Load down, cook in, shoot up.
The head of a needle poking right into the blood highway, releasing bitter sweet smack into the veins that goes rushing through the body, breaking all speed limits and shoving everything out of the way; pain, worry, sadness, contempt and replacing it with pleasure. But as the pleasure begins to subside and your senses begin to return, they return altered, corrupted and enslaved by the need to take more. Tis a terrifying cycle from which most never manage to break out and their lives take a fucked-up turn.
I’m not going to play the drug police here, people are smart enough to know what drugs are good for them and what are bad, take them at your own peril. Instead, I’ll waste your time talking about Trainspotting (1996)
This grim and harrowing film about drug addiction is powerful as it takes you with the characters right to the very merciless depths of a heroin addiction and all the pains and pleasures that come with it. Unlike a lot of drug films that I’ve seen and enjoyed, this one is among the rare rank that doesn’t glorify drug use, and for good reason because the drug in question is fucking heroin, how do you go about making a film that paints heroin in a nice light? The film is raw, it doesn’t beat around the bush when it comes to the subject matter and the H comes out and is stuck in the veins within the first few minutes and the needle frenzy continues until the very end. My girlfriend, who is aversed, to put it mildly, to needles found herself looking away for about half of the film, so if you have a needle phobia too, this may be a challenge for you.
Contesting with the fucked-up nature of heroin in this film is the fucked-up nature of society. Why do you think the characters end up on the junk in the first place? Society has become an extremely inhospitable hell for them, with a mountain of worries and obligations that have become too much to endure, they choose to just don’t know. The squalor of Edinburgh after its ruthless colonisation by England is reflected through the washed-out grey colour palette of the metropolitan areas. The hallucinatory shooting of scenes is gripping especially the overdose and withdrawal scenes dangling us in the in-between and the latter engulfing us in a sea of paranoia and nausea. Music drives this film, the unrelenting pace of punk rock with the images pull us along this kinetic downward spiral through a crime-filled underworld.
At times the films humour is simple and surrounds the everyday utilities of life, framing them in such a caricatured way that makes you think, does it really take that little displacement of reality to realise how frivolous it all is? Maybe it’s their drug addled trains of thought but we get to share it with them nevertheless.
This film is about enslavement to chemicals and to society, which one do you prefer and when does one start getting worse than the other? It’s a dynamic and crazy film that gets right into your veins and into your head with its provocation, leaving you thinking about the state of the world and how it imposes on the state of mind. Is the world a parasite upon us or the other way around?
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