blur, Pulp, New Order’s Temptation, Brian Eno, Leftfield: Britpop and what sat beside it are used as furniture, not as a commercial. Then the credits, and Underworld’s Born Slippy .NUXX, a track that was not born for this film and became its afterimage anyway. For a year you could not hear that kick drum without seeing a floor, a choice, a lie told at speed.
Acted out with a freedom of expression that is often astonishing.
(Derek Malcolm, The Guardian, 1996)
The film was accused, early and often, of making squalor stylish. The charge is not empty. The orange posters, the buzz cuts, the jokes, all traveled farther than the baby on the ceiling. Boyle’s answer is in the circular shape of the story. Nobody is improved by a speech. Renton gets out by stealing, which the film neither blesses nor hides. Welsh’s book was a chorus of dialects. The movie picks one pair of eyes and still lets the others shove into the frame. That is why it felt, in 1996, like news, and why it still feels like a room you should not tidy.
Two decades later the sequel tried to visit the same bodies and found them older, which is the only honest sequel to a film about time stolen. The first Trainspotting remains the one that matched a national mood without asking to represent it: irony as armor, pop as adrenaline, friendship as a bad habit with good timing. Iggy still opens the door. Underworld still shuts it. Between them, a generation heard its own pulse and pretended, for the length of a song, that the drop was a kind of flight.
