Transcript
Speaker: Welcome, welcome to Death is a Photograph, Culture at the End of History. i am Chase here with my co-host Sam, here to talk about something a lot of people know about, very Scottish. What are we talking about today, Sam?
Speaker: We're talking about train spotting and T2. Movie is very close to my heart. Why? Well, many, many reasons. I mean, you didn't actually start this episode as you normally do by mispronouncing my Scottish name. I was extremely aware of this, of the possibility, and I didn't want to dishonor the people of the Highlands or, you know, the Jacobites by getting it wrong on this episode of all episodes, so...
Speaker: Yeah, so there are two films that are very close to my heart. And um I once actually met the author of the the sort of books that make up the backbone, the background of these two Danny Boyle directed films.
Speaker: Irvin Welsh. um I was a sort of pale skinned, know, sophomoric filmmaker. undergraduate um back in 2014 and me and a friend aptly named Callum Ian MacDonald.
Speaker: Callum, if you're listening, shout out. Found out that Irvin Welsh was giving a talk on transporting and I think his latest book, which was maybe Skag Boys, he was giving a talk in a town hall in St Andrews and um we were both very, very hungover and it only found out prior two hours that he was giving this talk and we sort of rushed to make this talk.
Speaker: And there there were certain bacon sandwiches and weak coffee and tea. was It was freezing and there was no heating on and we both sort of clutching these bacon sandwiches with this ketchup spurting out, you know, just sinking in cigarettes sort of went out to Irvine.
Speaker: I was like, oh, I love your books. And he was be very nonplist. It just sort of embraced us in this kind of very unpretentious way. That's kind of ends much sweeter than the kinds of stories that usually show up on the show. ah you know but yeah I think he was probably the first famous writer I'd ever met.
Speaker: Yeah, I met... Oh gosh, it's gone. Not Ian McEwan, someone like Ian McEwan, I think I was. unest yeah But Evan Welch was that yeah the first big dog writer that i've met. And, you know, Trainspotting is very much an 18-year-old's idea of great literature. so Well, this is, yeah, I mean, probably the closest thing we've done to Trainspotting in a sense so far is Fight Club. I mean, just in the in the way that it works on the imagination of ah of a young man, especially. Right?
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, i remember these films, transport that's right I mean, T2 will get to, but Trainsporting just was this, like, generational touchstone that almost leaked out of its own era into modernity of the 2010s. I remember really vividly... um So I went to University of Scotland and i remember like crashing this flat that served as the headquarters for an all-male Catholic upper-class drinking society called the ah Kensington Club. And they had in their stairwell a mock-up of the sort of vignette or You know, when you call it a vignette or like a montage of all the main characters, you get posed in black and white. It's the sort of poster for the film with their own heads of this all-male drinking society superimpose our own heads on each of the train-sourcing characters.
Speaker: So like, you know, broad reach is what I'd say. This is a film that, you know, anyone can sort of project themselves into, um even if it's based in a very particular sort of social, industrial, economic, whatever context.
Speaker: But that's what's so weird about a movie like this taking on the life that it has. and And I will assume to a certain degree that listeners are familiar with it. I mean, we have a bunch of heroin addicts basically in Edinburgh in the 90s. That's more or less where we are.
Speaker: And like it's got this heroin chic thing going on, right? The kind of beauty of the... hyper-thin, rugged person that was popular in the 90s.
Speaker: But the movie itself is like not particularly sanguine about that environment. Do you know what I mean? like To idolize it is kind of a strange thing because, yeah, it's cool. It's got Iggy Pop music in it.
Speaker: It's got Blur in it. It's got these things that maybe you identify with rebellion you think are awesome. But it's also a movie kind of about how living that lifestyle kills everyone around you, kills children, ah leads you to get HIV or your friends to get HIV, leads you to be involved in a criminal underworld.
Speaker: um You know, it's not like glamorizing. um And even movies that sometimes are associated with glamorizing criminal life that don't, like Goodfellas or something. It doesn't even have that level of kind of like amiability. At least I don't think it does in terms of like why you would like it or want to be like Ewan McGregor.
Speaker: Yeah, I think it so know it's it's it's an incredibly grim film, but that grimness is sort of has this like chic kind of I don't know, Danny Boyle's sort of kind of modernist, very playful, you know, quite experimental at times pop culture touch across the top of it, which I think, like yeah, when you don't watch it carefully, kind of...
Speaker: You kind of forget that like a baby dies and the guy crawls up a wall and torments the main character. Because the soundtrack is so cool, because there's all these kind of like very artfully done like you know sort of montage bits. and sort The heart of the film is maybe sometimes lost. but i mean yeah What did you make as a sort of outsider to so the Scottish culture, british then broader British culture um of the film? i mean I'm assuming that you've seen the film as sort of as a teenager and is that this has been a rewatch you.
Speaker: So actually it wasn't. I mean, i I'm very familiar with the movie. My wife had seen the movie multiple times, but I somehow managed to escape it. Of course, yeah. You haven't seen it have you? Yeah. so this was my first, ah you know, sort of Trainspotting Virgin situation. too not long before I had seen the movie, I watched one of those like poverty porn YouTube videos that's pretending it isn't, that's sort of like, no, we're just journalists. We just happen to be going to like all of these terrible places. Don't worry, we're going to find out what it is that the people who live here really think. And of course, they talk to a guy who's like doing the Fent nod into like a brick wall.
Speaker: And they're like What do you think about Reform UK? And he's like, you've got to get him out. know like So in in that sense... um What was this thing that you were watching, you remember? I think it was ROCA News, R-O-C-A News.
Speaker: and They were going around Scotland. And I can't actually remember. I think they were in Glasgow, not in Edinburgh. So in that sense, it is a little bit different. We should highlight to listeners that this is ah a film that is set in Leith in Edinburgh, not in Glasgow.
Speaker: um It's often like confused here. Well, which is, i will say, is itself kind of strange because like I have a friend who is American but went to both the University of Edinburgh and Glasgow at separate points because he got thrown out of one school to the other. And you know his reports back to me were very much like,
Speaker: Glasgow the working class town where you know you're going to up in a fight outside a bar, and Edinburgh is not like that at all. So if there was a surprise for me, it was the location within Scotland. In other words, I had been primed to associate Scotland to some degree with you know sort of rampant drug use and these kinds of things. Not to insult our Scottish listeners, this was just the what I'd been given.
Speaker: The amount of times I've been cornered by, like I don't know, like it it's ah Italian 26-year-olds in hostels you know on holiday, where they've realized that my name is Scottish, and they're like, oh man, train spotting, Glasgow. i mean no ah I even actually stayed in a hostel in Glasgow in about 2015, and it it was train spotting themed, which was very...
Speaker: That is. me and to to to my all my like British friends who are staying there, but obviously like all the Italians and Australians or Spanish people there loved it. Well, yeah, it's like going to Nashville and like putting on the cowboy hat and the cowboy boots and like walking to all the sponsored bars. And you're like, well...
Speaker: This isn't exactly what Nashville actually is, but you know for the tourists, it's good enough, I suppose. I suppose the context is that a large portion of the film is set in Leith, which is this kind of exurb port. So Edinburgh is on um the 3rd and 4th. I'm going to get killed if I don't actually get that correct. I'm pretty sure it's the 3rd and 4th. you can be in Edinburgh for like months and not realize that it's like a maritime port city because it really doesn't brand itself as that because most of the city, the center of the city, is inland.
Speaker: But yeah, there's this bit that sort of does touch the coast, which is Leif, which is the old docking and part of the city. Yeah, it's just, it's iss it's his own little world. It's much more like Glasgow. It's where the docks are.
Speaker: It's yeah predominantly working class. It's predominantly sort of Irish Catholic, which is something that this picks up on in both films. like right like You spot the green and white football scarves or like pictures of like football players in their childhood bedrooms in green and white football strips. So they're all pretty much all the characters in Trainspotting are Hibernian fans.
Speaker: Well, and in you get the Orangemen Club, right, if I'm remembering correctly. Yeah, which they go and taunt and take or steal all their money from. Yeah, so we should say there's a great interlude, which I have to ask Chase's reaction. And if you watched it with your wife, I'd love see her reaction. There's a bit where the two main characters, Mark Renton and Sick Boy, in the second film go into a loyalist Protestant, like Orange Club, and basically distract the crowd with this song.
Speaker: which is just like a kind of like, I don't know, like a ersatz marching song. It's just like two chords on the piano with one of the main characters just chanting into a mic, no more Catholics, no more Catholics left.
Speaker: um And while he's doing that, they steal everyone's credit cards under the assumption that all of their pin numbers are going to be 1690, which is the Battle of the Boyne. They are. And it turns out yeah and it turns out that 80% of the credit cards are do have the pin number 1690, so they get all this cash from these these these Protestants.
Speaker: And it's a very entertaining like sort of look at sectarianism, which i would say is is... Very funny for me. yeah Very funny for me. No, I do have a story I have to tell, which is that So when I was living in the UK, I was doing a year abroad. um I had some friends visit me.
Speaker: And obviously growing up in New Jersey, going to Catholic school, growing up, you know most of my friends are at least sort of culturally Catholic in some sense, but it doesn't, there's no like great opposition against which we're placed, right? Like the orange men are not marching in the streets of nor New Jersey, or if they are, I've never seen them.
Speaker: And I remember we went to this club in Oxford where we were, and it was this, you know, very kind of like, lefty-seeming space. I remember there was a magazine called Country Living, C-U-N-T-R-Y Living, this sort of zine that was splayed out on the tables.
Speaker: And my friend, who's you know there's a picture of us from this night in which he's just, I don't know if he's covered in sweat or beer, but like the whole middle of his shirt is just drenched in something. like The other friend's eyes are like facing two different directions. And so he went up to the bar And he asked he asked the bartender for an Irish car bomb, you know which is, I think, a shot of whiskey and a glass of Guinness, basically. And he got he got like a lecture you know about, like, don't you ask for that here, this whole thing. And I do believe he was thrown out of this left-wing club in Oxford for even using this name for this drink.
Speaker: So I knew from then on that these, you know, the Good Friday Agreement be damned. Like, you know, these feelings were not gone. Yeah, I don't want to, like, over-egg sectarianism in Scotland. Like, it's it's obviously a lot less bad than it was even in the 90s. But, um yeah, I do remember, like, coming up as a kind of English person with Scottish family, like grandparents, but who were mostly too middle class and sort of not engaged in those discourses. I remember two weeks into being at university, two people in a kebab shop screaming, you Fenian fuck, and you Hun. The Hun is the term for Protestants, and obviously Fenian speaks for itself.
Speaker: But yeah, just being completely taken aback by that kind of division. And like a few months later, being on a train in Edinburgh, and like it was a hips versus hearts match. that Most of the characters in Trainspotting are hip supporters, and the hearts are you know mean it's less strong than glasgow we've got celtic and rangers which are very definitely sectarian teams and in an ember it's slightly softer but yeah the hearts tend to be the protestant team hips hibernian speaks for itself and um i was like reading a novel on a train i just looked up and there was like three carriages around me completely empty on on either side of the train there were like hearts and hip supporters with like just like a no man's land in between with like me reading like i don't even know like fucking vanity there or something so Yeah, it's still there.
Speaker: And yeah, it's it' it's interesting interesting that Irvin Welch sort of doesn't foreground sectarianism really until you get to that bar scene in the second film. like He sort of like dribbles in that the the characters are...
Speaker: Hibernian supporters, and most of them have Irish last names like Murphy. um I think Spud's last name is Murphy. um But yeah, it's not... It's quite end of history in that sense that when it is played in in Danny Boy's films, it's played for laughs. it's not it's It's not like a sort of structural underbed of the film, of the films particularly. It's kind of like a ah knowing nod to something that's kind of like fading into the park. I mean, I think even in the narrator, right, like... and Mark Renton in the second film, he kind of like says this is a kind of relic.
Speaker: But you know, this is, I think, because we've already talked about Shallow Grave, or while you were not on that episode, but we I spoke about Shallow Grave with Will Bigelow, and you know that's also that's Danny Boyle's first movie, and a lot of the same flourishes are here that I think of as very kind of Gen X into Y2K formal strategies for making a movie, and I think that actually allows him to suppress some of that stuff, so Very famous opening sequence set to the Iggy Pop song, right?
Speaker: There's narration. There's a lot of cross-cutting, lot of very fast cuts. Yeah, it's like freeze frames. Yes. There's this huge emphasis on like keeping the film moving, and it's it's in a way kind of ironic, right? Because, of course, heroin is not a drug that keeps you moving. Yeah.
Speaker: But it it it does play into, I think, this idea that almost like what we're dealing with now, it it feels like this this the attention span of the viewer is only going to be kept through this like constant montage, essentially. yeah um And I think that that leaves only so much room for like, the exposition is always going to come in the narration, basically. right and So you you can leave these little clues about the milieu that we're dealing with.
Speaker: You can put in the green and white you know You can ah give them the Irish last names, but these things are always kind of going to be set dressing to give you yeah clues behind what is really foregrounded for the viewer, which is like everyone may as well be just on like cocaine all the time because of how it feels to watch the movie.
Speaker: Yeah, it's it's definitely like style is at the forefront and like social context is there, but it's it's kind of like in the background. Like you don't get an opening monologue from um Mark Renton, the Ewan McGregor character being like, you know, the docks have closed, you know, industry has died, Thatcher's in power. Yeah. third spaces are down and we're we're not drinking anymore and like there's masculine alienation and you know no one's got jobs so we're doing heroin. That doesn't happen, right? like The first scene is, if I recall correctly from Trainspotting, is um Mark Renton, sick boy, who I need to look up sick boy's actual name, Simon Williamson, played by Johnny Lee Miller, um and Spud, who is this kind of Blake-ian
Speaker: yeah know he's almost like this puppet like straw man character. He's always sort like lumping around the place. Played by Ewan Bremner. um And the first scene, if I recall correctly, is them sprinting away from shoplifting at a shop, being chased by security guards, down this ground. It's a cut forward.
Speaker: It goes back and shows you how they got there. Yeah. yeah And it's like, ah Mark Rennon gets hit by a car and he's like over the car, grinning manically at the driver and it freezes. And that's the introduction, right? Like it's, it's, it's pacey, it's stylistic. It's like, it's yeah. For lack of a better term, vibes based rather than like, yeah, like Irving, well, Irving, well, Irving, well, I'm going into like a deep Marxist analysis of how we've got here. Like, but But it's interesting because it I do think he uses the form to sort of do some of this stuff. So the first version of that scene is played with Iggy Pop's Lust for Life written by David Bowie, right? So this very like, we're in the 70s, everyone's on drugs, ah everybody's doing sex crimes that aren't sex crimes because we're not talking about them, right? Like that is, you know, you enter the movie and you're like, oh, okay, I'm in for fun, right? Like we've got crime, and we've got music. yeah And then the second time,
Speaker: it plays a Blur song over it. The Blur song ah what Sing, I think. Which, like, what is Blur? but And listen, I love Blur, so this is no hate. But basically, like, 60s redux, like, recovery of British music wrapped in a new package for Tony Blair's, you know, rise to power, essentially, right? yeah So, the movie does try, i think, to in these subtle ways that are lost on the teen male viewer who's like,
Speaker: um oh, that's awesome, like look at the plunger go down. you know like like it It does add in these ways of saying, like you can view this in one way, right this is 70s Britain, and then we can actually go to 90s Britain and what that looks like, and yeah, we're not I'm not going to write Friedrich Engels on the condition of the English working class or something like that. and Yeah, but obviously, because that's set in Manchester. Yeah, well, they wouldn't do it for that reason too, yes. yeah But yeah, it would have to be the Scottish working class, of course. ah But you don't You don't foreground all of that text. Instead, you let the the formal devices, the music and the editing, kind of show that slope.
Speaker: And I think that's why earlier I was like, it's crazy that teens love this movie for its for its energy. Because basically, the longer the movie goes on... the worse off all the, you know sort of how heroin works really kids is, you know, the deeper they get into this and the more they struggle with it, the more things sort of fundamentally go wrong to the point that by the end we're like,
Speaker: in bed with big time drug dealers and trying to steal from them. You know what I mean? And I think the Franco character, what's his last name, like Busby or something?
Speaker: Begbie. Begbie, who's just like a psychopath, right? Like that is his role in the movie is being, yeah, sorry, go ahead. No, it's really it's just like a beautiful quote, recurring quote, isn't it? Which is like, ah I's a mate, what can you do as a mate?
Speaker: Yeah, which, you know, in itself, I think, you know We were saying, oh, it it doesn't foreground all these political concerns. There is something about the way in which all of them fold into the private life of drug use and partying yeah ah as the sort of response to the conditions, right?
Speaker: Most of them are on heroin. The side character, I think it's Tommy. if i'm it's A little peek behind the curtain here, this episode was scheduled to be recorded a little bit earlier than it was. Yeah.
Speaker: but There are two characters who don't do heroin and they're kind of coded as more conservative, maybe slightly like, like if if the characters do heroin are sort androgynous and almost like tending towards the feminine. um The characters who don't are these kind of hard men.
Speaker: Francis Begbie, who there's like a question who's like, i I wouldn't put that shite in my body while he's like drinking a pint and smoking. Yeah, and getting in fights constantly. Like just genuinely looking for any excuse possible. I think Yeah, he what does he do in the first movie? He like throws a glass down, I think, from the top and he hits somebody. Yeah, they're on a mezzanine floor, aren't they? like Above a crowded bar and he just tosses a pint glass behind him.
Speaker: and then But then he comes down. Yeah. know He doesn't even, he comes down and he goes, someone glass that lassie. I'm not going to leave here until I find out what cunt did it. And then just starts, like, immediately starts a bar fight. It's just beautiful.
Speaker: But see, that's like, that's kind of what I mean, is like the two characters are not in here, are Tommy and the Franco character. They represent very different things, right? Tommy's a little more conservative. Franco is just a psychopath.
Speaker: But at least to an extent, Franco represents this, like, almost like original working class culture of, I don't know, like getting fucked up on beer and like getting into a bar fight, you know, rather than like returning to your desiccated looking apartment and just doing heroin on like a stained mattress while like a baby sits in a crib 10 feet away. Like there's, there's something more vital if psychopathic about Franco.
Speaker: Yeah, and it should be noted that he's slightly older, right? like um yeah i think we I don't know if you find out in the first film, but at least in the second film, you find out that he's been kept on at school for like four or five years because he's slightly stupid. And that's how he knows the other characters. So he's at least five to six years older.
Speaker: And if we if we sort of understand the transporting characters as kind of... yeah if they're 26 in sort of 1992, then they're kind of like early Gen X. Then Franco might be kind of like a boomer, like a Jen Jones. Like he's... And yeah, there is a kind of generational gap between their friends, but there is ah a generational gap between them in the sense that he's nihilistic in a kind of outwards way, like he's violently nihilistic. But he he has a very sort of determined and sort of have concrete sense of self that the other characters don't have.
Speaker: And there's like a joy to it. Yeah. There's like almost a joy to it. I mean, yes, he is just destruction incarnate, but he is the only one in the movie having fun in any meaningful sense of that term.
Speaker: Yeah, and it's quite odd that by the time you get to T2, and maybe we just have to intersperse them here, right? Like, yeah it's the opposite way around. Like, actually, the the heroin users in T2, most of whom, all of whom, apart from Spud, don't use heroin by the time you get to 2015, 16, 17, the second set. Yeah.
Speaker: kind of more adapted to the... it it They're struggling in the 90s and they have this internal nihilism, but by the time you get to 2015, they're actually somehow more adequately suited to the world of the 2010s than Francis's.
Speaker: And there's a beautiful quote where Francis's sort of I mean, like we we can give spoilers because these films are so old, but in the in the first film, Mark Renton, they do this drug deal in London, and Renton sort of takes all the money and betrays his friends. And by the second film, 20 years on, Francis has found McGregor's character, Mark Renton, who's trying to kill him.
Speaker: And there's is odd scene where Mark Renton locks himself in the bathroom, and Francis is sort of like smashing his way and kind of... um ah the shining kind of shining style you know like here so here's Johnny and one of his quotes to so the Ian McGregor character is um you've always been a smart cunt haven't you well you know what about me what about men like me the world's not alright for men like me Yeah.
Speaker: The world is, to use a Christopher Hill term, right? Like the world is turned upside down. And by the time you get to the 2010s, that kind of more integral, internally integral character like Francis, who externalizes violence into the world.
Speaker: Yeah, he somehow feels out a place in a way that sort of the other characters don't. Well, he's literally out of place because in the NT2, he escapes from prison, right? In the first movie, Sick Boy, I think, goes to prison and gets out. it's like a relatively light sentence for the robbery that they've done at the beginning.
Speaker: And then after the movie ends, they kind of all build their own lives at at different levels of success. Like Renton is relatively successful. Sick Boy is managing this like totally failing pub.
Speaker: And Spud kind of has this family relationship that's like not going as well as he would like, but he has built something resembling you know sort of like a simulacrum of what you would have wanted to do in the mid-century, like have a child and exist.
Speaker: Whereas Begbie is just in prison right and then comes back out And it's just like, his it's so funny. What is his son, of course, named Frank Jr., because of course he would name him after himself.
Speaker: Because he's like nothing if not an egotist. Yes. And Frank Jr., all he wants to do is go to university. Like that is his goal. if He wants to be a social worker, if I remember No, he's not at university. He's at college, right? So in kind of British terms, college means more sort of community. It's kind of, I think it's supposed to be implied like in American terms, be community college.
Speaker: But the the point is that he wants to keep going to school. He's starting hotel management. Oh, hotels, yes. And he wants he wants to go to school, and this is just like, frank he may as well be telling his father that the sky is purple. like do you know like it just He's like, what do you mean? like How could you possibly want to do that?
Speaker: And it's just... And Franco is constantly insisting that he comes and burgles properties with him. Yeah. Come out with old dad and like let's you know let's do crimes together. And it's it is this weird, like the son, i mean, he's going to hotel manager, right? so it's not exactly this, but he has sort of like responded to the ads that are like, learn to code or something. Okay, you're from a broken working class family. Your father's in prison.
Speaker: Get an education. like He has sort of actually responded to the governmental propaganda campaign of like yeah how to no longer be everyone else in this movie. And his father, who's out of time,
Speaker: It's just like, what are you talking about? Like, no, the only life is the life of crime. Like, there's no other... Well, until you get right to the end where he he has a resolution with his son and his wife, before he confronts Mark Brenton, he goes back to to his sort of council flat one last time to say goodbye to his son and wife. And he does actually, this this psychopathic, narcissistic character has a kind of weird softening where he kind of goes, look, I just, it's hard for me to hear that you're at college because that wasn't there for me.
Speaker: And it's odd that Boyle, or I don't know if it's Boyle or Owen Welsh chooses to have that kind of softening. But yeah, it's interesting that there's that note of this character who's completely terrifying to all intents and purposes manages to kind of omit his own weakness around, and it's around this topic of social mobility. Yeah, it's interesting. but it makes And it makes a certain amount of sense because as much as Franco is a narcissist, if we're reading him as something like a stand-in for...
Speaker: this slightly older you know guy who probably just would have been a dock worker, a sailor, if he were born 10 years earlier than he was, right? Yeah. Then what is that guy all about, theoretically, is is family, right? like me Like that is the one unit that they would see themselves as a man responsible for sort of protecting and nurturing and in a broad sense, right? Not nurturing in a kind of oh, I'm home with you and i'm you're you're suckling at my teeth or something like this. But in that in the broader sense of like, I make sure that you have material security and that you get to go on to do what you need to do you know in the next stage of your life.
Speaker: And so it it does make a certain amount of sense that the one part of him that is still kind of human is the part that dovetails with what he would see as his social function, or the thing that he's supposed to do within his social function. And then he goes off to kill Wren. So like, you know, it's not. Yeah, but that's also a kind of framed in a sort of, almost like a sort of blood feud on a, yes yeah're kind of almost like Scots-Irish Appellation, like the McCoys versus the Hatfields. sort of thing. it's it's It has its own internal logic. And it's quite interesting that, yeah, he, him and Spud, I think, have the the most sort of, if any of the characters in the films have the most sort they move towards the family, the stronger. It's interesting that almost all the characters first, sort of infertile in some way. Like, yeah,
Speaker: ahh Renton, when he reappears to do and Sick Boy and Renton have this fight 20 years on whatever over the money that's been sold in in the first film. well and It's worth saying that he he leaves Spud's cut with Spud, but does not leave any of the other cuts for the other people in the room. right so The four of them do this drug deal.
Speaker: I think they basically are planning on splitting it, but obviously no one trusts Franco because he's insane. so ean McGregor's character, Renton, sneaks out. and does leave the money for spud in a safety department or like a locker i think it is and doesn't do that for sick boy so sick boy is pissed off he didn't get the money. Whereas Franco is just mad he got stolen from, right? It's a very black and white. It's not like, even if he'd been paid out, he would still probably want to kill.
Speaker: Yeah, there's like a a sort of inner logic of like honor. A play with Francis, as Francis Begbie, whereas with Sick Boy, it's it's just' much more material. that There's a a bit where Renton pays him back the 4,000 pounds he's owed. And he kind of like, I can't remember what if he goes like, what about fucking intro like inflation? He's like, can't turn back inflation. Like, there's been 20 years of inflation, you fucking asshole. Like,
Speaker: This doesn't it doesn't make up for you know the purchasing power £4,000 would have had in 1994 or whatever. of it yeah i mean we should We should go back to the first the first film and in the sense that actually the film does move out of Leith. The first half of the film is very much centred on Edinburgh and Leith and this kind of it's very enclosed and um claustrophobic and it's set in these dingy flats And then Mark Renton actually manages kind of to escape. And the escape, which is interesting because Irvin Welch is obviously like, brands himself as a kind of left-wing, sort of anti-Thatcherite. But the the novel in the film, at least, the avenue for escape for the Renton, the Ewan McGregor character, is to move to London and to become estate agent. Which is just like kind of perfect, right?
Speaker: I think the important thing in a way is that despite his escape, because he gets sober, right? Like that's part of this whole thing because heroin is the the the sort of pole that keeps him in this lifestyle. He gets sober, he moves to London, but they find him.
Speaker: Yeah, his friends like track him down, yeah. Yeah, and basically force him back into something resembling a life of crime. And I do think if I can put on my, like you know I'm i'm the i'm a social critic hat,
Speaker: This is something, if you've ever lived in a similar kind of community or you know watched the sort of poverty porn type stuff that exists for Rust Belt cities, for you know forgotten British villages that are now 50% Pakistani and there's Union Jacks everywhere and blah, blah, blah, blah.
Speaker: it's There's always this discussion of, well, even if you want to get out, the reality is that if you relate to anyone else in this community, there is no way out. Because your friends will pull you back in, right? like You kind of have to make a clean break to have any hope of leaving behind the social conditions that are the subjectivity created by the social conditions. So I see this as like, you may try and cut your ties, you might try and leave it behind, but the social reality is so strong that inevitably,
Speaker: Begbie is going to find you. Inevitably, Sick is going to find And you're going to find out Tommy died, which we didn't mention, not to spoil anything. But the other character doesn't use heroin is so depressed by his conditions and kind of gets talked into it that he does try it and is the only one of them who passes away from HIV. Right? So this is this other kind of... Yeah, he gets HIV and then toxoplasmosis from, like, there's a cat, I think, who keeps shitting everywhere. And he gets, like, there's, like, worms in the shit that then, like...
Speaker: it's Yeah, it's pretty great. Yeah, it's also the same reason, a little fun fact for everybody, why pregnant women are not supposed to change cat litter. So if you are pregnant and listening to this podcast, please don't change your cat litter. Get someone else to do it. You'll end up like Tommy. um Yeah, his immune system is fucked. Yeah, yeah and so he dies from toxoplasmosis. And even the second film, right, is like a home is a kind of twisted homecoming film in the sense that...
Speaker: Mark Renton tries these two escapes, right? His first escape is to London. That's still too proximate to Leith. Like, his friends find him. He's working as an the estate agent. He kind of, like, is numb to the job but kind of enjoys the numbness of it. It's like a replacement for heroin, almost, if that's not too on the nose. um And then he's roped into this heroin deal, and they sort of stage this heroin deal with this London drug dealer, who, fun fact, is Keith Allen, who is Lily Allen's dad. oh didn't know if you picked that up. Lily Allen's dad, who I think is also plays the guy who dies of heroin in Shallow Grave.
Speaker: So both films. Oh, yeah, yeah, I think, yeah, yeah, yeah, that makes sense. I recognized him when I was watching, so that, yeah, it would have to be. When he steals the money, where does he escape to? Amsterdam, right? Yeah.
Speaker: um so And he finally, you think he's made this clean break. um And yeah he lives 20, 30 years in Amsterdam. And the second film is kind of about him returning to Edinburgh. the start of the film, he has this kind of coronary mini heart attack while he's on this kind of gym running machine. Because of course he's working out now, right? You know what mean? Like, of course. Yeah, it's a classic kind of Gen X move. Like, you know, he's traded in his heroin for like obsessive exercise. Yeah.
Speaker: And yeah, he but he comes back to Edinburgh. You're not quite sure whether it's because of the heart attack what it's about. You find out later that he sort of divorced his wife. He's probably going to lose his job because of a merger. He's now an accountant. So he's he's entered the professional classes. But he kind of says, you know, I'm just not like the technology is going to overtake me and I'm going to lose my job.
Speaker: It's unclear whether him or his wife are unable to have children, but it's it's clearly an issue in in the marriage. And so he's back in Edinburgh. So this 20-year escape is you know is quite communitarian in that sense. is sort of There is no individual escape for anyone.
Speaker: No, well, yeah, yeah, exactly. And i just I have to bring it up with deference to the British legal regime. There are certain reports that have come out of a certain American financier that may or may not be affecting ah the workings of the socialist government in the UK, which I fully support. I've said this before.
Speaker: i think it's important to have a socialist government active. to kind of, you know, make things very easy between the EU and the United States, kind of an in-between. But anyway, the movie contains, well, both movies actually contain in different ways. In the first movie, there's a sex tape that's made that's stolen by the Ewan McGregor character. And in that case, it's much more just about the kinds of thief-like behavior that you exhibit when you're on heroin.
Speaker: But in the second movie, Sick Boy is essentially making his living or trying to make his living because he's inherited this failing pub, which you know Talk about on the nose for 2017 Britain. you know It's like, the the pop is dying, you know but i'm going to i'm going to I'm going to save it. um you know Witherspoons is not taking this over. This is going to be local run.
Speaker: And maybe this is my naivety, but that the whole like Death of the Papas is more of a twenty twenty s thing. Like I think that... Because of COVID probably. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's quite prescient actually in that sense. I mean, it's interesting that the film is set in Leaf and it does return to Leaf and for American viewers and probably English viewers too. Like Leaf started to gentrify in like the early twenty ten s So you get like shots of gastro-gastronomic eateries along with the the shorefront where the port used to be. and I think even Sick Boy says you know when Renton first visits him in a dilapidated pub, you know the great tide of gentrification hasn't reached us yet. Or like swallowed us up. So the place is de-industrialized. That's been socially catastrophic. It's called herony's.
Speaker: And then, you know, the restaurants move and I've told, I don't want to like defame anyone, but there was, yeah, I won't say his name, but there was ah a very famous chef that had a restaurant in Leith that was kind of representative of this gentrification and was very like sort celebrated in the Scottish press. who I think then like two years ago, it was exposed that he was like abusing his staff or something. So yeah. Oh yeah. Yes. I, I read about this, but,
Speaker: So he can't really make this work. And of course, now he's addicted to cocaine. is He's basically traded the heroin for the drug of choice of the restaurant industry, which is cocaine. Yeah, it's very 2010s. Yes. Like, okay, we got to make it work. We got to make it work. and you know Sort of maybe proto old dime square man or something. But what is he doing to make his money now but blackmail? right So he's got this Bulgarian...
Speaker: A girlfriend, i mean, he clearly loves her, but you know her relationship to him is much more ambivalent. And she's representative of these kind of Eastern European workers who've come to the UK. In the meantime, I met some of them, you know not that I ever experienced like anti-Slavic racism, but like you know if I were to hear the word Polak in a negative sense and not as like an inter-ethnic joke in the United States, it would be it probably would have been when I was living in the UK. Yeah. Yeah, and mean, it's very telling that the the first scene where Mark Renton comes back to Edinburgh at Edinburgh Airport after 20 years of living in Amsterdam, there are these like women dressed up in like tiny tartan skirts, which is like actually very un-Scottish because Scotland's quite a PC culture in lots of ways. I can't imagine that ever actually happening. But he he sort of gets handed a leaflet by one of these like kind of fun beautiful women outside Edinburgh Airport. They're all dressed up in kitsch Scottish dress, and they're like entirely Eastern European. And he's like, where are you from? And she's like, Slovenia. He's like, okay.
Speaker: So like yeah, we're in by the time of Trainspotting 2, we're in the world of like globalized Britain in a way that you are in Trainspotting 1, I think. No, yeah, no, exactly. I mean, it's funny. I was watching, again, one of these videos, probably the same source, and it was about some small you know small city or town. I don't remember which one.
Speaker: And um the when they were sort of talking to this woman, it was clearly like high as hell outside her apartment. She's like, I love ah my my my my Muslim neighbors. I love them all.
Speaker: But the Slovaks, that's who she's racist against within the community, which I thought was very funny. For for American listeners especially, I think it might be hard to imagine because we've sort of made people like me white over the last 70 years or so. and and sort of now I get to participate in that for for all that's good and all that's absolutely awful about it.
Speaker: But in the UK, where there's this sense of, or I should just maybe even say just in England, where there's this deep sense of Englishness that is like almost somehow separate from whiteness for a lot of people, or like is its own thing within the world of being white. Yeah. um you can You can still have this reaction. So I think it's very telling the decision to insert these kinds of characters into the movie.
Speaker: Yeah, and she kind of plays a an interesting role is to to enter the generational discourse. She's a millennial, right? Yeah. She's actually incredibly millennial. She has like the meenic millennial fringe. She looks like She looks like Zooey Deschanel or something, yeah. She looks like, yeah, she's kind of like is ah a sort of sub-Zoee Deschanel kind of character. She looks like so kind of indie sleaze.
Speaker: And it's quite touching, actually. like There are these kind of bits where the sick boy Simon and ah Mark Renton, they're sort of made up over the the theft in the in the second film, and they're sort of competing for her affections.
Speaker: And they just go on this like Gen X, like cocaine-driven spiel about georgia George Best, the art Northern Irish football player, And you get this kind of like very postmodern like text overlay on the screen and they're like showing these like footage of like, you know, yeah people going to a football match in like 1970s Edinburgh. And they're like, no one's fat. They're all thin. When do people get fat? Why are people fat now? And it's like, ah, de-industrialization, Margaret Thatcher, George Best, you know, ah. And she's just sort like sitting on the sofa like, Jesus fucking Christ. Shut the fuck up. No, I'm so happy you mentioned that scene because for me, that distills two things really. One, like what is of interest to this for the podcast? But also more broadly, what it means for Gen X filmmakers to make movies in like the mid-2010s. Because it's this like radicalization of the formal strategies we talked about in the first movie. Where it's like, all right, I'm going all out.
Speaker: I'm just going to literally put a bunch of words on screen. We're going to clip in some um you know some actual footage from the 70s. And we're going to get narration that is now basically brought to the point of just being individual sentences with gigantic periods at the end.
Speaker: with, you know it's like I'm reading Gertrude Stein's poetry or something, like just these lines that nothing, that like all of the meaning is in the gaps between the lines and you just kind of have to put it together. Yeah, it's it's crazy. And it's, it's it's also interestingly very much, I think like, we're we're we're not far away enough from the 2010s to like formalize what that was as an era. Like T is like Hegelian term, right? Like the owl of Minerva flies at dusk. Like ah we're not, we're not quite there yet in terms of understanding what the 2010s were.
Speaker: But I think T2, it's not the best, like I should, i should just sort of caveat. It's not a great film. Like it's a, it's a three point It's a three-and-a-half film, like three-and-a-half star racing film. The original is much better. yeah It's much better. But it's not a bad film, and I think it's very of its time. like There's a whole plot point, which is that Simon, sick boy, is trying to renovate his pub into...
Speaker: by misappropriating EU regeneration funds to turn it into, like, a brothel. And there's a whole, like, scene where they have to, like, go to the Scottish Parliament. Clearly, Mark Renton, who's now an accountant, is much more proficient in, kind of, PMC, professional managerial class, bureaucracy language. And he's, like, giving this, like, bullshit speech to this, like, assembled committee of, like, EU bureaucrats in the Scottish Parliament about, like,
Speaker: we're going to lovingly regenerate this like formerly industrial pub into a pillar of the community. that ah And sort of Simon, who's still very much in the working class habitus, is just like fucking like barely containing himself in terms of by laughing at it. But they get the money because Mark Grunton is fluid like fluent in bureauc bureaucratic language, right?
Speaker: Well, yeah, he's in the Low Countries. He may as well be in in Brussels. I mean, you know, he's not. on the place He understands these people in a way that, like, the other characters don't. And these people have become the prime sort of movers, the most important people in Scottish history.
Speaker: And it's quite interesting because Ervin Welsh, is I'm pretty sure he's an independent supporter, but he's very much critical of the SNP. And it's interesting that the first film is set before you even have devolution, right? So we're still in Scotland with like no Scottish Parliament.
Speaker: It's pre-devolution, it's pre-the devolution referendum. And by the time you get to TT, we're post-devolution, we have the Scottish Parliament. We're also post-the first independence referendum, which is a curious absence in the film.
Speaker: Like, nationalism... isn't discussed at all in the film, actually. like um So for for listeners, the Scottish referendum was in 2014, narrowly lost.
Speaker: I think it was... I'm looking right here. It's 55% no, 44% yes. mean, obviously, there were some decimals there. And yeah, none of that is included in the film. But we are very much definitely in the era of SMP sort of centre-left technocracy.
Speaker: Like, I think that is included, like, we're very much in that Scotland. But the kind of undercurrents that Irvin Welsh is interested in, the kind of working-class radical independence, which I think these the characters of Trainspotting, who are like working-class Irish Catholic guys, would be pretty supportive of.
Speaker: Like, none of that comes up, interestingly. Yeah. Well, yeah, no, it doesn't. I think the the closest you get to anything like that is obviously the scene at the Loyalist Club that we talked about, right? Which is not the same the same binary necessarily. Yeah, I mean, there's like two binaries at work. There's like Protestant Catholic and then there's sort of independence versus union. um Yeah, which, no, I was going to ask you, I mean, this is not really about the movies, but maybe it'd be interesting for our listeners.
Speaker: what What is the the breakdown there? Because I was just looking at the map when I brought up the numbers. And red on the map stands for no. And most areas are either like a pale red or a deep red, right? The only actual blue pieces are cities, as best I can tell.
Speaker: So what does that mean? Yeah, I mean, the the strongest areas in terms of support for independence were Dundee and then sort of west of the greater Glasgow area, um which is probably two of the poorest sort of urban areas of Scotland. um Edinburgh was pretty firmly unionist um as a whole in aggregate, right? But like Edinburgh in aggregate is a city that is sort of administrative, educational, governmental, elite, middle class. Yeah.
Speaker: which is not the characters of Trainspotting. So like, I would imagine that the characters of Trainspotting who are working class, like of Irish Catholic background, you know, I mean, obviously it's a bit determinative. It's, you know, people are individuals, but yeah, on the whole, those kind of the people that would be supporting independence. And like, yeah, like I was in Scotland, i was living in Scotland in 2014 and, fourteen and um I actually don't have the historical date of when this switch happened. It's a bit the Southern strategy for the Republicans. well Suddenly, like all the Southerners were voting Republican at some point, and everyone everyone was like, when did that happen? But the S&P, historically, were like a lower petty bourgeois, Presbyterian party, and they were not a party that Irish Catholics or the working class voted for.
Speaker: Historically, the you know the dead that that was the Labour Party and the Communist Party. an s And the S&P were, yeah, sort of a bit sus, but to the left in a lot ways. like there were i Not to ah foreground this too much, but there were certain Scottish nationalists like Hugh McDermott who um you know it was a yeah kind of friend of the Nazis.
Speaker: So yeah, this was not a party of the the Irish Catholic working class. And yet, by the time you get to 2014 and fourteen and the the the tenure of Alex Salmon, that those people were voting for the S&P.
Speaker: I think the change kind of happened in the early 2000s. And I think it was a lot to do with, I'm guessing here because I just don't know, but I think it was a sort of disaffection with the Labour Party and New Labour and the hegemony. I mean, Labour were really hegemonic in Scotland.
Speaker: You know, New Labour was a Scottish project to ah to a certain extent. And I think there was a real sense of that that party wasn't delivering for the working class, wasn't delivering for the poor in Scotland. And they were looking for alternatives and the S&P were there, despite historically being kind of a Protestant middle class party.
Speaker: Well, you're seeing some of that even, not to turn this into now like Brit Talk, you know, 2026, but like, you know, you're seeing a little bit of ah of that with with the Greens now, right? Which is, you know, historically this kind of, I don't know everything about the the UK Greens, but certainly in most parts of the world,
Speaker: an alliance between sort of what we might think of as like NIMBYs, you know, sort of maybe like quasi-progressive, but ultimately kind of environmentally minded, anti-developmental ah middle class to upper middle class people. And then to a certain extent, this group of maybe like older benighted ex-communists or something who sort of like massaged their way slowly into something like what Renton becomes in this movie, who hold on to some of these like soft left principles, maybe are, you know, not quite as wealthy as the other people we're talking about here, but find a way to express their leftism.
Speaker: absent the traditional kind of like mass party. But now with the breakdown in the the more or less, not the two-party system in the way America has it, but something closer to the American model than the European one, um with Labour and the Tories both sort of nosediving, it seems like the Greens are trying to and with some success exploiting that.
Speaker: Yeah, I think we could do a thought experiment on Trainspotting, which is like, where would who would the characters be supportive of now? Like, yeah, sort of late Gen Xs in the 2020s. And um I think Mark Renton would be a Nicola Sturgeon sort of centrist SMP supporting, PMC class, kind of like pro-independence, but like...
Speaker: very kind of bureaucratic and like, yeah, very supportive of the kind of like what what is often called the Tarth and Tories. So like centre-right economically, socially liberal, pro-independence. Francis Begbie would obviously be a reform voter.
Speaker: Like, obviously. um Like, and there is an emerging sort reformer doing quite well in Scotland. And I wouldn't be surprised that we've got the Scottish parliamentary elections coming up in May.
Speaker: And I would not be surprised if they took quite a lot of seats, especially in the borders. So I would say Francis, reform voter. Simon Reynolds, probably like apathetic non-voter or maybe like radical independence voter, like some kind of fringe socialist party.
Speaker: And then Spud could be a Green Party supporter. Yeah, because Spud is, you know, we didn't say this, but he gets turned into basically like a writer. he gets turned into sort of like Charles Bukowski or something by the end of the movie.
Speaker: I could see Spud being a Green Party supporter, yeah. Yeah, but what's interesting is the the the sort of rainbow coalition of of voters you've you've ushered there. Because like you know you would imagine in a movie about this kind of milieu that you would just be talking about reform to it to a certain extent. right because you're talk At least in America, when you speak to like the heroin adult on the streets of a Rust Belt city, you're much more likely to hear reform.
Speaker: kind of Trump talking points for the most part. There's a reason he's captured a lot of those places, you know? Yeah. And I think independence to a certain extent in Scotland has funneled some of that populist resentment away from the populist right. Like I wouldn't want to overstate that because I think reform will do very well um in the coming years in Scotland. And like even looking at the Brexit referendum, but there's a,
Speaker: a meta self-apologisation that Scotland is more socially democratic, more centre-left than England. And I've always been subtly quite suspicious of that. And I mean, like, even um but in aggregate, Scotland voted for Remain rather than Brexit. But it was still a large... sport I mean, it was 30... It was high 30s, low 40s, I think, for Scottish support Brexit. It's a big slice. And like we see in the film, right, and the loyalists, lodges and stuff.
Speaker: That is there. That's, like, an element. So... Yeah, and and I would, because because I know we don't want to go too long today since we both have... a Sam needs to go take in the the UV that escapes through the cloud cover in rainy.
Speaker: I'm going to, like, get rickets or something.
Speaker: You're going to want to make sure you're getting some vitamin C to avoid scurvy as well. um but and And I have a little trip, but I did want to just touch on two things before we part. One is I think it is important that we're gleaning a bunch of things about the social and the the basically the political world of the movie that remains mostly unstated.
Speaker: And recently I've been reading, and i don't know if you started saying the Anton Jaeger book, Hyperpolitics. And, you know, his terms for this are post-politics in the 90s and then sort of post-2080 calls it anti-politics.
Speaker: And then we get what he now calls hyperpolitics. And I think that Boyle, as someone who starts making movies in the early 90s, is sort of like post-political in his sense, right? Like it's always haunting the movie there. You know he can't escape the social conditions.
Speaker: Obviously, it's based on a novel that is set very much in a particular kind of social sociopolitical world. But he's more comfortable in the mode of formal experimentation than he is in the mode of like explicit political conversation, at least as far as the text is concerned. yeah And that is why, to bring it back to Sick Boy in the second movie, the fact that he is trying to turn the pub into a brothel, which is a very... like Here's how I'm not going to get taken over by Witherspoon's strategy for like allowing the independent pub to survive. But also that his way of doing that is this blackmail scheme where essentially he's pimping out his girlfriend to be in these sort of like embarrassing...
Speaker: you know I'll just come out and say it, pegging style videos that are meant to embarrass. I think it's like a local principle or something. Yeah, it's always like he's like targeting like the kind of bourgeois of Edinburgh. It's like the the headmaster of fetties, I think, or something. Yeah, exactly. There's a way in which he, and he's not doing this in a political way, but He recognizes that the mode of advancement for him, if it's not going to be the EU grant, is going to be sort of em parasitizing the bourgeois class of of the city. And he's going to do that in ah in a sort of classic mode, which is, okay, you know they're all freaks in one way or another. So how do I how do i monetize that that product, right?
Speaker: And um there's something that feels very current about that in the obvious sense for me, but also like telling about what politics looks like. Like there's a pulling back of the mask, like he's not some kind of sophisticated influence operation and it fails precisely because he's not right. Like he's not actually good at this. He's just doing it because it's what's available to him, but it is this peak into sort of like The fact that politics never really can go away, even if you remove it from the text of the movie in this grand sense, the sort of like bare bones basics that will always be with politics, which is, you know, influence operations, blackmail, the sort of nitty gritty, awful stuff that always makes it up, whether you're in the Soviet Union you're in the UK US remains. it It cannot go away and it will be there.
Speaker: I think there's something like incredibly refreshing about... i mean, as much as Gen X, tics can annoy me. um And there's ah a sort of monologue where Ewan McGregor's character does the choose life bit to the Bulgarian millennial girl. Story-facing, pointing... It's very fucking Reddit. like It's like, oh, like twitter choose Twitter where you spew a dissognist bio. It's just like, oh my God, shut up. But... um T2 is a Reddit movie. You're like so spot, like thinking about it, that is sort of the progress. T2 is quite Reddit, yeah. Its ethos is the the sort of soy face ethos of like, look at it, look at it. like There's an understatedness, ironically, about Trainspotting that is just gone in T2. T2 knows exactly what it is. It's extremely in your face. And in that sense...
Speaker: Is it oddly like authentic movie if we want to bring back that term? Yeah, if we're going back to the early season references to like earnestness, sarcasm, cynicism, the whatever the quadrant that we're using, like by the time you get to T2, it's very earnest. The cynicism, this kind of edginess is gone.
Speaker: It's middle-aged, it's bloated. And that maps Gen X in a certain way. Like we've talked about this kind of core of authenticity or sincerity and earnestness behind the ah mystique of cynicism.
Speaker: But by T2, like with Gen X more generally, again, go on Blue Sky if you want to see this, it is just like pure, just earnestness about the problems. And obviously, because it's a narrative text, and Danny Boyle still has some of that attachment to formal experimentation, it's not like It's not like, quote unquote, high woke. Like I'm just, the characters are just saying exactly what everything means. But there are these moments. Yes, that was what I was about to say is that like, it's a double edged sword in the sense that you get this kind of like the the worst of Gen X in this film, which is is kind of like high moralism. But you also get the best of Gen X in this film, which is that it is still a film which is showing you not telling you.
Speaker: Yeah, well, this is, if I may go on a little rant here briefly, i sat down to watch Materialist probably like six months ago, whenever that movie came out. I don't remember. i think it was the summer. And like, I despised that movie. I don't know if you saw it. And I remember my main... I've not seen it, it's It was like a mini phenomenon over here, very polarizing.
Speaker: i would say most people I respect and like hated it. But you know, you could be out there and like it. i Listen, I love everybody, ah you know. But... It's a movie where all of the characters just say exactly what they're supposed to be thinking at any given moment. It's it's it's a marionette film, right? Where essentially you can feel the strings being pulled. And it's a very, in that sense, millennial movie. And I think this kind of Reddit, insofar as that term means anything to me, is really where Gen X and the millennial generation like meet in this over-the-top moralism, in this, again, soy, to use that word. Just this like gesticulation is the best word I can come up with.
Speaker: And that movie is just full of it in in such a way that if I could If I could blow up the the original prints that no one ever had to see it again, I would do so. And T2 is not that bad. It is it is not as infected as that. No, and if it's infected with anything, it's a kind of nostalgia.
Speaker: but i I'm a sucker for nostalgia. There are all these shots of bare-kneed boys in shorts in red-brick terrace houses that supposed to be stand-ins. Be careful here, Sam. There's a lot going on the country right now, and I think you want to...
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, But and and the characters always, they sort of break into these soliloquies, you know, it' do you remember when, you know, you came into the classroom, you sat down next to me and, you know, it was like, Francis, this is, this is Mark. And it's, I don't know, this is kind of like, I don't having like Gen X parents and Gen X uncles and aunties, like it's, it's, I'm a sucker for that. Like, I don't know No, I think it's fair.
Speaker: It's fair. And it, it brings me back to something that Will said in our, in our interview about Shallow Grave, which is that like, The movie does have the blessing of having Danny Boyle at the helm. And I think how Will put it is like, I don't like all of his movies. I don't think all of them are successes, but he sort of is always at least interesting. He's always trying to do something. Yeah, it was like the film is like formally in a like trying to do formal innovation.
Speaker: i think it came off terribly. It wasn't very good, but I appreciated its attempt to do it nonetheless, I think. Yeah, and it it it is for what problems it does have, i think this conversation is richer for being able to talk about, well, obviously for our purposes, because we're trying to map Gen X over a long period of time, it's almost like the perfect movie, because it's, again, ah a representation of how these characters, who are very Gen X in their 90s-ness, change over time. And we get a glimpse that I think is strange.
Speaker: fairly accurate, actually, in many respects, of like what is going to happen to that kind of person. And so, you know, good. Yeah, and I think there is still a strain of cynicism in the sense that, I was trying to the point earlier that almost all of the male characters kind of infertile or incapable as far as or in the kind of biological sense of of men. that there's Mark can't have children or his wife can't have children, and we're not quite sure. Francis is obviously a terrible father who is in prison most of the time and doesn't see a son.
Speaker: a Spud is, I think, has a restraining order or something. or there's some kind of yeah they're They're separated. And then Simon has a daughter, well, firstly, his first daughter dies in the first one, obviously. He has a second daughter who he sees, we're told he sees like once every 10 years.
Speaker: So child, in some sense, kind of childless or estranged from their families. And the the sort of mechanism of family formation has never really taken effect. they're all failures in a way. Even Mark, who's probably the one who's done the social mobility, is is a failure.
Speaker: Well, and they are capped at one kid, I also think is sort of significant. like no like i mean I don't mean to sound like Curtis Yarvin or something, but like they're not they're not hitting replacement rate. like You know what I mean? like Whatever is here is not reproducing itself.
Speaker: And the degree to which it is reproducing itself is failing to imprint anything, except for maybe with the Francis Begbie Franco character, you know basically giving his son his blessing before he goes off to die. like that's that's That's the best he can do, is like be nice once and then die. like that is That's the gift that he is allowed to give. well Although, it's kind of left ambiguous, but There's a kind of double cross in the second film, in the same way there was in the first, where I presume that half the money from the EU fund ends up going to Veronica, the Bulgarian girlfriend, who then heads home to Bulgaria.
Speaker: And half the money goes to Spud, which he then gives to his family. I think that's what happened, yeah. But you know you're you're right. But I think in the world of the movie, I take that to be... like Spud is always this... I mean, he's almost in his name, like the the softest character in a way, like the one who's the the most, i mean, there's a reason that Ewan McGregor gives him the money at the end of the first movie. He's sort of the most normal. I don't know if that's quite the right word, but he's the most, yeah, like the one you could see being most capable of actually carrying on that family relationship. And that becomes the means to him having something approximating a happy ending, right? Like that this can be repaired. See, I don't want to say that there's nothing there. It's just that,
Speaker: the movie doesn't have a lot good to say about the prospects of this generation, even in their relative successes, you know, which is probably what a reform voter in the UK would tell you right now anyway. So, you know, well, everybody, thank you. i was train spotting in T2. Hope you learned a little bit about the ah demographic makeup of remain versus leave voters in Scotland, as well as independence voters in Scotland in 2014. So with bye-bye.
