He can't resist sharing the junkie rationalization of using as a logical reaction to the plastic, stifling straight world. Choose rotting away, pishing and shiteing yersel in a home, a total fuckin embarrassment tae the selfish, fucked-up brats ye've produced. Hodge's screenplay knocks the stuffing out of that passage, recasting it ironically, and Boyle sets so relentless a pace that there's no chance for moralism to take root. Like soldiers and journalists too hooked on the adrenalin of war to settle back into civilian life, Renton can't take the nerve-scraping slowness of life without heroin. There's a shot of Renton during one of his clean periods in the local pub with his mum and dad, sitting stone still at the table, staring into his beer while people rush around him in fast motion.
People have lots of problems.
They take drugs, they have one problem. There's a moving scene where Spud, a hilarious, stick-figured sad sack in most scenes, sits in a pub after a friend's funeral and croons a song about boyhood to his dead mate. I can't recall the last time I've seen a picture that kept pulling the rug out from under you the way this one does. Desolate, Tommy offers to pay Renton to shoot him up, and Renton, needing money to score, agrees, getting Tommy hooked. Boyle shows us terrible things, shocking things, even, in one scene, the corpse of Allison's baby daughter, dead from neglect.