T2 Trainspotting: Danny Boyle's sequel taps Gen X nostalgia and regret
Posted
The Trainspotting sequel reunites director Danny Boyle with his original cast 20 years later and has a powerfully melancholy undertow.
Yes, there's also the grotesque, often comic antics you might expect — the drug-fuelled pop culture arguments, an outlandish plan to rip off the EU and a few bone-crunching fights.
But beneath the macho, bad-boy surface lies a mournful core of regret, self loathing and fear.
I know for a fact it reduced some reviewers to tears (not naming names).
On one level the film might unkindly be labelled a nostalgia project for the original target audience, now grappling with the uncertainties of middle age like the film's characters.
But at a deeper level, T2 is as wary of the sentimentality it peddles as it is embracing of it.
Danny Boyle and screenwriter John Hodge have come up with a sequel that talks to the original film in many ways, to tell the story of a now married and on-the-wagon Mark "Rent Boy" Renton (Ewan McGregor) approaching his first real mid-life crisis.
Loosely inspired by Irvine Welsh's novel Porno, it begins with Rent Boy's return to Edinburgh after ripping off his three mates — Spud, Begbie and Sick Boy — on a drug deal at the end of the last film.
He's been living with his wife in Amsterdam and seems like he has it together — though appearances prove to be deceiving. Certainly he finds his mates all looking older and sadder.
In a way, the sequel is a richer experience
Welsh's breakthrough Trainspotting novel was a portrait of Scotland overlooked and beaten down.
It was also a defining text that marked the transition in youth culture between the 80s and 90s that saw the fashion in music and drugs change, from rock and heroin to ecstasy and techno/house.
The film brought the characters to a mass market, delivering them inside Danny Boyle's pop-grunge package with a promotional campaign that tapped in to the "heroin chic" trend of the time.
The follow up is not anything nearly as iconic, but the choppy energy of the first film flows through it, and in a way, it's a richer experience.
It references its predecessor in many ways, aural and visual. Shots are repeated, and the two big songs of the first film — Iggy Pop and The Stooges' Lust for Life and Underworld's Born Slippy — pop up in strange ways and also as cover versions.
Experience your own moment of truth
Photo:
T2 references its predecessor in many ways, aural and visual. (Getty Images: Jeff J Mitchell)
The story the film tells is less important than the way it tells it. Watching T2 is like experiencing your own moment of truth, as you confront the idea you have of yourself with the reality of how your life has turned out.
In a split second moment inside Rent Boy's childhood bedroom, this frightening prospect is put into sharp relief.
On his first visit back to his parents' house McGregor's character pulls out the Stooges record from his old vinyl collection, puts it on the turntable to hear the first thumping drum beat. Then he yanks it off again.
It's as if the memory of his youth is too strong, and he's too vulnerable in that moment to look back. But he must, eventually, and he does. As must we all.
Topics: film-movies, arts-and-entertainment, scotland, united-kingdom
