Trainspotting – a controversial drug-drama

A frantic, thrilling and rebellious story featuring controversial topics such as drug addiction, friendship and growing up under deceptive circumstances – that’s what the film Trainspotting is about.

Mark Renton is a young heroin junkie from Edinburgh, Scotland, trying to get rid of his drug addiction. This leads to a series of challenges regarding his family, friends, lifestyle and acceptance.

The film starts by showing the junkies lifestyle. Mark Renton and his junkie friends are living in a small shabby apartment, which is used as a safe place for consuming heroin together almost all day long. One day Mark decides to quit heroin. That’s when the plot changes. He locks himself in a cheap hotel room geared up with food for several days to overcome the heavy withdrawal. When he then finally succeeds and gets rid of his addiction, Renton goes to a club. There he meets a girl named Diane, with whom he then leaves. In the moring, he realises that Diane is a 15-year-old schoolgirl. Wanting to leave her, she blackmails him telling the police if he wouldn’t come back. Later during the course of the film Diane takes an important role as the new „generation“ of friends for Mark, not being a drug addict.

But being clean doesn’t last for a long time. Just when everything seems fine, Sick Boy and Spud, who quit heroin contemporaneous with Mark, start using heroin again. And with that being the trigger for Renton to take drugs again, too, the spiral of drug addiction repeats.

Without revealing the further progress of the film too much, it can be said, that an unsteady and pulsating struggle between friendship, parents, drugs and living follows. Looking at the whole story in retrospect the films topic could rather be referred as ‚friendship‘ than ‚drug addiction‘. The conflict to decide between knowing what would be right and knowing what your friends expect you to do pops up like a leitmotif now and then.

With that being said we won’t consider this film the typical „drug-addiction-film“ but much more a film dealing with friendship and the impact it has on an individual on the basis of a story telling the life of drug addicts. On the other hand this does not mean you wouldn’t get what you’d expect by reading the films description: Scenes showing excessive heroin use and psychedelic trips paired with the dirty reprehensible downsides of it all.