PsycCRITIQUES
August 7, 2017, Vol. 62, No. 31, Article 10
© 2017 American Psychological Association
Choose Relationships
A Review of
T2 Trainspotting (2017)
by Danny Boyle (Director)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0040913
Reviewed by
Kimberly Kirkland
So [T2 Trainspotting] is a movie about the infantilism of middle age. We’re supposed
to stay as young as possible until we physically crumble and fall apart. Until then,
we’re supposed to go out and see bands, have affairs, and take drugs. —Irvine Welch,
author of Trainspotting (in Stephenson, 2016, para.10)
It is simultaneously one of the greatest blessings and curses of life that it begins anew with
each individual. Certainly writers more eloquent than I have tried to capture this
notion—this idea that if only there were some Lamarckian mechanism for passing on
knowledge accrued over the course of a life span onto offspring, what profound implications
it would have for humankind, mankind (in the literal male sense of the word) in particular.
For it is men, as we are frequently told and can quite readily observe, who often ignore
recommended health practices, are reluctant to seek adequate physical and mental health
care, and engage in dangerous behaviors at a rate much higher than women. As noted by
Kruger and Nesse (2006), “Being male is now the single largest demographic risk factor for
early mortality in developed countries” (p. 92).
Without such a Lamarckian mechanism, parents and other adults are left with the
formidable task of trying to pass on a lifetime of accumulated wisdom to the younger
generation, trying to find some means, any conduit—both directly through one-on-one
communication (usually in the forms of “lectures,” “nagging,” and “guilt-trips”) and
indirectly through cultural mores and behavioral expectations—to reach the Youth with a
capital Y to try and help them understand and avoid the mistakes that their elders tragically
made. This task is often met with sharp resistance and rebellion by the younger generation,
reactions that have been the subject of countless films and novels.
Youthful rebellion was the premise of the original Trainspotting film 20 years ago and its inyour-
face condemnation of the status quo, demeaning and disparaging the lifestyle of the
elder generation, and its outright indictment of cultural norms reached heights that had
been yet unseen in the adolescent rebel film genre and gave rise to the unforgettable and
now iconic nihilistic soliloquy by the main character, Mark “Rent-boy” Renton:
Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big
television. Choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players, and electrical tin can
openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol, and dental insurance. Choose fixedinterest
mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose
leisure wear and matching luggage. Choose a three piece suit on hire purchase in a
range of fucking fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who the fuck you are on a Sunday
morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing spirit-crushing game
shows, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it
all, pissing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the
selfish, fucked-up brats you have spawned to replace yourselves. Choose your future.
Choose life. (Macdonald & Boyle, 1996)
Even today, it remains a stunning and powerful rant. And what makes it so powerful and so
believable, as with all powerful and believable lies, is that in its heart there is a kernel of
truth. But it’s far from the whole truth, or even a significant fraction of the whole truth. A
larger portion of the whole truth can be found in what has to be the best entitled peerreviewed
article I’ve ever read: “‘The Average Scottish Man Has a Cigarette Hanging Out of
His Mouth, Lying There With a Portion of Chips’: Prospects for Change in Scottish Men’s
Constructions of Masculinity and Their Health-Related Beliefs and Behaviours” (O’Brien,
Hunt, & Hart, 2009). This excellent analysis of the perception of masculinity among
working-class Scottish men found unsurprisingly that these men typically prioritize
masculinity over health. Masculinity for many disenfranchised Scots and, more broadly, I
think, in Anglo culture or perhaps even more fundamentally in lower socioeconomic males
across Western culture (possibly an overgeneralization) often includes a repudiation of the
idea of a “healthy” lifestyle. Being health conscious is seen as somehow unmanly or, even
worse in their view, feminine or gay (Emslie, Hunt, & Lyons, 2013). Political correctness has
little traction among them. Likewise, higher education is often eschewed as a practice of the
effete (Archer, Pratt, & Phillips, 2001). Very heavy alcohol consumption is glorified and even
justified as being an acceptable form of stress release. And so what happens, as we can see
from Welch’s quote at the beginning of this review, is that these men—these youthful
rebels—become trapped in their own self-created “masculine hegemony” (a term
popularized by Connell, 1993) and remain perpetually infantilized even into middle age.
The first Trainspotting ends with Renton’s decision to “clean up and move on” with the
relatively large sum of money he has stolen from his friends. T2 Trainspotting opens 20
years later with Renton’s pursuit of good health damn near killing him.
In T2, Boyle does not let Renton off the hook for his nihilistic youth, thereby avoiding the
classic and ultimately disappointing “coming-of-age” conception of rebel genre in which the
rebel realizes the error of his ways, gets the girl, and falls in lockstep with societal demands.
But with this pitfall sidestepped, Boyle does not seem to be able to formulate a vision and
purpose for Renton other than to allow him to wallow in his own emptiness and emotional
immaturity. And when the middle-aged Renton tries for a power rant, it rings hollow:
Choose handbags, choose high-heeled shoes, cashmere and silk, to make yourself feel
what passes for happy. Choose an iPhone made in China by a woman who jumped out
of a window and stick it in the pocket of your jacket fresh from a South-Asian firetrap.
Choose Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram and a thousand others ways to spew
your bile across people you’ve never met. Choose updating your profile, tell the world
what you had for breakfast and hope that someone, somewhere cares. Choose looking
up old flames, desperate to believe that you don’t look as bad as they do. Choose liveblogging,
from your first wank ’til your last breath; human interaction reduced to
nothing more than data. Choose ten things you never knew about celebrities who’ve
had surgery. Choose screaming about abortion. Choose rape jokes, slut-shaming,
revenge porn and an endless tide of depressing misogyny. Choose 9/11 never
happened, and if it did, it was the Jews. Choose a zero-hour contract and a two-hour
journey to work. And choose the same for your kids, only worse, and maybe tell
yourself that it’s better that they never happened. And then sit back and smother the
pain with an unknown dose of an unknown drug made in somebody’s fucking kitchen.
Choose unfulfilled promise and wishing you’d done it all differently. Choose never
learning from your own mistakes. Choose watching history repeat itself. Choose the
slow reconciliation towards what you can get, rather than what you always hoped for.
Settle for less and keep a brave face on it. Choose disappointment and choose losing
the ones you love, then as they fall from view, a piece of you dies with them until you
can see that one day in the future, piece by piece, they will all be gone and there’ll be
nothing left of you to call alive or dead. Choose your future, Veronika. Choose life.
In both Trainspotting and T2 Trainspotting, Boyle asks the hard question: How do we as
individuals find meaning and purpose in life? In both films as in many of our own lives, the
main character is fumbling blindly for an answer that is perpetually under his nose, an
answer that clinical psychologists and other mental health professionals have been helping
their clients gain insight around for over a century: relationships. In both films, it is
Renton’s deep affection for his mates that is his salvation. And even though he is correct
that as our loved ones “fall from view, a piece of you dies with them until you can see that
one day in the future, piece by piece, they will all be gone and there’ll be nothing left of you
to call alive or dead,” our lives will have been made infinitely richer for having had these
deep social connections. The positive psychological impact of close interpersonal
relationships has been demonstrated repeatedly in the literature.