Trainspotting (1996, Boyle, UK)
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A Level Film Studies - Focus Film Factsheet Trainspotting (1996, Boyle, UK) tone for the film’s iconoclasm. The scene is Component 1: Varieties of actually from the middle of the film prior to Film and Film-Making (AL) Spud and Renton’s arrest for shop lifting. Component 2: European Film • 01:25:48 – End - Renton leaves Begbie, Spud and Sick Boy behind and runs off with Core Study Areas: the money they got from a drug deal. The Key Elements of Film Form feeling is optimistic. He’s quitting drugs and Meaning & Response is going straight. He’s leaving his violent, The Contexts of Film nihilistic, wastrel friends behind and moving on - literally crossing a bridge (London Specialist Study Area: Bridge) to a new life that he’s chosen! ‘I’m Narrative going straight and choosing life…’. Ideology (AL) CORE STUDY AREAS 1 - STARTING Rationale for study & narrative POINTS - Key Elements of Film Form (Micro Features) • Trainspotting remains an era defining film and one of the most successful UK films of the 1990s. Cinematography Aside from its ability to talk to a generation • Low level camera movement and and capture the zeitgeist it remains (despite the framing communicates a sense of a life huge critical and financial success of 2009’s of limited perspectives and ambition. Slumdog Millionaire) Danny Boyle’s defining • The first of a number of Renton’s overdose movie. Its vibrant soundtrack, its aspirational POV’s – having surreally sunk into the fleshy new stars (Ewan McGregor most famously), its carpet and lost touch with reality: (44:53). wit, its controversial representation of Scotland A doctor revives Renton with adrenalin. and its energetically edited, beautifully shot The irony of Lou Reed’s song ‘Perfect Day’ material lead to some criticism for its perceived u n d e r s c o r e s h i s v i s u a l n i g h t m a r e (4 7: 0 8 ) . glamorisation of a drug fuelled lifestyle. True • (01:14:33) London, a long shot and homage or not, the marketing for the film certainly to the Beatle’s Abbey Road photo. communicated to its audience a sense of cool – featuring iconic portrait mid-longshots of the Mise-en-Scène main characters (see above) as well as trumpeting • 00:48 - The shabby brown tones of a dilapidated the arrival of a new wave of UK cinema. junky drug den perfectly communicated through set design, costume and colour palate. However this is not social realism but rather STARTING POINTS - Beginnings hyperrealism – a heightened realism. and Endings • 07:45 - Colour-coordinated cubes of working • 00:21 – Beginning - Iggy Pop’s anthemic song class life. These cells hide their contents from ‘Lust for Life’ erupts on screen and we see us and their conformist normality reflects Renton (Ewan McGregor) and Spud, running something Renton is escaping from. from security guards in well-heeled Edinburgh. Editing Renton’s narration of Welsh’s iconic and • Title sequence freeze frames - Focus on nihilistic ‘Choose Life’ monologue sets the character’s identity and character traits: (1) 1 A Level Film Studies - Focus Film Factsheet Renton (00:40 – a gremlin); (2) Sick Boy seems, to successfully give life to a new (00:57 – cool and argumentative); Begbie generation. A contrasting generational (01:02 – violent and sadistic); Spud (01:07 representation occurs through the school - foolish); Tommy (01:20 – embattled). girl, Dianne (Kelly McDonald). Here is • 14:02 - Jump cutting during Spud’s awkward someone who is more in control of her own hyperactive interview working with the destiny and sexuality (unlike Renton). sparse mise-en-scène and claustrophobic • Gender representation is largely male focussed set to create a comic effect. but both Tommy and Spud’s girlfriends get • The cross cutting between Tommy and his screen time as does Sick Boy’s girlfriend, girlfriend making love and Renton and his one Allison (another heroin addict) and Renton’s night stand is hilarious. As Renton orgasms on/off schoolgirl lover, Dianne. However he notes: ‘I haven’t felt that good since Archie these characters are largely love interests to Gemmill scored against Holland in 1978!’. We the main protagonists and although by no then see the goal – the same one which Tommy means being supine and inactive the film has is also bemusedly watching. However this little interest in them. Renton’s monologue in comic scene has a tragic outcome as Tommy’s the London club towards the end of the film girlfriend subsequently dumps him and he (see Sexuality below) suggests that gender becomes an addict and then dies of complications equality will become the norm: ‘One thousand with AIDS. The tragedy that befalls Tommy years from now there will be no guys and no is all due to Renton’s selfish and childish act. girls’. The fact that Begbie discovers this to his horror with a transgender lover is a fitting Sound commentary on his sexual redundancy. • Music - Chronological in its appearance in the film and often having some narrative importance Addiction and drugs in terms of commentating on scenes rather than • (47:56) Renton is infantilised by his merely accompanying them. Thus ‘Lust for Life’ addiction. Returned to his parental home introduces Iggy Pop (an idol of Tommy’s referred and the room he had as a kid. Perhaps to in the film a number of times) as well as from this old nest he will be reborn. augmenting Renton’s ‘Choose Life’ monologue. • However controversially graphic detail of The drug induced haze of Lou Reed’s ‘Perfect heroin use suggests that it is also a very Day’ acts as a counterpoint to Renton’s OD. pleasurable ‘high’ – in the opening sequence • Renton’s voiceover - Throughout the film we see Spud high and happy (02:39). Renton narrates (his VO bookends the Sexuality film) and his acerbic, cynical, foul mouthed • Renton – ‘The world is changing, music is and resigned delivery perfectly captures changing, drugs are changing, even men and the ‘exhaustion’ of Generation X. women are changing. One thousand years from now there will be no guys and no girls – CORE STUDY AREAS 2 - STARTING just wankers. It sounds great to me … We’re POINTS – Meaning & Response heterosexual by default not by decision. It’s just a question about who you fancy. It’s all about Representations aesthetics and it’s fuck all to with morality’. Gender, age and ethnicity Aside from this very contemporary and liberal • The film is largely filmed from Scottisha view on gender difference and sexuality the film white male’s perspective and most screen time contains some nudity – refreshingly male as well is devoted to 20 something Renton. There as female – and some positive representations are few older representations of note other of empowered and sexually active women. The than Renton’s parents (see below) who are sexually active schoolgirl, Dianne, who Renton depicted sympathetically as a caring loving meets at a club is perhaps the most shocking couple, deeply concerned for their son. representation – followed soon after by Renton removing a condom from his penis. However the • Age is represented through the nihilism film is partly about the absence of sexuality – of the Generation X experience – most aside from Tommy none of the main characters vividly evidenced through death of Allison’s have regular girlfriends (heroin is their lover) and and Sick Boy’s baby – they are unable, it 2 A Level Film Studies - Focus Film Factsheet when he loses her he soon becomes an addict. CORE STUDY AREAS 3 - STARTING POINTS - Contexts Scotland & England • (30:54) Tommy attempts to lead the guys Social on a refreshing walk in the great outdoors • AIDS - Trainspotting is not a kitchen-sink – a stereotype of Scottish nature and its drama and its disaffection with society is rugged outdoor appeal. Renton rebels: ‘It’s general rather than specific. Indeed the parents shite being Scottish!’ They all get back of Spud, Spud’s girlfriend and Renton all seem on the train and return to the city where decent people. The police and judiciary are in the next scene they are all back on the rarely seen and there is no gang violence – only heroin – soon followed by Tommy. Begbie’s indiscriminate and psychotic rage is • Later in the film Renton decides to‘ find something to be feared. Interestingly though, something new’. Leaving heroin and Scotland aside from Archie Gemmill’s goal, the one behind he heads to London, introduced with an time we see a TV show it’s a fake game show upbeat dance track and a highly ironic montage hosted by Dale Winton about AIDS. The graffiti of the tourist stereotype that is our capital – outside Tommy’s flat (‘Aids, Junky, Scum’) also Big Ben, red buses and cockneys (58:30). references the hostility faced by AIDS sufferers • The mediated reality of Scotland and England and the tale told to Renton of Tommy’s death is a far cry from the actual truth. In the by a friend is far from empathetic. Renton scene following this cheesy montage we see tests negative for AIDS: ‘It seems however I Renton at work, selling grubby overpriced really am the luckiest guy in the world, several city appartments to yuppie wannabes. years of addiction right in the middle of an epidemic, surrounded by the living, but not Aesthetics (i.e. the ‘look and feel’ me, I’m negative…’. AIDS was clearly a social of the film including visual style, problem given screen time and it still is a influences, auteur, motifs) pressing problem for addicts who share needles. • Surrealism & hallucination - The hyper • British Music in the 90s - Starting with Iggy realism of the set design and cinematography Pop’s ‘Lust for Life’ song from 1977 and ending is also enhanced by sequences that are clearly with ‘Born Slippy’ by Underworld from 1996 reflective of Renton’s deranged mind.