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Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a ****ing big television. Choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol, and dental insurance. Choose fixed interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisurewear and matching fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who the **** you are on a Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing, spirit crushing game shows, stuffing junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pishing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, ****ed up brats you spawned to replace yourself. Choose a future. Choose life... But why would I want to do a thing like that? I chose not to choose life. I chose somethin' else. And the reasons? There are no reasons. Who needs reasons when you've got heroin?

Mark "Rentboy" Renton

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If nothing else, Trainspotting is to be thanked for the moral outrage it kicked up from professional hypocrites squeamish over the consequences of the hardline anti-drugs rhetoric they'd been pushing as fanatically as any dealer. And therein lies its problem; it's a movie six feet under its own mythology. That poster of five cocksure smackheads giving a smug two-fingers to the nation has long been devoured by pop culture and parodied out of whatever scarce meaning it once had. Strip away the hype and the squalid gloss, and what does the supposed film of the Nineties have left to say?

I first heard about Trainspotting before it came screaming into the public consciousness, in a Film 96 clip on a small arthouse flick about Edinburgh heroin addicts. For reasons evident in my member profile (now that, mate, is what you call a plug) I didn't see the film on its original release, finally catching up with the beast behind the headlines on its Channel 4 premier. At the time it blew me away, a gasp of fresh air spat from Edinburgh's urban squalor at the idiotic miasma of our national narcotic infatuation. Sickboy, Renton, Spud and Begbie were unworthy icons, putrid embodiments of the social decay the clowns of Westminster seemed hell bent on dealing. That it was funny as a pot of pish didn't do any harm.

Watching it again, my third viewing, each courtesy of C4, I noticed two things. First, the ever unpredictable needle shot, shown the first time, snipped the second, is back in again. Good to know the nation is ready to learn how all those pointy things get the brown gunk into the veins. Second, I didn't like it any more.

Don't get me wrong, it's still funny as a pot of pish, and the following state of the nation on English-Scottish relations as great as ever.

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It's shite being Scottish! We're the lowest of the low. The scum of the ****ing Earth! The most wretched miserable servile pathetic trash that was ever shat on civilization. Some people hate the English. I don't. They're just wankers. We, on the other hand, are colonized by wankers. Can't even find a decent culture to get colonized by. We're ruled by effete arseholes. It's a shite state of affairs to be in, Tommy, and all the fresh air in the world won't make any ****ing difference!

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But as a film, it's about as winning as the worst toilet in Scotland. It chews up the heroin hysteria with gusto without glorifying the drug, and this is good. It's got a lineup of oddballs that make Tim Burton look like a two-up two-downer, and this is better. Did I mention it's funny as a pot of pish? Once or twice, probably. But that aside, Trainspotting is the embodiment of its subject; a kick equal to a thousand orgasms, but nothing left after its dripped out of your collapsing veins.

It's the ideal movie for a disposable decade. You don't care for the characters, care less about their pathetic Del Boy-esque schemes, and once the ride's over, what was seared into my mind is now shrugged off before the start of the ad break. Trainspotting wants to be a confident chunk of social realism cut with the force of Begbie's much brandished malkey, but it doesn't play by its own rules. Traingspotting does not glorify junkiedom, but far worse, the film revels in its own nihilism, the angry teenager of pop philosophy. It's a joke mate, so have a laugh, then pull your head out the toilet and every man for himself. Heroin is the anti-Midas, and so is Trainspotting. Rent-boy actually quotes Thatcher's "no such thing as society" dictum, a political philosophy as putrid as the cheapest brown, and watching Trainspotting doesn't feel like taking a confident Nineties hit, but chasing the washed up chaff of Yuppiedom.

The scene where Begbie glasses a man who dares to give his foul lip the response it deserves now sums up the film for me. As the fat, ungainly drinker is ruthlessly put down by the glowering psychopath carrying more jewellery than the Tower, you're left watching the apotheosis of nihilism, Begbie standing triumphant among cowering society, oozing more cool than Tarantino could bear as he blows a victory cigarette at Rent-boy over the fate of man left mewing in his own blood. He's brought down in the end, but only courtesy of a dog eat dog mauling from Rent-boy. In reality, if you glass a man in a pub full of witnesses and stand around crowing, you're going down for GBH. In Trainspotting, all you get it a futile shrug. As the camera hovers over the silhouetted Begbie it isn't disgusted, it verges on the masturbatory. Nasty this, but God, has he got the stuff.

He hasn't, and neither has his world. It's still an almighty hit, but not one I'm inclined to repeat. Society isn't dead, but Trainspotting's juvenile chest-thumping most definitely is.



(Edited by Byron 25/04/2006 23:36)