Misguided Friendships

Rating: 8/10 (11 February 2017)

Well, twenty years after it was released I have finally got around to actually watching this film, though I suspect that it had something to do with the sequel hitting the cinemas shortly. Mind you, after finally watching this film I sort of wonder whether a sequel is actually warranted – sure, it might be interesting to see what happened to the guys, and I'm sure Begby is one who is definitely going to be holding a grudge, however a part of me feels that this film pretty much covered everything that needed to be covered and we simply could have gone on without the need for a sequel to be produced, unless of course it is to encourage us to actually get around to watching the original film.
The one thing that had stood out about this film was that despite its name it had nothing to do with trains. Well, there are a couple of trains in the film, but I was wondering why a film about heroin addicts would get the title 'Trainspotting'. It turns out that it is a reference from the book, and also that addicts would hang around an abandoned train station, using it as an injecting room, and whenever they were going there they would say that there were doing 'a bit of trainspotting'. This reference appears in the book, but unfortunately doesn't make it into the film. I guess that is actually one of the biggest flaws in the film and that is that there are a lot of things that come out of the book, and unless you have read the book you might not entirely understand what was going on. For instance – how did the baby die? Okay, that is fairly obvious, but it is things like this, that are mentioned in the book but not so much in the film.
One of the themes that seems to run through this film is that you are who your friends are. The thing is that once you have a group of friends you eventually pick up their bad habits, and the thing is that it is really, really hard to actually break away from these friends because you are either on your own, or these friends will eventually hunt you down. Further, when you have a group for friends who have some really bad habits, then quite possibily you will eventually pick up this bad habits – as Tommy did – and then find yourself in a situation where you can't actually get away from them, and these habits.
Trainspotting is incredibly confronting, and while I have never touched heroin, I have met a couple in my time and have seen how destructive the lifestyle can be. Actually, my encounters have been more with speed, and I have seen houses where the mothers live in a pigsty and are more concerned about their next hit than feeding their child. However, the scary thing is that many of these addictions start out pretty innocently but have the tendency to slowly dominate your life. Sure, I have heard stories of heroin addicts holding down successful jobs, but the stories you don't hear are the stories of those who have thrown away their careers, their lives, and their families to pursue these desires.
Another theme about the film is that of choice, and the choices that we make, but it seems that there are only two, both of them quite horrible. We have the choice where we succumb to our desires and need for pleasure, though which heroin is a symbol of that pursuit of pleasure, while the other pursuit is that of 'life', which in part is enslavement to the system though debt, through employment, through being an acceptable member of society. In a way it seems to be one of those loose, loose situations. Mind you, there is something more fulfilling living a clean life with a respectable job, but the problem is that sometimes the choices that we made in our past, like those of our friends, eventually come back to haunt us.