LUDIC LOG

"I understand that about twenty years ago, you were interested in trainspotting."

"Well, what's that got to do with my bloody music?"

Trainspotting was on the other day, and I happened to watch it (the second time I've seen it) with a few friends who were rather surprisingly enthralled by it.

"Style vs. substance" and the inevitable "triumph" of the former over the latter is a much-discussed phenomenon in modern culture; critics who have very little conception of the meaning of either word are fond of using the cliche to describe anything that strikes them as slightly too flashy, calculated or outside the realm of familiar aesthetic form. Since the phrase (inherently a rather servicable one) has been reduced to meaninglessness by constant over- and misuse, it saddens me to have to call it into play when talking about Trainspotting.

It had a lot going against it from the start: it was insanely popular amongst the British hipstertariat and their American counterparts (both of whom are renowned for embracing cultural production of dubious quality if it wears their clothes and portrays itself at odds with "mainstream" values); it was based on a largely unreadable novel by a youngish writer who spends a great deal of time simultaneously decrying critical interpretations of his work and posing for fashion shoots in glossy magazines, a la Henry Rollins; and it inspired a flood of questionable subsidiary product lines, including a stage play, a photobook, a bestselling soundtrack and, worst of all, a "fashion collection" of "Funky Junkie" clothing, available at the sort of store that the protagonists of the film would be pitched out of.

At its surface the tale of young Mark Renton and his junk-shooting pals in mopey industrial Edinburgh, Trainspotting follows its "anti-hero" as he goes through several attempts to kick the habit with varying degrees of success, enjoys a number of comical, pastoral and sexual misadventures with his Euro-Friendsy set of skinpoppers, and eventually gets clean just in time to score in a big drug deal (described as a "scam", although it consists of a series of simple purchases and then a rather unbelievable theft). The standard critical line was that the film was an alternately harrowing and absurdly comic look at heroin addiction; slightly wiser critics pegged it as a cleverly tricked-out buddy flick. But even this misses the real origins of the movie: it's really nothing more than a 1970s-style drug heist movie of the Mother, Jugs and Speed mode, with heroin substituted for marijuana, Scots burrs for Cali-dude drawls and blaring rave music for funked-out hippie-rock.

Admittedly, the "grab-the-dope-and-run" genre was simple entertainment cranked out for jaded middle American tastes and therefore had zero artistic merit, but neither did it have far-reaching aesthetic pretensions which caused it to fall flat on its pockmarked face the way Trainspotting repeatedly does. Trying for absurdity, it gave us scatological slapstick that wouldn't be out of place in a SNL-alum vehicle; trying for wit, it gave us incessant pop-cult in-jokes in the Tarantino vein; tring for irony, it gave us cheap twists like the newbie-junkie getting a fatal dose of AIDS while inveterate dope fiend Renton gets off Scot-free; trying for horror-show psychedelia, it gave us a jaw-droppingly clumsy, awful hallucination sequence featuring a self-consciously hip melange of snide flash-edited pronouncements from Renton's near and dear while a Hasbro Baby-Go-Walkies doll crawls mechanically on the ceiling, menacing the withdrawal-stricken hero with its uncanny impersonation of the centerpiece of a really bad student film. The scenes that are meant to be poignant (the death of the baby, the funeral of Tommy Football) instead seem forced or downright silly. The much-ballyhooed structure of the film doesn't seem to care where it goes, and neither does the screenwriter.

The so-called technical triumphs of the movie are of a sort that impressed naive American critics and inexperienced filmgoers when Natural Born Killers came out; like that excrescent Oliver Stone abortion, Trainspotting's techniques seem daring and sophisticated to those who never see foreign or experimental films and don't realize that jump cuts, out-of-sequence narrative, unusual segues, flashy sound editing and rhythmic pacing have been done to much greater effect as far back as the 1960s, and that skilled technical filmmakers from Stan Brakhage to Martin Scorsese know that it's the judicious and sparing use of visual pyrotechnics that work, not piling them on to the point of sensory overload. Even Quentin Tarantino knows the value of a nice simple two-shot.

Much has been made of the film's treatment of addiction -- several critics at the time embarrassed themselves by saying that the movie treat junk-sickness "realistically" and didn't "glamorize its effects" when discussing its "unflinching" treatment of the drug plague. In fact, however, Trainspotting was ambivalent at best in its treatment of heroin addiction. To be fair, the junk is a Maguffin -- a backdrop on which to hang the guid-ole-lads antics of its protagonists and to add color to the heist that forms the endpiece. Two of the main characters don't take heroin at all, and the protagonist is smugly triumphant about his eventual triumph over the habit. As far as its refusal to tamper with the harsh realities of addiction, well, there's an awful lot of carrying on about how great the kick is; the main troika of needle-druggers are awfully happy and carefree; and the worst thing that happens to our hero as a result of his withdrawal is that he has to have an embarrasingly hokey hallucination.

The implicit criticism of everyday life, so vital to postmodern art and so frequently referred to in the more insightful essays on Trainspotting, was so shallow and unexplored that any attempt by the filmmakers to capitalize on it as part of the movie's rapidly flagging place in history is nothing more than crass intellectual opportunism. The characters in the film reject the world of work not out of any theoretical or even hedonistic bases, but simply because they are junked-out losers without drive or energy. Their non-heroin-related conversations inevitably revolve around consumerism. Renton's final escape from the world of unprofitable junk-sickness comes when he rips off Begbey for a pile of cash and heads for the Continent, spewing out with an awfully faint irony a litany of the goods and comforts he foolishly rejected in his younger days.

It wasn't without its redeeming features, even on a second viewing. The acting was of a fairly high quality; the cast was easy on the eyes; the conceit of pacing the film with a disjointed, untraceable chronology wasn't entirely unsuccessful; and certainly, many people would argue that it's better to fail by overreaching than to succeed by mediocrity. But then again, pandering is pandering, whether you're doing it with a transvestite frat-boy in Sorority Girls or a flash-cut triple-fuck in Trainspotting.

Trainspotting, by the way, is a stultifyingly dull British pastime which consists of watching trains go by, seeing if you can catch the number on the engine and then writing it down in a little book. I'm not suggesting that trainspotting is more interesting than Trainspotting, but it's a hell of a lot cheaper.