What to think about Trainspotting and T2: A Dialogue
Spouse: Going into watching [Trainspotting], I assumed that I had seen it before but hadn’t really liked it enough to remember it. I was mostly wrong about that; I remembered it QUITE well, and the reason I thought I didn’t remember much was that I straight up stopped watching the movie after the “worst toilet in Scotland” scene. I was ALL THE WAY OUT as soon as Ewan McGregor started fishing around for his suppositories in the grossest toilet I have ever seen (and I have to pee frequently and have traveled in many countries known for poor public toilet situations, so I have seen some shit, literally).
WTTAA: And you are not a movie quitter.
To a fault! Honestly, I think that as soon as Ewan McGregor started to project his body headfirst into said toilet, I had seen all I needed to see; I’m pretty sure I never learned what happened to the suppositories, at least not until the other night when I decided to stick my toe back into this world, encouraged by the knowledge that I am perhaps more open to discomfort as part of watching a movie and more invested in listening to what that discomfort is telling me and how to move through it.
Still not a pleasant viewing experience! Harm done to children is rough on me, particularly babies. I’m still torn on whether I think this was a good/worthwhile use of a dead baby situation in a movie. Maybe this dialogue will help me figure out where I land.
I thought it would be fun to lay down some thoughts on Trainspotting and then watch T2 together and reconvene for a consideration of the films in conversation with one another. As you noted in our immediate post-Trainspotting discussion, this movie has a lot to say about a certain generation of young men living at a specific time. You, I presume, came to the movie as a young man, and clearly you had the stomach for it - perhaps because you felt a more personal investment in what it was saying - that I did not. Talk to me about that! What do you remember about seeing it for the first time and what made you want to revisit it?
To be clear, I was thoroughly grossed out by the toilet scene the first time, and each subsequent time. But I’ve also always been suckered in by the charm and charisma of the characters.
I mean, the movie isn’t a typical ‘heroin movie,’ insofar as I understand the genre. It gives you its thesis statement up front: these people wouldn’t be doing it if heroin didn’t feel so amazingly good. These are interesting characters who make interesting choices and have a lot of fun, and that’s compelling to watch, even and particularly because the choices make logical sense while being spectacularly destructive.
I don’t remember much about seeing it the first time, which I think was when I was in college. I remember the toilet scene and I remember being really terrified by Francis Begbie, who is oppressive in a manner similar to Ben Kingsley’s character in Sexy Beast.
YES.
My tolerance for that kind of abuse on screen is much lower than my tolerance for poop humor (and let’s not forget - there’s a second centerpiece poop joke in this movie!).
Poop humor is one thing, and as you well know I’m not really all that squeamish about poop qua poop. It’s much more the toilet, the presence of SO MANY STRANGERS’ POOP and god knows what else all in the same place. The other poop joke in the movie made me squeal with discomfort but would in no way have made me stop watching.
A few years ago I’d seen a number of references to it as an all-time classic film and I watched it again, this time in my mid-twenties. And that time it really spoke to me more on the level of this story of young men who have a fair amount of privilege - they’re definitely working class, arguably poor, but they have welfare and families and lovers - but just can’t see a reason to do anything with their lives. And I think I was just more receptive to some of the great acting and directing choices in the film and so on. It just spoke to me.
Watching it this time I started to wonder if you could make a film like it today. Or at least, have it be received in the same way. So much of the critical response to film these days is race- and gender-based. It’s hard to be sympathetic to a ‘life-is-hard-for-hot-privileged-white-guys’ narrative. And I mean that within the marketplace for film criticism of the high drama variety. But I also mean it personally: I personally don’t sympathize all that much with that kind of narrative anymore, which means that at some point in my mid-20s I stopped sympathizing with a lot of my own artistic output, which was very much that. Know what I mean? I said earlier that I now think of this as a very 90s, Gen-X voice-of-a-generation film. Do you agree with either component of that assessment?
Yes, definitely. There is a certain malaise that this movie depicts that I have a hard time relating to, because it’s hard not to look at these guys and go “are you serious?” But then again, I am currently in a period of my own white privileged life wherein I feel incredibly stuck and i don’t know what to do with my ambition and there are moments in which I wonder how I would feel if the bottom just fell out from under me, because part of the frustration comes from the fact that security - financial security and personal safety - can feel like a prison, and yet it doesn’t feel appropriate to say so because look at everything you have. Now, there is a certain kind of person who gets to make a movie about that struggle and many kinds of people who don’t. But I think the work here is honest, and as an older person who had lived a bit more life since I last shut this movie off in disgust, I feel ready to engage with it on its own terms and I feel receptive to what it is saying.
Yeah, I agree, the work is honest. And there’s no denying the reality of the characters’ struggle, I think we just choose to acknowledge and depict different struggles these days.
Right, and I do think you can talk about it honestly while also talking about how white and male its viewpoint is, and the movie it most reminded me of in that way is Fight Club. Along the lines of what you were saying just now, I found myself wondering whether Fight Club would still get made today and how it would be received. And I mean obviously it would still get made - Brad Pitt, Chuck Klosterman, these people have social and cultural currency - but would it have thought differently of its audience and vice versa? Revisiting it recently, I asked myself why I liked it then and am still drawn to it now, because it definitely made my “favorite movies” list on my first Facebook profile in 2004, and I owned the DVD and gave it pride of place on my shelf next to my John Cusack movies. I do think that in part, that was because I wanted guys to like me and think I was cool; it felt like a way of telling people about who I was. But I was also drawn to it because I found that kind of masculinity - Brad Pitt’s kind of masculinity - sexy in a way I couldn’t articulate, and I was extremely seduced by the dripping disdain in the montage of Ed Norton living his boring life and listing all the material things he acquires and curates. I was reminded of that during Ewan McGregor’s “choose life” voice-over, which feels like his establishment of his own ironic distance from that sort of white middle-class existence that he swings towards and away from as he tries to figure out whether he can peacefully coexist with it or not. Heroin is his way of slamming down on the self-destruct button, just as Tyler Durden comes crashing into Fight Club and the narrator grabs on.
That feels very 90s and Gen-X to me. The whole idea that selling out and buying nice furniture is the worst thing you could do, and it’s preferable to just destroy everything, including yourself. We already look back on the 90s as pretty much the peak of prosperity and peace and economic opportunity in all of human history, at least for certain majoritarian groups, so it’s like what? What are you rebelling against? Credit cards, really?
But there really is something seductive about self-destruction, isn’t there? And about watching people make choices that I would be too scared to make - I was always and still am terrified of hard drugs and of losing control - but that I also very much understand. Also, this movie is incredibly dark, but it has a light touch and I always admire that and want to pay close attention to how it’s done. What were the filmmaking choices that struck you most this time around?
I think we’re really talking about the anti-hero here, particularly the anti-consumer anti-hero, and most of the things you are saying about Fight Club and Trainspotting you could also fit into The Graduate, and Mad Men, and if we’re talking John Cusack then certainly Say Anything and maybe Grosse Pointe Blank. Privileged white dudes rebelling against consumer culture, each in their own way. I’d take Trainspotting over Fight Club any day though, because of that light touch. Fight Club is so self-important, it’s very ‘I’m fourteen years old and this is deep.’
Well like I said, I am fairly sure I also would have loved The King’s Speech in 2004; I fell hard for that stuff.
Ha, well I enjoyed The King’s Speech while I was watching it. And Fight Club too. Just a question of how quickly you realize it’s tripe. The King’s Speech: while watching. Fight Club: in my case, after listening to people I didn’t respect treat it like a holy text.
Check out this whole video, but at 1:20 it discusses transition scenes in particular.
Filmmaking choices that struck me this time: this is random and specific, but I’ve noticed over the years that when a director wants to transition location to a new city and keep the energy up, they show a montage of bridges and tourist sites and throw an uptempo pop song over it. (See video at right, maybe I didn’t notice so much as “was told”). It’s really hacky and overdone, generally. But the use of that technique after Renton has just given this climactic speech about how it’s “shite being Scottish” because they’ve been colonized by the culturally destitute English just throws Renton’s choice into stark relief. So whether it was a hacky trope in 1996 or not, it’s the use of the trope to tell you something about who this character is and how they feel about their choices.
Yes - a great visual and intertextual joke and I think your read is exactly right.
I noticed a bit more of the urban depression in the movie this time. Nobody complains about being poor, but it’s implied that they’re all on welfare. The movie does a good job of showing how squalid much of Edinburgh is.
I was struck by that too. Edinburgh is so pretty to me, but I’ve only seen it from bridges and tourist sites.
And then the characters do go to a couple places - the countryside where Renton makes his speech, Diane’s house in a plush neighborhood within walking distance of her old-money private school, then Renton as a literal salesperson for upscale locations in London - and it does build a sense that these are people who are economically and maybe culturally excluded. And maybe part of that is their choice, they’ve chosen heroin instead of life, but--Renton’s parents chose life (sort of, give or take their legal substance addictions). And they are still living in a tiny, crappy apartment in the projects. They didn’t get Renton into Diane’s posh prep school and never would. I guess all of that is to say that the choice of settings is really well done, it all really tells you who these people are and perhaps why they act the way they do, but without excusing them and without having to spell it out. How about you, what if anything really spoke to you?
What I found myself admiring is the film’s true commitment to the notion that being clean does not make you a good person. It really made me realize how deeply the idea of redemption is ingrained in stories about addiction and recovery. We see it all the time with sobriety narratives and to a more insidious extent, weight loss “journeys” in movies (ugh, Brittany Runs A Marathon). Characters free themselves from a dependence on something and it’s taken for granted that they grow as people, probably due in part to how America loves stories about the nobility of doing physically hard things. This movie is like LOL, no. We do see Renton struggle through withdrawal more than once, but the movie doesn’t really attempt to make the case that he deserves credit or admiration for getting clean on any individual occasion. He’s got it down to a science, after all, and the part just before the infamous toilet scene when he goes shopping for getting-clean supplies (you need the tomato soup AND the mushroom soup in the correct quantities, after all) is one of the most memorable sequences, eye-catching. It’s very funny - the voiceover and camera cuts can make any shopping list funny - and because it’s funny, it’s also not being presented to us as admirable. And we don’t dwell for a long time on the withdrawal itself; we cut pretty quickly from fishing suppositories out of toilet-fantasy-land to post-withdrawal, all clean, lying in the grass with Sickboy and being irritated that he seems to find it even easier to quit heroin and sort of enjoys showing off about it and spouting his “philosophy on life.” He is doing a performance of having grown as a person by way of getting clean, but as the film will soon confirm, he has not. There’s very little evidence that Renton learns any lessons or grows as a person at any point at all - he has lots of opportunities to do the right thing when it is also the hard thing, and he does not. And something tells me that it would be a less compelling and less honest movie if it tried to redeem him. Do you agree? What do you think is valuable in this story told as it is, aside from what you’ve already said (which I think is very astute) about social and economic exclusion?
That’s a great point. This is not a typical addiction/redemption arc movie, and you could argue it’s not even a ‘heroin movie,’ in that Renton spends a good chunk of the film theoretically clean. And it doesn’t make him a better person at all. At the end of the film, he says he’s going to be better, but the reality is all he’s done is steal some money and he’s not even sure he’s finally done with heroin.
What I think the ending says is that this was never about drugs, it was about being able to reasonably envision a future for yourself. And Renton couldn’t do that until he had (1) GBP 14,000 in a duffel bag and (2) a clean break from his awful “mates” so he can reinvent himself. Who knows if he succeeds - though I think he does, because he is indeed charming and privileged - but that’s what he needed to get out and it has nothing to do with being good or redeeming himself. Although he does leave a little bit of cash for Spud, which I think does work. It’s true enough to the character and it leaves you with the right taste in your mouth.
Yes - that bare minimum of feel-good is earned.
I think there are a lot of “valuable” elements of the story. There’s some sly commentary about the ‘heroin movie’ and heroin in general as you observe literally everyone around Renton drinking beer and doing legal prescription drugs all the time. The idea that heroin is somehow exponentially more transgressive becomes a pretty good joke. And that ties back into our expectation of a redemption arc - if Renton became a legal, respectable drug addict like his parents, would that make him in any way ‘good’? His parents’ apartment is literally the same apartment as Tommy’s, but with wallpaper.
Right, and Begbie, his one buddy who is too good for “that shite” - Robert Carlyle - is definitely the WORST dude in the movie.
Easily, yes. And I really like Kelly Macdonald’s character. It’s a very male movie and there’s a male gaze element to the portrayal, but at the same time, you get the sense of her as an interesting person who understands Renton’s anti-social/anti-consumerist malaise, and is fully willing to be entertained by it and may even help him grow, without being sucked into it. You get the sense she’s got her own life to live and she’s going to learn from this experience. (You have to just accept the statutory rape element of the storyline, and to be fair, it really isn’t Renton’s fault, but it’s still icky.) The movie needs an audience surrogate, and she really pulls it off. She shows you how to enjoy it.
That’s well put; I didn’t see her originally as the audience surrogate but I think you’re right. She makes it very clear to Renton that she sees right through him, and she’s choosing to invite him into her taxi anyway and take him home because you know what, from a place of comfort and safety and privilege, why not enjoy the injection of wildness that this guy brings to the table? When you can enjoy him from a distance without taking the risk of trusting him in any way, he’s pretty appealing.
And speaking of Kelly Macdonald, one thing I respected about T2 was its restraint with her character. Yes, she appears briefly as no-bullshit lawyer whose hourly rate makes Renton’s eyes pop (“that’s very reasonable!” he stammers, thinking the figure he’s looking at is a flat fee for her services) but thank GOD they resisted the urge to have her join the redemption squad and make Mark a better person. We get just enough.
I could’ve spent more time with her. But I agree it would’ve been a bad move to relegate her character to assisting with Renton’s redemption/nostalgia arc. Which is sort of what they chose to do with the Veronika character.
I’m curious to hear your thoughts on the sequel, now! I was into it, and I enjoyed seeing the various reference points to the original, most of which managed to not be too overdone. We revisit the “choose life” speech with a patina of 20-teens malaise - as Renton riffs on his onetime ironic bit, we understand that in the intervening 20 years, he’s chosen life in the sense that he’s attained the things you’re supposed to strive for, but he feels just as empty and bitter as he did in the days when he chose heroin. The first movie opened with him sprinting maniacally down the street, and he’s a mess, but that wild-eyed smile at the camera when he gets hit by the car...he’s alive, man! T2 opens with a long line of people running on treadmills, and the camera slowly finds him running in a mechanical way right alongside all the others, so indistinguishable that we barely recognize him as Mark Renton before he collapses in a heap on the floor, looking far more dead than alive.
Having “chosen life,” or so he thinks, Renton is clean, he’s married, and he’s got a job, but the job is a dead end, the marriage is ending, and he still seems to teeter on the edge of his addiction, not quite sure yet as you said earlier whether he’s done with heroin. Contrast that to Spud, who returns from the brink of suicide and chooses life - grudgingly, at first, but then with the encouragement of Veronika (whose arc is more satisfying than I expected it to be) with more emotional honesty than any other character has thus far displayed. He chooses life by facing himself, literally telling his story in a way that’s far more true to who he is and what he’s lived than the sort of twelve-step group leader shtick he’s doing at the beginning of the movie, wherein he’s playing a part that someone else has more or less scripted for him. Clearly that persona isn’t really him and it is not helping him beat his addiction; it just keeps sending him right back.
Did you find all of that too on the nose? Did it convince you that the original story was worth revisiting and commenting upon further (which many sequels do not)? Who did you find compelling in T2?
If by ‘on the nose’ you mean ‘overly nostalgic’, that would be a criticism. It revisited a lot of visuals and characters from the first film and tried to do it in a slanted way (Renton hit by car, laughing; return of Diane and Mikey Forrester, etc.). And the whole Spud-as-storyteller bit made an avenue to revisit the original movie from a new perspective, but that got a bit cute at times.
Yeah, I guess that’s what I meant - a bit cute.
So that was all less interesting to me than revisiting the character relationships--the focus on Renton’s relationship with Sickboy/Simon (I’m going to use the T1 names) I think did really pay off. It was complicated and difficult and seemed authentic, really spoke to who the characters are and why they’re worth revisiting and caring about.
I really didn’t like the Veronika character. It was too much of a re-tread of Diane - Renton charms the hot young thing who’s out of his league, she fucks him and helps him understand himself. And then she basically does the same thing for Spud and Sickboy. The movie feints toward making her a real character, but I don’t think it succeeds. Part of it may be that she’s just too young and attractive. This is a movie about a bunch of junkies in their late 40s, men who have a lot of trouble just existing. The romantic relationships between Begbie and Spud and their exes are pretty believable and age appropriate. Why couldn’t the audience surrogate/love interest character be older also? I get that she’s an immigrant and a sex worker, but are there really so many hot 20-somethings looking to bang 40-something burnout assholes?
I guess I feared it would be much worse than it was, with Veronika. She doesn’t end up with any of them, which I guess isn’t asking for much. I suppose my non-objection comes in part from the fact that aside from my low, low expectations for female characters in guy movies, I also went into this movie wanting to like it, and I enjoyed much of it enough to be willing to nod along with some of its lamer choices. She was definitely too young and beautiful, but she also gets all the money and gets to leave them all behind. I guess, in a nutshell, I try really hard with some movies to set aside my disappointment with the female characters and even be pleasantly surprised when they’re not as offensive as they could have been. If it sounds like I’m jaded, I am. Sometimes I want to yell about the male glance, sometimes I want to feel just for a little while like these movies were made for me, too.
Also, I think by the time Veronika and Mark have sex, the movie has already basically revealed itself as an action movie made for men of a certain generation who have aged alongside the main characters. It’s MUCH more of an action movie in all its major set pieces (I’m thinking mainly of Begbie and Renton facing off in the chase sequence and the final sauna-ruining sequence - poor Spud’s decorating choices all smashed to bits). So at that point, I’m just not asking it to be a whole lot more than that. You know?
I guess. I thought the chase sequence was not believable at all. We’ve seen Renton literally run up a mountain. Begbie is overweight and just got stabbed through the gut. And he’s keeping pace?
I didn’t say it was a good action movie.
Why is this scene in the movie?
It is, though, weirdly action movie-ish in the way it chooses fantasy over reality. The random Spud-as-De-Niro-in-Raging-Bull sequence - why? And Begbie, a violent psychopath, has escaped from prison but somehow not only is that not an insanely big news story but also the cops aren’t watching his wife and son and nobody tells Renton? I’m done ranting. But I don’t think you had to make those sorts of excuses to buy into the plot of Trainspotting.
Definitely not. You were willing to go with it; the movie is about troubling choices more than improbable ones. All of which is not to say that this movie gets nothing right! I agree that the complications of Renton and Sickboy’s relationship are compelling, and the other sentimental piece that sat well with me was Mark’s return home, the way his bedroom is the exact same one in which we saw him go through terrible withdrawal and hallucinations. I’m glad we got to skip the dead babies on the ceiling this time.
Agreed. The bedroom worked.
Here’s what didn’t work for me: the train ride out to the Highlands, where Sickboy and Renton trade accusations about who fucked who over in the throes of addiction. Renton got Tommy addicted to heroin which led to his contracting HIV and dying. Sickboy fathered a child who died essentially of neglect. Then, we basically cut to the two of them shooting up. It felt to me like that was an attempt at going back and saying “see, that baby’s death did mean something! It wasn’t just tragedy porn that got swiftly set aside!” It felt a little hand-wavy.
Hmm. I guess I see that. I thought the film did a pretty decent job of suggesting how much the past weighed on the characters, while also suggesting it didn’t weigh enough. As much as they have reason to hate each other and themselves, Renton and Sickboy are so desperate for companionship and understanding and forgiveness that they’ll go back to heroin if it takes them to that place. What I loved was the scene where they’re friends again and the thing they choose to do, that brings them so much joy, is just to mansplain, at absurd length, the history of English soccer to a hot young woman.
Extremely funny and...yeah.
There’s a lot more to Y Tu Mama Tambien than this scene, but it is climactic.
If that isn’t an indictment… Veronika observes they ought to fuck each other (and that would be a movie; actually it is, it’s called Y Tu Mama Tambien), but she and the movie are also suggesting that they need, really desperately and pathetically need, love and acceptance and to feel like their accumulated knowledge and experience is meaningful or important in some way. That I thought was quite touching.
That moment was, in retrospect, what got me on board with Veronika as audience surrogate. Were you surprised that Tommy’s death was not more discussed in T2? Can you talk a little bit about what your hopes and/or questions were going into this sequel, since you’re the one with the more longstanding relationship with the original, and how/whether it answered?
By the end of the movie, I was genuinely surprised that we didn’t get a cameo or a hallucination-type appearance from present-day Kevin McKidd, the actor who played Tommy. Just in the spirit of showing us what he looks like in 2017 and including him in the filming and making it a party.
Honestly I was expecting that, too, but it’s hard to imagine them pulling it off without being too cute.
Ha, well they didn’t shy from cuteness. It is a better movie for not doing that, though. Loved him in Rome!
I guess the one thing I was hoping for was that it would be less nostalgic and less obsessive about the previous film. For instance, I was hoping it wouldn’t gloss over the previous 20 years as if the most important thing that ever happened to these four guys was when Renton stole the money. I get why that would be true for Begbie, but for Sickboy and Spud? After 20 years, I would’ve thought that would just be one incident in a long period of junkie hijinx. And I would’ve thought that Renton wouldn’t stay away from Edinburgh for 20 years--like, why not have it be that he came home and paid Sickboy back seven years later (in 2003), and Sickboy was Renton’s best man at his wedding, and now they’re having their mid-life crisis? That might be interesting. Because in the end nostalgia isn’t the worst thing per se, it’s the nostalgia for that particular period and that particular event, that makes you feel like you’re watching, not middle-aged men understandably full of nostalgia and regret about making bad choices and being economically excluded, but middle-aged men who were once in Trainspotting and kind of still wish they were. That’s what T2 feels like in its worst moments.
Yes, I think that’s well put. And I think maybe that’s because they imagine the audience for this movie is middle-aged men who loved Trainspotting in a vicarious-living way (yeesh) and identify with that longing in the middle-aged T2 protagonists.
You watched the two films back-to-back, more or less. But it was your idea to watch T2 immediately, I thought we’d let it marinate. What were you hoping and expecting it to be?
I’m actually really glad we did it this way, because I think having Trainspotting so fresh in my mind made the sequel’s choices easier to interrogate, and in some cases, appreciate. I already talked about my admiration for the director’s choice of opening shot; I thought that worked really well and set us up well for the story we were going to rejoin, telling us where Renton is now and setting up where he’s going and what he’s grappling with. Having recently watched Godfather Part 2, I have a lot of time for a sequel that recasts specific scenes or shots from the original with a purpose in mind, a relevant comparison they want the audience to be making. I’m thinking of the wedding that opens Godfather (very Italian, family-oriented, lots of love, fairly unpretentious as parties go, demonstrative of personal connections that Vito has cultivated in an honest way over the years even if they ultimately serve his criminal enterprises) and how Godfather 2 asks us to contrast that directly with its own opening set piece, i.e. the first communion bash that Michael is throwing for his son (super fancy and impersonal, the band can’t play Italian songs, Michael clearly has no love for any of these people, he’s just trying to impress racist senators). The G2 party scene absolutely works on its own and is full of character moments, but the viewer who watches with the G1 comparison front of mind is going to see so clearly how drastically things have changed for this family in the last ten years, what power structures have moved in to replace former ones, and how people’s feelings about each other are evolving.
It’s unfair to say the least to compare T2 to G2, the most decorated sequel of all time, but it’s the best way I can think of to describe what a good sequel can be capable of, even on a small scale.
Hmm, the most decorated sequel of all time. I can think of a few competing candidates, including the other T2, Judgment Day. But that’s another article.
That was the only other sequel that came to mind, but I stand behind my characterization - when I say decorated I don’t mean indisputably best.
I do think that the opening shot of T2 is a strong start, though. It’s a good choice - we’re learning something about Renton just by watching it (he goes to the gym now just like all the other normies! and it’s still not enough to keep him from collapsing in a heap) but if we watch it and compare it visually and thematically to the opening of T1, we now have so much insight into the world we’re stepping back into. I don’t think, however, that all of the callbacks work, and maybe not even most of them. Renton getting hit by the car during the Begbie chase scene and calling up that same deranged smile as in its parallel scene in T1 feels more like a “hey guys, remember this?” winky thing instead of a thoughtful dialogue between these two moments.
So, what was I hoping for...I mentioned above that I felt like Trainspotting is an honest and emotionally curious movie, its white-male-ness notwithstanding, and I was hoping that this movie might successfully reopen the story with an equally honest look at these guys’ existence, fan service be damned. But ultimately, a lot of it felt like fan service.
Can you think of any self-referential moments that worked for you?
Running as the new addiction worked for me. Like I said, the whole mansplaining thing worked for me, and that kind of is a reference point - recall that Sickboy’s favorite thing to do in Trainspotting is to mansplain about Sean Connery. And the part where Begbie reads Spud’s stories and play-acts his former self starting fights and going nuts, and then you see a vignette that was in the book Trainspotting, where the book and movie get the name, from an encounter with Begbie’s father--that scene with Begbie and Spud is the only Begbie-related scene that really spoke to me.
Yes, I agree about that; it’s really the only Begbie-related thing in either movie that works for me on an emotional level; it’s the only thing that humanized Begbie in any way and makes you hate him a tiny bit less. He’s such a villain otherwise, and I often found myself wondering during the first movie why these guys are even friends with him. And the way he treats his ex-wife and son in T2 is appalling, but not heartbreaking until you get that story about his father.
That goes to the one element of the film as constructed that did work for me, which is how it captures the, not necessarily nostalgia, but the way as a somewhat older man, you think back on your young adulthood and you feel this sense of mystification and loss. You know you did those things, you wish you could still do those things, but sometimes you just can’t understand how you could’ve been that person then, and this person now. Like, why do I only get one chance to be young? Why am I this old weakling now? I want to be that guy again! And do it differently this time!
I feel that way sometimes. And I’m only thirty-four! It’s only going to get worse! And to some extent it isn’t rational, because when I was, say, 22, the things I most wanted were the things I now have and am swiftly acquiring more of - family, money, respect of my peers. When I was 22, despite having just about every advantage in life to that point, having a really bright future, it felt like the world was shitting on me. Constantly.
Maybe it’s the pandemic talking, because we literally can’t go outside and do anything. But I think T2 captures this sense of wanting so badly to go back and do it again. Maybe that is just, at its core, nostalgia, in the truest and most painful sense of the word. But at least it’s not all kitschy nostalgia, of the ‘remember when?’ variety. Know what I mean? Do you feel that way at all? You have always had a different relationship to your past, and I wonder if this is, itself, a deeply masculine feeling.
Yeah, maybe this is where being a man is necessary to connect with the film on this level. I feel no nostalgia for my early twenties. I sometimes mourn what I might have had if I hadn’t profoundly hated my body so much! But I would not go back to being that age for anything. I have a peace with myself now - a very imperfect one that requires much maintenance - that I had no dream of ever having as a twentysomething. I was constantly afraid of people judging me. I look at these young, give-no-fucks dudes (who clearly by the way have some “shite to be Scottish” self-hatred of their own to contend with) and I don’t relate at all to the invincibility that they sometimes feel and that they otherwise chase. I never even smelled that at that age, even when I ran marathons (which I completely did in hopes that it would cure me of my self-hatred, but I digress).
The best part of aging for me is that I care way less about a lot of these things than I did as a younger person, and I find that liberating. My priorities are clearer and feel more right and I feel that that is only going to get better. Post-menopause is supposed to be a great time! I feel like the best times of my life are ahead of me - increased financial security (I hope) and giving fewer fucks, plus only being 50 when we send our kid to college and get our pre-parenting lives back a bit. We won’t be young enough to get by on crappy hostel mattresses traveling the world anymore, but we also won’t have to. You know? I have admiration for many of the things I did as a young person with a more resilient body, but I wouldn’t trade that youth for what I have now.
Not that this movie necessarily makes it look all that great, but who knows, maybe I’ll be ready for hard drugs when I make it to my 60s.
Coming to What to Think About Art in 2048: “What to think about actually doing heroin: a dialogue.” Looking forward to it.