Trainspotting.

Irvine Welsh's acclaimed Trainspotting is a book of linked short stories, but the John Hodge (scenarist)--Danny Boyle (director) film adaptation has such unity and thrust that it feels like a work written directly for the screen, or at least the adaptation of a tightly plotted novel. In its first half we watch the protagonist, heroin-addicted Mark Renton, destroying himself with the cheerful collaboration of his "mates": moronic Spud, sly and maniacal Sick Boy, and the nonaddicted but sadistic thug, Begbie. Another pal, the soccer-loving Tommy, becomes an addict after losing his girl-friend through a feckless prank perpetrated by Mark. These young Scottish males dissipate and brawl, steal to support their habits, and coast on the dwindling funds of Edinburgh's public welfare system. A brush with the law and a near-fatal injection, followed by an equally hideous "cold turkey" cure, persuade our hero to get clean and go straight. In the concluding half, Renton is thriving as a real estate agent in London, but his friends, now completely sunk in criminality, seek him out, get him fired, and inveigle him into a drug deal. Finally, Renton realizes that he has become not so much the slave of drugs as the captive of his friends. "Enablement" is too weak a word for what they're doing to him. Not only are they encouraging his addiction, they themselves embody the circumstances of addiction. They are swampland, quicksand, sucking Mark down. So Renton must drain the swamp.

As my summary indicates, Trainspotting's real theme isn't drug abuse but the struggle against one's environment, with friends standing for environment. Yet some have denounced the movie as a glorification of heroin, and it's easy to pin down what gives offense. Mark himself broaches the question: Why take heroin? He answers, "For the pleasure of it. Otherwise, we wouldn't do it. After all, we're not stupid. Not that stupid, anyway." If we multiply the pleasure of orgasm by a thousand, he suggests, we may get an inkling of the ecstasy the drug yields. In fact, why even review the reasons for taking or not taking it? he wonders. "Who needs reasons when you've got heroin?"

But this is all in the first three minutes of the movie. For the next eighty-seven we are immersed in the horrors of addiction, depicted with a vividness, even gruesomeness, not found, to my knowledge, in any previously released film. Violent crime, grinding poverty, squalid dwellings, incontinence, drug-induced sexual impotence, alienation from loved ones, the death of a baby due to his addicted mother's neglect (the sight of the dead child's bloated face is something I'd like to erase from my memory but can't), legal punishment, the horrors of "cold turkey"--they're all here and it's all hellish. Nor does Trainspotting buy into the big lie of Leaving Las Vegas, that is, that self-destruction is honest, even stoically noble, as long as it's done in solitude with only a lovely prostitute to waft the suicide out onto the waters of death. No, Trainspotting shows that suicide is inevitably contaminating: parents are shamed, loved ones berated, innocents robbed, employers duped. That the movie doesn't deny the momentary ecstasy of heroin is part of its candor, and that candor certifies its expose of heroin's horror. Furthermore, the exhilaration is shown to be cognate with the horror: the first thing that wretched mother does after discovering her baby's corpse is to take another hit of the very drug that helped bring about the infant's death. What else would dull her horror?

Yet, I'd be kidding you if I were to leave you with the impression that Trainspotting is humanistic or spiritually uplifting. Its antidrug propaganda is powerful but incidental. This film has wit and immense vitality, but it is a vitality rooted in nihilism. A Nietzschean joy pulses through the movie, energizes you, but leaves you with a rare feeling of frustration at the conclusion. You feel charged with life but with nowhere to go.

In the opening scene, Mark and pals are on the run after another bit of thievery. Renton hurtles toward us over and over again in a succession of fast back-tracking shots that immediately establish the battering, percussive rhythm of Danny Boyle's direction. And on the soundtrack we hear Mark's mocking meditation: "Choose a TV. Choose a VCR," etc., if "life" were nothing more than the appurtenances of a middle-class lifestyle. But why would I do that, wonders Mark, why would I choose life when I've got heroin?

But, in the movie's final scene, Renton is again heading straight toward the camera, now walking determinedly, not running in panic. Again, we hear the litany, "Choose life. Choose a job," etc. And Mark tells us that he will. Have TVs and VCRs become his new drugs-of-choice? Is this the moral victory of materialism?

Of course not. The instinct for self-preservation is strong in Mark Renton and has survived heroin and crime and filth and his suicidal and homicidal friends. Money and the things money buys are merely the latest life buoys on which he clings. What will it be next time--a woman? travel? macrobiotics? Or perhaps the writing of a book called Trainspotting, soon to be a major motion picture? Mark has believably transcended drugs, but he's not heading toward any sort of spiritual transcendence. But, then, spiritual transcendence must seem a pretty weird concept to the makers of this movie and, indeed, to most young artists working today.

Perhaps Spengler was right when he said that Western civilization was Faustian, but, as one of Faust's translators, Walter Kaufmann, pointed out, much of recent Western literature and drama is Mephistophelean: harsh, proudly undeceived, zestfully cynical, wittily cruel, iconoclastic, nihilistic. This is an art that exalts in tasting what's most poisonous in life and then dares life to dish out more. The drug addicts of Trainspotting are pint-sized, punk Fausts embracing hits of heroin instead of Helen of Troy, but the artists who have created these antiheroes are modern Mephistos, and the best stuff in Trainspotting partakes of Mephistophelean mockery:

Mark's near-fatal overdose is staged as a parody of a meal at a four-star restaurant, with the drug supplier taking on the role of maitre d'. Though charged with horron and a sort of grim pity, the scene never ceases to be comedy.

The "cold turkey" session begins with Mark barricading himself in his room and lining up three buckets: one each for urine, feces, vomit. On the soundtrack, the "Habanera" from Carmen purrs along. The music, composed to portray the sensuality of a beautiful woman, is here yoked with bodily pain and disgust.

The most notorious scene in the film is also its most paradigmatic. Renton has lodged two cocaine suppositories (transitional drugs meant to ease him into "cold turkey") up his rectum. An attack of diarrhea forces him to excrete into "the worst toilet in Scotland." Panicked, Mark launches his entire body into the unflushable toilet to retrieve the unmelted suppositories. Just as we are about to lose our own lunches, something amazing happens. We see our hero swimming in an enchanted sea. Through sparkling clean water he peers and finally spots, glistening like faerie jewels on the seabed, the cocaine tablets. Mark grasps them and shouts his triumph and, lo! we hear his words under water, for Renton is now a sort of merman, invulnerable, immortal! Then he pulls himself out of the toilet and he is nothing but Mark Renton, drug addict and loser, soaking wet and hands caked with excrement.

That's the essence of Trainspotting: through filth into poetry and back into filth. The insolent vitality that courses through the movie, expertly served by the poster-bright photography and amazingly adroit acting (especially Ewan McGregor as Renton and Robert Carlyle as Begbie), expresses the vitality that is within Mark and that helps him to conquer his addiction but cannot provide him with any real reason to go on living once he is "clean." To be sure, our hero chooses life. Then what? Or are we meant to ask, So what?