The other side of the tracks

Interview, August, 1996 by Graham Fuller

Trainspotting has just arrived in American movie theaters with its pistons throbbing and its bells clanging. Adapted (as everyone must know by now) from Irvine Welsh's 1993 vernacular novel about the young disciples of Edinburgh's heroin culture, it's a dreamy, surging, and scatological tragi-comedy that goes easy on the "tragi" part; there are many laughs to be had from Danny Boyle's movie if one can just get past the heroin-induced cot death, the squalid demise of a junkie, the scenes of cold turkey, and vat loads of what the Scots call shite. It was released in Britain in February and created more commotion there than any previous Scottish film.

But is Trainspotting truly Scottish - and, if so, what does it tell us about Scottish culture - or is it more accurately British? Andrew Macdonald, who produced the film, had this to say about it in the February issue of Sight and Sound: "I suppose I feel, because I live in London now, that Trainspotting is a British film." And then, in the same breath, "In a way, I still see it as a Scottish film." Scottish regionalists may be equally confused. Before the film removes to London, it unfolds mainly in Leith, Edinburgh's port area. Yet it was filmed largely in Glasgow and financed by the London-based TV network Channel 4. Its indigenousness is subtly skewed, the result of it being made by outsiders looking in rather than insiders looking out.

If there's any sense of a Scottish identity in Trainspotting, it's a thing to be escaped from, not embraced. As the protagonist, Renton, acknowledges in Welsh's novel when he visits London: "Ye can be freer here, no because it's London, but because it isnae Leith. Wir all slags on holiday." And here's the peripatetic Robert Louis Stevenson back in Edinburgh in 1876 between trips to the Continent: "I was down at Leith in the afternoon. God bless me, what horrid women I saw. I was sick at heart with the looks of them. And the children, filthy and ragged! And the smells! And the fat, black mud! My soul was full of disgust ere I got back." So much for the Scottish-heritage industry endorsed by Rob Roy and Braveheart.

Trainspotting, the movie, gives us a Leith - albeit a Glaswegian Leith - essentially unchanged from Stevenson's day. But, if it weren't for the characters' insistent brogues and the specifically Scottish hard-man machismo of the psychotic Begbie (Robert Carlyle), the movie might just as well be taking place in Moss Side in Manchester, Toxteth in Liverpool, or any other inner-city site of the flourishing British drug economy of the late '80s. Or, it could be happening in - as a character in Boyle's Shallow Grave (1994) describes New Town, Edinburgh - ". . . any city, anywhere."