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"I don't think it'll do any business there," Danny Boyle, Trainspotting's director, predicted a few months ago. Could be. Yet it could also achieve the cult-hit status of a certain 1964 movie, which was also about four British lads with heavy Northern accents and anti-Establishment cheek and which also began with the boys eluding their pursuers. Maybe Renton and his friends Sick Boy (Jonny Lee Miller), Spud (Ewen Bremner) and Tommy (Kevin McKidd) aren't exactly John, Paul, George and Ringo, but you don't need Boyle's quoting the album-cover poses from Help! and Abbey Road in Trainspotting to see it as A Hard Day's Night for the wasted '90s. It may even lure American viewers into learning the rough poetry of street Scottish--"radge" and "gadge" and "swedge" and "shite"--as they once did the Liverpudlian "gear fab."
They will also have to learn what that darned title means. "Trainspotting," Welsh explains, "is the compulsive collecting of locomotive engine numbers from the British railway system. But you can't do anything with the numbers once you've collected them." Says John Hodge, who culled a brilliant screenplay from Welsh's anecdotal novel: "It's a nice metaphor for doing something that gives your life a bit of structure but is ultimately pointless." So is the intravenous injection of hard drugs--a palpable pleasure that wastes time and, often, life.
It's the assertion of an addict's pleasure that--along with the raw language, the sex with a 15-year-old and the comic fascination with fecal matter--could make Trainspotting a subject of controversy. Renton, Sick Boy and Spud do their drugs in the flat of a dealer they call Mother Superior, "on account of the length of his habit." They swear off the stuff, as Renton does three times in the film, only to fall back. They are a scuzzy lot and a trial for their straight friend Tommy. But the worst of the bunch is Begbie (Robert Carlyle), an alcoholic sadist. "Begbie didn't do drugs," Renton says. "He just did people. That's what he got off on: his own sensory addiction."
Trainspotting dares to ask: Why take drugs? And answers: not just to kill yourself, but because, for the moment, it's wonderful. The film doesn't quite get inside the thrill and thrall of junkiedom; it displays people acting stuporously, oblivious to their friends or children. Neither does it wag the moralist's finger at addicts; the audience must make up its own mind about them. "Both the book and the film offer more rounded characters than most pieces about drug addicts," Hodge says, "because we looked at it from their point of view. They have a soul. They have a sense of humor." They are awful and attractive--in a word, alive.