Calton Road this afternoon. It struck me today that I’ve never once snapped this Mark-Renton-gets-run-over spot, the manic laugh he offers to the driver an iconic snippet from Trainspotting (1996).
I was an employee (an actual ‘trainspotter’, no less) of East Coast Railways a decade ago and used to sneak out the back of Waverley Station to this Renton hideaway for a cheeky fag and a can of Monster, my walkie-talkie in hand just in case my absence was noted. Come to think of it, 30% of my ‘working day’ consisted of either this filmic interlude or listening to Kanye West tunes in the ScotRail bogs.
“Where are you?”
“Just having a shite, I’ll be on the platform in a minute.”
If you mute a movie and it looks infinitely worse then it’s a bad film. I can’t recall who said this but it’s a reasonable proposition. Such is Human Traffic (1999), a truly garish and ugly remnant from the late nineties, a poor man’s Trainspotting (1996) that on a 2018 viewing comes across as a student film cobbled together over a weekend. Like any nostalgic longing, it’s best just consigning these matter to the past where they belong.
In 1999 I thought this was the shit; now it’s just shit, a pilotless, plotless, theme-less advertisement for ecstacy, executed with the craft and subtlety of a sledgehammer and featuring some of the most irritating and insipid ‘characters’ in a British movie ever. I’ll never handle a floppy disk again, and I’ll never watch Human Traffic (1999) again.
Here we enter the circus, a veritable Looney Land. I used to work here in my ‘Wilderness Years’ 2010-2012 and the shit I saw is more than enough material for the basis of a manky neo-gothic crime drama set in the early twenty-tens. Ah, those were the days – before Trump, Brexit, and fidget spinners being habitually revered as the panacea to Autism. My highlight in ‘Stalag EH1 1BB’ was a disgruntled passenger throwing punches at a rail cop because the vexed customer didn’t like the quality of alcoholic beverage he was served in the bar – it didn’t meet his esoteric ‘standards’.
I highly recommend a day trip to The Waverley. Bring a packed lunch and a Polaroid.
The infamous ‘Banana flats’ on Gorgie Road. This is where Begbie stays in T2 Trainspotting. I went to a house party in there a few years ago. Everyone present was a chav and they were all off their tits on Daz washing detergent. I quietly left and went home for a wank.
The Trainspotting of ’96 was made in that allegedly esoteric Britpop era of New Labour, swaggering Gallaghers, and unshackled chemical exploration, when the last honking remnants of Thatcher’s Britain (or Major’s) were ebbing away; a new cultural discourse on the horizon, things could only get better. I read an article (somewhere) a few weeks ago that pondered whether Trainspotting was a product of that alchemist epoch or actually created it. It’s a movie synced to its time, yet it doesn’t feel dated. Boyle’s expressionist, almost magical realist style – Gabriel García Márquez meets ’80s Edinburgh – is without gimmicks. Every tour de force shot or bravura sequence has a purpose, serving to express his characters’ experience of heroin and hedonism.
The sequel is strong. It nails how much both Edinburgh and our sensibilities have mutated over the past two decades. The essentials of modern living have altered – now it’s Facebook and Instagram and not the Compact Disc Player and big fucking televisions. Sensations are less corporeal, more about building a social narrative – it’s surface appearances and their validation that brings happiness, not the materialism of yesteryear. Edinburgh is no longer the destitute hellhole of old but a gentrified cluster of hamlets, with some no-go areas still hanging in there. I was in Niddrie last week and I must confess I experienced ‘The Fear’ – it was like another world, an urban toilet with trolls. Left behind the express train to post-modernity, you’ll never see this ‘non-place’ – as Marc Augé would put it – in a travel guide.
Mr. Francis Begbie in a toilet ….
There’s a sadness to proceedings, that these now middle-aged blokes look back on the shite times in a nostalgic sense, like the Ossis did (and still do) the GDR. Spud and Begbie especially wax lyrical about the rough ol’ days as if they were less a perversion and more an idyll. Familiarity doesn’t always breed contempt.
The new film has so much energy, is so visually dynamic, and the characters imbued with so much zest that it can’t be missed. And Francis Begbie is one scary bloke.
Wanderings and ... wonderings. 