Complaint Containment

Okay, so, first thing, I aged out of Trainspotting a long time ago as it’s a movie about a person’s… early-to-mid-20’s? There’s a very specific point in the movie where, for better or worse, the main character’s talking to a younger character and she says something to the effect of, “Times are changing. Drugs are changing. Music is changing. You can’t keep on listening to the same Ziggy Pop!” which is funny because, as he says, “It’s Iggy Pop!” and I think she says, “Whatever,” because young people don’t care about his music anymore, which is new to him.

Like, I think the movie is kind of about growing out of an artificially extended adolescence, which was important to me not as an opiate addict, which is what the movie is arguably more literally, specifically about, but as a then-(who-knows-about-now?)-not-terribly-wise neurodivergent person who was in his early-to-mid-20s when he was watching the movie regularly.¹

One of the things I’ll probably write about in another post is that I don’t like the idea of escapism a lot. It starts to be very clear how I think something like this relates to a movie about opiate addiction when I say escapism is an easy way of easing psychological pain, but it doesn’t do anything to solve underlying issues. I’ll probably talk in ANOTHER ‘nother post about my relationship to Star Trek, but, hopefully not getting too far away from the subject of this post, I think, too often, Star Trek, being about, like, a “hopeful” future where scientific understanding doesn’t damn us to climate doom or thermonuclear annihilation but blesses us with what my buddy calls “luxury space communism” where its faster-than-light “warp drive” allows us to visit different cultures on different planets in solar systems in hours, days, or weeks and not generations or eons and practically any food, tool, or toy you can imagine is materialized in its “replicators” from thin air–therefore, according to too many of its viewers, you can safely forget the simple and natural fact that the same science that proves global warming causes global warming and that allows nuclear power allows nuclear war, and that they, who are, by nature of the writing of the show, given to intellectualization as a coping mechanism can simply engage in it to their hearts’ hideous, grotesque content.

However, I think Trainspotting is based on a kind of psychological realism, abstract and cartoonish though it is as necessitated by constructing a coherent plot that resolves itself in ~2 hours.

For example, one of the main character’s friends is very physically forceful and intimidating and one of his friends is very duplicitous and scheming. In this way, I think the movie says something (in an almost allegorical way) realistic about the influence of force and fraud on our lives, which, art being “a lie that tells the truth,” is worth watching the movie for because very few people will discuss the role of force and fraud in their lives openly and honestly–they simply engage in the same kind of denial of reality any common addict does.

Being about opiate addiction, the movie says something meaningful about the pursuit of pleasure and reward. Recalling the kind of abstractness and cartoonishness I mentioned earlier, there’s the scene where the main character, having attained some opiate suppositories to ease the symptoms of coming off heroin cold-turkey, loses them in a toilet and, in a spot of magical realism, dives in after them. The shit we go through to achieve our goals, y’know?!

And that’s… maybe I’m burying the lede here or whatever, but the depiction of that kind of disorderedness of impulses that are otherwise at least simply necessary for life is, I think, why I like the movie so much. People are depicted as trying to escape their pain and not understand it. The way they talk about movies, for example; there’s one prominent part at the beginning where a character is described as “lacking in moral fiber”:

He knows a lot about Sean Connery!

That’s hardly a substitute!²

I associate Trainspotting with a bunch of different movies. Probably the biggest one is the much more recent, 2019 if I recall, Annihilation starring… and… I think produced by? Natalie Portman, which is a sci fi thing which I think is based on a novel, but it’s about what goes on in what it calls “The Shimmer,” which is a growing area (like a forest) where all information and memory is “refracted”³ or kind of randomized and Portman’s character (a biologist)’s husband is the only person who’s entered there and lived to come out again, and I forget why she has to go back in, but (spoiler) she meets an alien that tries to, like, steal her identity, and (spoiler) she figures out her husband back in the hospital or whatever is actually another one of these aliens. But also 2024’s Nosferatu (“I am but an appetite.”), I think it’s 2009’s A Serious Man, 1986’s Blue Velvet, 1985’s Legend (none of that 2012 rip-off shit!)… uh… there’s probably others, but…

1. Incidentally, there’s its sequel, T2 Trainspotting, about the same characters I think 20 years later, which is more like my age now, which came out in 2017 and I’ve never seen. ↩︎
2. lol i’m trying to figure out the quote feature ↩︎
3. I read a science-minded review somewhere a long time ago that explains what happens in the movie is, at best, only vaguely, abstractly related to the actual, physical phenomenon of refraction. ↩︎