T2: Trainspotting (2017)

directed by Danny Boyle

Jane McNulty

I’m looking forward to it already.

Sitting in my backyard reading was my salvation that summer; through the gray, sunless weeks of a New England winter, I still smile, knowing I get to experience it again each year. The verdant trees bent at clean, generous breezes, and the clouds overhead were transported from a Renaissance painting. The sky was mirrored in the pool’s shiny surface, superimposed over its sapphire lining. The quiet hum of exurbia seemed to originate from the woods, behind the pool shed. When I went outside to meditate in the evenings, it softened to a hush, like a higher power whispering a reminder of my good fortune.

When I actually put my book down and gravitated toward the water, it was both a warm hug and a gentle reprieve from the furious heat, heat that wormed its way into every crevice. Heat emanated from the outdoor couch cushions where I did most of my reading. It emerged from the bumpy concrete surrounding the pool. It trapped the comforting smell of sunscreen in the air. The heat was relentless that summer, or at least that’s how I remember it.

I had just turned twenty-one when I gained a real understanding of how heat is linked to extreme behaviors—it was making me extremely sad. It probably had more to do with needing to heal from major life changes and a loss that felt unending, but it was a comforting narrative to blame it on the weather. My grief, regret, and anxiety were inescapable—more constant than my heartbeat, bleeding into my dreams, disemboweling every decision I made, threatening my functioning. The only time that really stopped was when I was reading.

Maybe it was a gift from my future self somehow, but I felt compelled to read Irvine Welsh’s 1993 novel Trainspotting one spring day, seemingly out of the blue. Once I made it past the first hundred pages, I was hooked. I read the four-book series (and even a spinoff) throughout the most difficult summer of my life. I lost my big emotions temporarily to Welsh’s form-warping style, the absurd lengths characters went to get even or get the upper hand, the unique voices of each narrator, the absurdity and humor, and the universality of the ontological questions undergirding the narrative. It renewed my passion for reading and writing. When things got really good, the words and shapes would swirl around my mind, kaleidoscopic, and destroy my notion of time. They weren’t always perfect books, but they were, in some strange way, what I needed at the time.

One Saturday night at the end of July, I felt happy with alone time again. It was a big victory. Home alone for the evening, I took myself out on a date—food from a local farm for dinner, followed by a trip to my favorite bookstore. I capped the night off by renting T2 Trainspotting, the sequel to the 1996 film. My cynical opinion of reboots and remakes and franchises had only been reinforced by the last few years of media; I didn’t have high expectations for a sequel.

I ended up loving it, obviously. The sequel captures the air of hopelessness and political strife that pulled me into the first book and kept me reading in spite of lulls in arcs, unbelievability of the plot, or the absence of my favorite characters. In the way that the first film is about a lot more than addiction, the sequel is more than the nostalgia it is bursting with—like a briefcase stuffed with money, but there’s something else underneath.

Twenty years after stealing money from his friends in the first film and subsequently starting a new life for himself in Amsterdam, Mark Renton (Ewan McGregor) finally returns to Edinburgh. Two decades sober, he suffers a heart attack in the opening scene of the film; he’s facing divorce and will soon be let go from his job, replaced by technology, all of this a recipe for a midlife crisis at age 46. His old friends are, in some ways, right where he left them: Begbie (Robert Carlyle) in prison, Simon (Jonny Lee Miller) making a living from blackmail while running the failing family pub and abusing cocaine, and Spud (Ewen Bremner) still struggling with heroin addiction. Mark regressing by participating in Simon’s schemes is the primary plot point of the film, with everything building up to the inevitable confrontation between Mark and Begbie.

Mark is arguably the protagonist of both the films and books, but the character with the most meaningful arc in the sequel is Spud. He attempts suicide in the first act of the film. Mark tries to motivate his old friend to “be addicted to something else” to recover. Spud tries running, construction, and boxing as outlets, but none seem to resonate. After leaving the gym, he steps out on the street and sees his nostalgia unfold right in front of him: his friends in their twenties being chased for stealing running right by him in his mind’s eye.

When fighting the urge to use again through the darkness of night, he instead decides to write down some of these memories. “The sweat wis lashin oafay Sick Boy,” he writes by hand, while looking at a picture of his friend Simon “Sick Boy” Williamson from when they were in their youth. This sentence is familiar to anyone who read Irvine Welsh’s first novel. The visuals suggest that he may have found his outlet, as sunlight streams into his apartment, illuminating the pictures of his younger days taped up on the walls. The movie’s conclusion sees Spud with a renewed will to live, sober, and in contact with his wife and son. He now has a book full of stories that maybe he’ll share with the world.

I can never find the words to aptly explain to myself and others why I’m so fond of this story—set in a country I am centuries removed from, about people I have very little in common with, and behaving in ways I’ve rarely seen firsthand—but Spud’s journey in the sequel sums it up for me. We all exist bearing narratives within ourselves. It’s inescapable, it’s part of our nature; narratives even slip into our unconscious lives, formulating our dreams. The things we tell ourselves are powerful, regardless of how true they are, shaping all our decisions and interactions with the world around us—it’s nothing new that we are who we are because of what we carry in our minds. Sometimes that internal story becomes too much to endure, like it did for me that summer and like it did for Spud after years of trying to be strong. Getting immersed in another narrative not of my own creation helped me get through a really tough time. And while every story has a narrative, I don’t find most of them as absorbing as this one.

In one of T2’s final scenes, Simon and Mark watch TV together, their friendship having gone through a journey that could be an essay of its own, and talk about Spud’s writing.

So, who’s gonna read ‘em?” Simon asks.

“Well, that’s the problem,” Mark says. “Nobody.”

While it’s heavily implied that Mark’s answer is wrong, I’m not sure if it matters to Spud if anybody is reading them. It matters more that he was able to shed his demons in the process of creating something. Plus, his wife Gail reads them in the penultimate scene and suggests a title. If only one person read it and got out of her head for a little while, then isn’t it a success? Irvine Welsh wrote, as Mark Renton nonetheless, “I’ve come to believe that everything you write, no matter how shite and trivial, has some sort of meaning.” I’m inclined to believe him.

Jane McNulty is a writer from Massachusetts. She recently graduated from Simmons University with a BA in Writing. Her work has appeared in The Write Launch, Réapparition Journal, and Sidelines.