Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting is a good film. I would call it a great film, which it is, but a certain idea about how to write this article has come into my head, and calling it a good film, and not a bad one, sets up this idea that I hope pulls through.

I’ve been told I’m a pessimist because I’m often cynical. But I think of pessimism as proposition part-one in a paradox of which proposition part-two is that I’m a joyous optimist. The paradox is that I hold to a creed that what’s bad ought be called bad if there’s any good left to be had in calling good things good. I pretend no profundity in mixing words, and I plead guilty to self-indulgence. I offer this by way of an apology unapologetic: that one must have one’s fun, even when fighting a battle sure to be lost and that only as a dream may it yet be won.

If life is a battle, Trainspotting is a dream it may yet be won.

Trainspotting is a good film, and I want to say why it’s bad and not good. You ask why I didn’t get going with this point from the first. Well, I took a paragraph for a rub, and take that how you will, but rub it this way at least: ‘To die to, to sleep, / To sleep perchance to Dream; aye, there’s the rub, / For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come, / When we have shuffled off this mortal coil’.

These lines are quoted enough, but not so often as one that comes some several lines before them in Hamlet’s monologue: ‘To be, or not to be’.

But I’ve rubbed enough and the time’s come to get to the point.

The famous monologue of Renton’s that opens the film seems an answer, of a kind, to Hamlet’s question of whether to be or not to be. Renton says: Choose life, choose a job, choose a career, choose a family, choose a fucking big television, choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players, and electrical tin openers...

But even as the gnarled, pulsing verve of Iggy Pop’s Lust for Life plays over a montage of Renton and his pals living life in a sort of energetic way, there’s this horrible irony: that the life we’re offered is a a superficial one, replete with cheap objects and activities, like a DIY job you carry on at while ‘wondering who you are on a Sunday morning’.

The irony reaches full resonance as the montage shifts to alternating shots of Renton just as he’s taken a dose of skag (he’s lying speechlessly europhic on the floor) and, in voice-over, he declares he’s decided upon a course of action Hamlet doesn’t offer: ‘I chose not to choose life: I chose something else. And the reasons? There are no reasons. Who need reasons when you've got heroin?’

And so here’s the film’s brilliance: life is good, but it’s full of shit that’s bad; so to escape life you take heroin, which is as good as euphoria in a needle, but so destructrive and dark as to be bad as the death itself.

And just as Renton has chosen not to chose, so is it fitting that he answers the reasoning of his choice with the answer that there are no reasons, because you don’t need reasons when you’ve got heroin.

Of course, neither the book nor the film is a propaganda piece promoting heroin as some

pharmaceutical panancea for all Hamlet’s (and our own) philosophical woes. The story speaks to us as one of those who has, in one way or another, and at least thus far, chosen life—it’s a life of pilling cinema chairs and stale popcorn, and what the fuck is there else to do once the film is over? We’ve chosen the Sunday afternoon screening, so we’ll go home and make dinner and resent it being bedtime, because tomorrow is Monday morning.

Do we sleep that night? Do we somehow, perchance, dream the kind of dream that Hamlet wonders might follow death and that Renton knows is the death, in the euphoria of heroin?

The point here isn’t some answer. The point is that Trainspotting is a truly great film because, when we might have spent Sunday on a DIY project wondering who we are, going to the cinema has let us feel anew the depth of Hamlet’s question. It’s a question so soiled and worn that it’s become to many of us the cheap, disposable idol of a spirit lost so long we’ve forgotten we lost it at all.

So I ought to say a few things a bit more concrete.

Boyle’s film is actually an adaptation of a truly excellent novel by Irvine Welsh, which has the same name. One virtue of the film is that it makes the book’s excellence a bit more accessible, first because its aesthetics are easier read than Welsh’s stylised prose, and second because it offers a kind of rushing imagetic joy not beset with halting hang-ups the non-British or even non-Scottish reader might come upon in the authentic Scots vernacular of the novel’s dialogue and narration.

The acting in the film is superb, and a particular highlight is Robert Carlyle’s mesmerising performance of Begby, who disdains and denounces what he calls the ‘filth’ that is heroin but—and this is important—is no less fucked than the film’s cast of junkies (probably in part because he has a problem with alcohol). Ewen McGregor is admirable in the lead performance of Renton. Ewen Bremner and Jonny Lee Miller are wonderful, endowing the film’s  palette of humanity with an authenticity of vibrant breadth.

Something about the film’s direction.

But first a detour.

The opening of Welsh’s novel makes reference to what I don’t feel ashamed in calling a sublime masterpiece of music, the song ‘Heroin’ by The Velvet Underground. It’s good.

The soundtrack of the film is good too (a notable element being a song by The Velvet Underground’s Lou Reed, ‘Perfect Day’, a song about an apparently perfect day with the singer’s lover that is composed, with such poignant irony, in the most mournful of tones—it’s commonly assumed the singer’s lover is no heroine but, rather, just, heroin).

Though in Welsh’s book, ‘Heroin’, the song, is materially absent from the film, but I find it hard to imagine Boyle didn’t listen to it a thousand times as he envisioned his movie, and no fewer times as he articulated his vision in its direction. The song—as the book, as the film, as Hamlet, as (in the dim reflection of some clouded shard of mirror) this review…—burns with the fever of a paradox. Formally, the song follows a steady beat that quickens and quickens, before becoming somehow both suffocated and energised by the ascendance of an incessant droning (perhaps the noise of life closing in, from which heroin offers escape, or perhaps giving substance and vitality to life itself through heroin, the great redeemer). This grasping for life and energy manifests lyrically in the fervoured allegory of heroin’s first euphoric rush: ‘I’m gonna try for the kingdom…I’m rushin on my run… I feel just like Jesus’ son…’ But the song follows a formal undulation of these ecstatic rises that then peter out to the steadier beat with which it began. It seems to capture the fevered life of the addict, rising to ecstasy and always falling to the despair of drudgery. And the aesthetic is no simple polarity.

Even in chemical euphoria, the singer is aware that as the drug ‘shoots up the droppers neck… I’m closin in on death’. And in some grim reflex, he is perhaps considering death some truer, better escape than the high he ascends to as he pierces his veins and dreams, ‘I was born a thousand years ago… sailed the seas on a great big clipper ship, goin from this land here to that’—because not only will this dreamed voyage last only ever so long as the drug’s more synthetic voyage, or trip, he’s still aware of the antagonising ‘big city where a man cannot be free’, ‘all the politicians makin crazy sounds’, etc.

And so, he is escaping these realities of life for some sense of life he feels in his drugged euphoria, but throughout the song, all along, his escape is saturated in irony: first, he shoots up precisely to ‘nullify my life’, and as the drugs flow he knows he’s ‘closin’ in on death’, until, by the final stanza, he declares with grim simplicity: ‘Heroin, be the death of me’.

I’ve spent a while talking about a song quite absent from the film. But my point in doing so is that, in Trainspotting, Boyle’s visionary direction captures, at the very least, some of that foul vapour plooming from the granulated narcotic burning and bubbling in the spoon. The film, by turns, captures the tidal euphoria beckoning the addict. Another directorial hand might have thought the film’s energy defined by a dark vigour, the timeless tragedy of flying too close to the sun. But the deftness of Boyle’s directorial touch displays an empathy that the heroin addict’s life is not the predicament of, to be or not to be. As Renton articulates from the off: the addict chooses not to choose. The addict chooses life in a dream that may be his death, and surviving that death he returns to the slow death of life in all its bleak banality.

Like the song ‘Heroin’, Boyle’s film undulates between the vitality of the exalted high and the elegiac languour of sobriety, as well as time-stopped despair. I’ll go too far and say ‘Heroin’ gives Trainspotting the fire of its story and the graceful flame of its telling.

One could draw some cheap question (an essay question at some institution somewhere): what does the film tell us about how real life is really real? Whatever. But there’s something. In the film, there’s idea of real life ironically manifesting in artifice of the televisions and washing machines Renton speaks of; or some other, somehow spiritual, idea of life that is itself, and by an irony parallel, only ever experienced as artifice via this narcotic pharmaceutical that might as well have been made in the same factory as the television or the washing machine.

We don’t need no education.

There’s no reduction here. No simplisitic critique of modern industry. Boyle’s film cost a lot of money to make, and was manufactured with greater complexity than Henry Ford ever considered in the production line of the Model A.

There’s good in life. And there’s bad. There’s good in heroin, and it helps get away from what’s bad in life. But there’s bad in heroin, and it degrades what’s good in life to something quite bad.

Ironies, paradoxes, etc.—I don’t care. They’re what life, and therefore the film, are made of. There’s no majesty in them, in and of themselves.

Although… Christopher Nolan (who, otherwise, posseses an aesthetic genius) seems unceasingly mesmerised by the dynamic of a temporal paradox just as a toddler is by the movement of a colourful mobile turning above its cot.

But this review, which never earned much the title to be that sort of writing, tried to demonstrate that what’s interestesting—what makes Trainspotting interesting and brilliant—is that it never gets caught up in the trvial toydom that Nolan does. Boyle, the prodigy of Nolan’s daycare centre, knows that life is good and bad and he knows that heroin makes it better and worse. But the point is that he doesn’t get dumbstruck by the paradox. He does something with it.

Renton, at least at first, chooses not to chose life. He endures both ecstacy and despair. Hamlet, caught in his moment, and cleverer than Renton, is already aware of what’s at stake in the choice.  Lou Reed, in writing the lyrics for ‘Heroin’, was wise enough to admit and repeat some dozen or so times throughout the song, ‘I just don’t know’.

Boyle doesn’t know either, and he knows he never will. A million doctors, therapists, and counsellors have tried to explain to Renton and his kind just what’s good about life and what’s bad about heroin, but still they don’t know what Renton does. And this is why I think Boyle must have been listening to ‘Heroin’ while he made his movie, because he knows the good and the bad of life, and of heroin. But that’s not the point.

The point? I just don’t know.

There are good films. There are bad films. It’s important to call those films bad and this one good. And it’s important if we are to avoid fooling ourselves into thinking that life’s all bad and heroin might as well make it good. Or that heroin is all bad so 9-5 with TV and waching machine and a DIY birdhouse must be good.

Choose life.