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Like it or not, Scotland's Trainspotting can be seen as a kind of existentially nihilistic travelogue for the rest of the world. Yes, it's true that Scotland is not so remote a place; still, the representation of this country in the cinema has more or less been limited over the last few decades-at least for those of us living outside the United Kingdom-to the charmingly whimsical comedy of Bill Forsyth in such pictures as Gregory's Girl (1981) and Comfort and Joy (1984). And although the depiction of English society generally in the cinema is certainly not limited to the Oxbridge-Thatcherite view of the world (witness only the films of Ken Loach), this is the view, through yuppie eyes, in the British-museum tradition of Alexander Korda, that gets the most international publicity in movies like Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), Sense and Sensibility (1995), and Emma (1996)-all of them, not by chance, concerned with young women in their hunt for rich husbands. Well, the status quo has changed for the moment with the export of Trainspotting, already the second biggest homegrown box-office success in British film history, unlike any other such movie with a plebeian-as-protagonist from Room at the Top (1958) to Riff-Raff (1993).
Trainspotting was directed by Danny Boyle, from a screenplay by John Hodge, who adapted Irvine Welsh's novel of the same title published in 1993. This team was previously responsible for the significantly lesser Shallow Grave (1995), a macabre comedy about three young Edinburgh professionals who discover not only the dead body of their new flatmate, but also his suitcase full of drug money and with it their own darkest impulses. This time we're in Edinburgh again, but the main characters are now a group of twentysomething heroin addicts. Moreover, the fact that the new film twice quotes the opening of the Beatles movie Help! (1965) should indicate that its intention is not to take another sober, socially realistic look either at alienated youth in the tradition of the English picture Look Back in Anger (1959), drug addiction in the manner of the American movie Panic in Needle Park (1971), or these two subjects combined, along with heavy drinking, as in Larry Clark's Kids (1996).
Rather, Trainspotting invokes the formalistic arsenal employed...