Looking Back at Trainspotting

Trainspotting is a film about a group of young men living a reckless, sinful life on heroin. In my youth, films like that were fascinating; now, I find them beautiful. Why?

Having studied at an art school, I was surrounded by drugs. I lost two good friends to heroin. The scenes depicted in Trainspotting weren’t entirely foreign to me, although I’ve always been more of an observer, only occasionally participating when invited. People who fear deviating from mainstream life might push drugs on you to ease their own anxiety, but art school kids don’t bother.

In my 30s, I had a persistent feeling that I’d wasted my youth by drifting wherever the wind blew. I had no ambition to “choose” the trappings of a respectable life, as Renton listed—family, big television, cars, dental insurance, etc. Still, I felt I should have lived more intentionally toward a goal. Now, in my 50s, I realize that’s impossible if I want to live a life that’s truly my own.

In our youth, we have no idea what possibilities life will offer or what we’re capable of—not because we don’t know yet, but because nobody does. Just because your family owned a printing press business, it doesn’t mean you can follow that path. If we want to understand life and ourselves, we have no choice but to muddle through. Taking the path society lays out—like climbing the corporate ladder—means forfeiting this understanding for ourselves. Observing the safari from the bus is comfortable but alienating.

To muddle through is to connect the dots only in hindsight. It assumes it’s not possible to do so in advance and, more importantly, that there is no single right or wrong path. Any path you walked becomes yours in retrospect, and you know it was not anyone else’s.

To fully understand life and ourselves, we cannot be constrained by the morality society imposes, because that, too, is a path devised by others. Right or wrong, we need to experience it and decide for ourselves, like pushing a car to its limit to learn its full potential. This is why the moral transgressions in Trainspotting feel beautiful. The insistence on testing the possibilities of life for ourselves lies at the core of what art is about.