Trainspotting (film)

17/11/2025

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Trainspotting doesn’t film Edinburgh; it metonymises it. It takes what the film needs for its own ironic, efficient narrative form. If Metonymy means an association signifying a greater whole, like the White House for the US government administration, or the Crown for monarchical rule, Trainspotting insists on the equivalent short-hand as it offers up a city without too much concern for the specifics of place. At the very beginning, there is a second or two of footsteps on the ground before a thunderous soundtrack comes in as we see two of the film’s leading characters, Mark Renton (Ewan McGregor) and Spud (Ewen Bremner), running along Princes Street,disappearing down Calton Road, and near Waverley Station. They are being chased by two men in suits, presumably security guards or management from a shop they have been robbing. (We later find out it is John Menzies) The scene isn’t there to explore the details of the crime, nor even the specifics of place, even if the scene is fair to the city’s layout, and later explains why the scene is shown. Running up Princes Street could lead you to turn off the top of Leith Walk and down in the direction of Regent Bridge; there is a later court scene based on the theft.
But chiefly, the sequence in this adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s novel is there as adrenaline buzz, with a variation of it in the following two scenes: a five-a-side football game based mainly on taking out your opponent rather than putting the ball in the net, and a scene with Spud and others shooting up heroin. All the while, Renton’s voiceover tells us about the purposelessness of conventional life and the excitement of an alternative one. As he mockingly talks about choosing leisure wear and matching luggage, choosing a three-piece suite on hire purchase… so we witness instead a life of dodgy mates, drug addiction, and thievery. Director Danny Boyle offers these in the baldest of dichotomies, and the film starts as it intends to go on, painting Edinburgh with the broadest of brushes, yet with strokes of genius. As another Edinburgh film from another Edinburgh book (Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie) insists: “for those who like that sort of thing, that is the sort of thing they like.” During the 90s, this filmic style was the sort of thing many liked, and Trainspotting holds up better than numerous other clever accounts of felonious living, sharing a place alongside Pulp Fiction, Out of Sight, and Fight Club rather than the mediocre Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Natural Born Killers, and Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead. They all rely on taking life lightly and relying on a metonymising aesthetic to minimise the violence and harsh feelings they depict. Trainspotting does it better than most, and even manages to contain a serious side to its flamboyant restlessness.
Yet let us be more specific and see how it metonymises place and feeling. When Renton goes to visit his parents early in the film, it is part of a witty montage sequence with Renton initially saying in voiceover that “the only drawback, or the principle drawback, is that you have to endure all manner of cunts telling you that…’no way would I poison my body with that shite’”, as a third main character, Begbie (Robert Carlyle) speaks directly to the camera: the non-diegetic voiceover becoming diegetic dialogue. Another key character, Tommy (Kevin McKidd), adds, “it’s a waste of life, Mark, poisoning your body with that shite”, before we see Renton sitting with his parents at the dinner table. His dad says, “every chance you’ve had son, you’ve blown it.” Each moment is metonymically ironic, with Begbie speaking as he downs a pint, and Tommy smoking and drinking as he speaks, before we see Renton’s parents’ place: a compact council flat with dull interiors suggesting a life we might understand Renton wished to escape. All this is covered in a few seconds of screen time before we return to Renton’s voiceover as we see him again, where he was a few seconds before: lying on the floor, high on smack.
In an excellent essay in Sight and Sound, Andrew O’Hagan noted that it is “…disturbing from time to time to see the lives of this troop of addicts blasted about in pop promo fashion.” But this is what happens when a filmmaker decides to eschew verisimilitude. As Boyle says, “we always said [Ken] Loach would make a really interesting film of this book. It would be very different.” (Sight and Sound) Part of that difference rests on Loach’s resistance to association over exploration. In films like Kes, Family Life, and later Raining Stones and Ladybird, Ladybird, Loach seeks out locations and the immediacy of people’s lives, and makes a film out of that engagement. As Loach says, “the problem with executives and script meetings is that they want you to rationalise something that’s only half formed—you see, making a film is an exploration and you don’t know all the answers before you start. It’s like life, you get the answers at the end…” (Rabbit Foot) Instead of cinematic shorthand, it insists on long-hand, often longer takes that absorb the milieu rather than sum it up: more Bazin than Kuleshov, more based on the elaboration of the scene over the assertiveness of the cut.
While Boyle knows how to capture a sink estate in one shot, Loach insists on putting the sinkness of that estate in the background so it becomes a secondary property of the image and not a primary assumption about it. In Loach’s Sweet Sixteen, for example, the high rises are evident, but part of the characters’ lives and not an immediately defining feature. In Trainspotting, they are shown categorically. In one shot, Renton crosses the frame. In a slightly canted image, he passes a block of flats that are clearly marked as a housing estate, with their multi-coloured curtains and blinds, most of them closed even though it is during the day. Boyle may not share the politics of the Conservative Party, even if he did organise the opening ceremony for the London Olympics in 2012 under their watch, but this shot resembles a speech chancellor George Osborne made the same year as the Olympics, when he said: “It is unfair that people listening to this programme going out to work see the neighbour next door with the blinds down because they are on benefits.” (Guardian) As if that weren’t enough, Osborne also mimicked Trainspotting’s opening. In 2014, he said: “Choose jobs; choose enterprise; choose security; choose prosperity; choose investment; choose fairness; choose freedom; choose David Cameron; choose the Conservatives; choose the future.” (Guardian)
Boyle might have said in the Sight and Sound interview that class wasn’t what the film, nor even the book, are about, but it was easily enough used for class warfare by Osborne, and Trainspotting’s style can be so immediate partly because of the assumptions the film contains. In another shot, before showing Spud in bed after a heavy night out and an unfortunate accident with his bodily functions, the film shows a couple of grey high-rises, this time seen from the top half of the building rather than the bottom as a plane passes nearby. The point is the same, even if Boyle offers visual variation: in the earlier scene, the colours are vivid and the moment is shot from a low angle.  Later, it is grey and filmed from on high. Boyle may believe he has escaped the question of class, but it is part of the brilliance of his aesthetic: his ability to create in the viewer’s mind very quickly what they need to glean from the image — that these are characters restricted by their environment.
Speaking of the sixties and the beginning of the seventies, mentioning films like Alfie and A Clockwork Orange, Trainspotting’s producer Andrew MacDonald said, “I think that was the last period when Britain actually made films about contemporary subjects that were exciting and impactful, and actually meant something to British audiences.” (Sight and Sound) Such a claim is an insult to intervening films like Quadrophenia, Scum, Naked and Meantime, but MacDonald has a point — Trainspotting wants to return Britain to that period in the sixties when the country was the place to be cinematically, when filmmakers could make international productions like Tom Jones, Darling, Blow Up and Help, and suggested the UK could conquer the world. It was a time when a Labour government was in power, England won the World Cup, and the working class was in the ascendancy: Michael Caine, Sean Connery, and Richard Burton were huge stars from poor backgrounds. In this sense, Trainspotting, released in 1996, in the final moments of an exhausted Conservative administration, anticipates well a renewed sense of hope, as if taking the eighties setting in the novel and turning it into a film that creates an ambiguous temporality, one that captures both despair and optimism, with a Labour government coming in, and staying in for 13 years. Boyle admitted he didn’t want the film to stop in the eighties like the book. He wanted “to bridge across to now” (Sight and Sound) ,evidenced in much of the music, which is from the 90s — Blur, etc.
It makes the film less true to life than true to the desires of its audience, as if everyone was so fed up with eighteen years of Tory rule they wanted a film that would anticipate the near future as much as it would insist on showing us the recent past. The book is a despairing account; the film exuberant, a work of possibility despite many miserable moments. It now looks as good as it did then, even if its lack of social comment allowed the next Tory administration to co-opt it for its own ends. Loach’s work would have offered no such possibility, but for others, Loach’s films lack the exhilaration that makes Trainspotting a work of odd optimism within its evident, situational drudgery.

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

Trainspotting (film)

Trainspotting doesn’t film Edinburgh; it metonymises it. It takes what the film needs for its own ironic, efficient narrative form. If Metonymy means an association signifying a greater whole, like the White House for the US government administration, or the Crown for monarchical rule, Trainspotting insists on the equivalent short-hand as it offers up a city without too much concern for the specifics of place. At the very beginning, there is a second or two of footsteps on the ground before a thunderous soundtrack comes in as we see two of the film’s leading characters, Mark Renton (Ewan McGregor) and Spud (Ewen Bremner), running along Princes Street,disappearing down Calton Road, and near Waverley Station. They are being chased by two men in suits, presumably security guards or management from a shop they have been robbing. (We later find out it is John Menzies) The scene isn’t there to explore the details of the crime, nor even the specifics of place, even if the scene is fair to the city’s layout, and later explains why the scene is shown. Running up Princes Street could lead you to turn off the top of Leith Walk and down in the direction of Regent Bridge; there is a later court scene based on the theft.
But chiefly, the sequence in this adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s novel is there as adrenaline buzz, with a variation of it in the following two scenes: a five-a-side football game based mainly on taking out your opponent rather than putting the ball in the net, and a scene with Spud and others shooting up heroin. All the while, Renton’s voiceover tells us about the purposelessness of conventional life and the excitement of an alternative one. As he mockingly talks about choosing leisure wear and matching luggage, choosing a three-piece suite on hire purchase… so we witness instead a life of dodgy mates, drug addiction, and thievery. Director Danny Boyle offers these in the baldest of dichotomies, and the film starts as it intends to go on, painting Edinburgh with the broadest of brushes, yet with strokes of genius. As another Edinburgh film from another Edinburgh book (Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie) insists: “for those who like that sort of thing, that is the sort of thing they like.” During the 90s, this filmic style was the sort of thing many liked, and Trainspotting holds up better than numerous other clever accounts of felonious living, sharing a place alongside Pulp Fiction, Out of Sight, and Fight Club rather than the mediocre Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Natural Born Killers, and Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead. They all rely on taking life lightly and relying on a metonymising aesthetic to minimise the violence and harsh feelings they depict. Trainspotting does it better than most, and even manages to contain a serious side to its flamboyant restlessness.
Yet let us be more specific and see how it metonymises place and feeling. When Renton goes to visit his parents early in the film, it is part of a witty montage sequence with Renton initially saying in voiceover that “the only drawback, or the principle drawback, is that you have to endure all manner of cunts telling you that…’no way would I poison my body with that shite’”, as a third main character, Begbie (Robert Carlyle) speaks directly to the camera: the non-diegetic voiceover becoming diegetic dialogue. Another key character, Tommy (Kevin McKidd), adds, “it’s a waste of life, Mark, poisoning your body with that shite”, before we see Renton sitting with his parents at the dinner table. His dad says, “every chance you’ve had son, you’ve blown it.” Each moment is metonymically ironic, with Begbie speaking as he downs a pint, and Tommy smoking and drinking as he speaks, before we see Renton’s parents’ place: a compact council flat with dull interiors suggesting a life we might understand Renton wished to escape. All this is covered in a few seconds of screen time before we return to Renton’s voiceover as we see him again, where he was a few seconds before: lying on the floor, high on smack.
In an excellent essay in Sight and Sound, Andrew O’Hagan noted that it is “…disturbing from time to time to see the lives of this troop of addicts blasted about in pop promo fashion.” But this is what happens when a filmmaker decides to eschew verisimilitude. As Boyle says, “we always said [Ken] Loach would make a really interesting film of this book. It would be very different.” (Sight and Sound) Part of that difference rests on Loach’s resistance to association over exploration. In films like Kes, Family Life, and later Raining Stones and Ladybird, Ladybird, Loach seeks out locations and the immediacy of people’s lives, and makes a film out of that engagement. As Loach says, “the problem with executives and script meetings is that they want you to rationalise something that’s only half formed—you see, making a film is an exploration and you don’t know all the answers before you start. It’s like life, you get the answers at the end…” (Rabbit Foot) Instead of cinematic shorthand, it insists on long-hand, often longer takes that absorb the milieu rather than sum it up: more Bazin than Kuleshov, more based on the elaboration of the scene over the assertiveness of the cut.
While Boyle knows how to capture a sink estate in one shot, Loach insists on putting the sinkness of that estate in the background so it becomes a secondary property of the image and not a primary assumption about it. In Loach’s Sweet Sixteen, for example, the high rises are evident, but part of the characters’ lives and not an immediately defining feature. In Trainspotting, they are shown categorically. In one shot, Renton crosses the frame. In a slightly canted image, he passes a block of flats that are clearly marked as a housing estate, with their multi-coloured curtains and blinds, most of them closed even though it is during the day. Boyle may not share the politics of the Conservative Party, even if he did organise the opening ceremony for the London Olympics in 2012 under their watch, but this shot resembles a speech chancellor George Osborne made the same year as the Olympics, when he said: “It is unfair that people listening to this programme going out to work see the neighbour next door with the blinds down because they are on benefits.” (Guardian) As if that weren’t enough, Osborne also mimicked Trainspotting’s opening. In 2014, he said: “Choose jobs; choose enterprise; choose security; choose prosperity; choose investment; choose fairness; choose freedom; choose David Cameron; choose the Conservatives; choose the future.” (Guardian)
Boyle might have said in the Sight and Sound interview that class wasn’t what the film, nor even the book, are about, but it was easily enough used for class warfare by Osborne, and Trainspotting’s style can be so immediate partly because of the assumptions the film contains. In another shot, before showing Spud in bed after a heavy night out and an unfortunate accident with his bodily functions, the film shows a couple of grey high-rises, this time seen from the top half of the building rather than the bottom as a plane passes nearby. The point is the same, even if Boyle offers visual variation: in the earlier scene, the colours are vivid and the moment is shot from a low angle.  Later, it is grey and filmed from on high. Boyle may believe he has escaped the question of class, but it is part of the brilliance of his aesthetic: his ability to create in the viewer’s mind very quickly what they need to glean from the image — that these are characters restricted by their environment.
Speaking of the sixties and the beginning of the seventies, mentioning films like Alfie and A Clockwork Orange, Trainspotting’s producer Andrew MacDonald said, “I think that was the last period when Britain actually made films about contemporary subjects that were exciting and impactful, and actually meant something to British audiences.” (Sight and Sound) Such a claim is an insult to intervening films like Quadrophenia, Scum, Naked and Meantime, but MacDonald has a point — Trainspotting wants to return Britain to that period in the sixties when the country was the place to be cinematically, when filmmakers could make international productions like Tom Jones, Darling, Blow Up and Help, and suggested the UK could conquer the world. It was a time when a Labour government was in power, England won the World Cup, and the working class was in the ascendancy: Michael Caine, Sean Connery, and Richard Burton were huge stars from poor backgrounds. In this sense, Trainspotting, released in 1996, in the final moments of an exhausted Conservative administration, anticipates well a renewed sense of hope, as if taking the eighties setting in the novel and turning it into a film that creates an ambiguous temporality, one that captures both despair and optimism, with a Labour government coming in, and staying in for 13 years. Boyle admitted he didn’t want the film to stop in the eighties like the book. He wanted “to bridge across to now” (Sight and Sound) ,evidenced in much of the music, which is from the 90s — Blur, etc.
It makes the film less true to life than true to the desires of its audience, as if everyone was so fed up with eighteen years of Tory rule they wanted a film that would anticipate the near future as much as it would insist on showing us the recent past. The book is a despairing account; the film exuberant, a work of possibility despite many miserable moments. It now looks as good as it did then, even if its lack of social comment allowed the next Tory administration to co-opt it for its own ends. Loach’s work would have offered no such possibility, but for others, Loach’s films lack the exhilaration that makes Trainspotting a work of odd optimism within its evident, situational drudgery.

© Tony McKibbin