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Friday, August 30, 1996
UN I V E R S I T Y D A I L Y K A N S A N
Trainspotting: A movie with a message?
Viewers must decide on meaning of film
By Jeff Ruby Kansan staff writer
Heroin may be fun, but it's scary. Simple as that.
That's the message Danny Boyle's movie Trainspotting pounds into the viewer's head. Amidst the controversy surrounding the film, there is no deeper significance to the film.
The debate about whether the film glorifies heroin use centers on whether the viewer chooses to focus on the fun stuff or the scary stuff. And there's plenty of both in the alternately hilarious and disturbing Scottish motion picture.
The fun stuff includes Renton, the narrator and hero of sorts played by Ewan McGregor, and the members of his gang of junkies, going to a techno dance club. Every one of them ends up flinging their clothes off and having sex with someone.
The scary stuff includes a junkie's only reaction to witnessing death as putting a syringe in her vein and emptying a load of junk into her system.
The fact that *Trainspitting* blares a trendy soundtrack through vivid
REVIEW
scenes highlighting and lowlighting the life of drug addicts seems to be the source of confusion. If we see hip, young Scots seemingly having the time of their lives to the sounds of their hero, Iggy Pop, then the movie's message must be that heroin is just plain cool.
When Renton says, "Take the best sex you've ever had, multiply it by a thousand and you're still nowhere near it," we have to wonder about the filmmaker's intentions. Sounds like a flat-out endorsement for drugs, doesn't it? But every promotion for heroin's alluring rush is countered with a pathetic slice of Edinburgh street life.
Viewers must decide which makes more of an impression on the movie-goer, Renton's honest attempts to kick the habit and live a normal life or the euphoria of diving headfirst into the filthiest toilet in Scotland and swimming in a pain-free under-water nirvana searching for his onium suppositories.
the scenes in which we get to peek into the social lives of drug addicts, and those are the scenes we'll remember. That doesn't mean we walk out of the theater looking for the nearest heroin dealer.
And there's no way we'd choose to go through the same horrifying locked-in-the-bedroom withdrawal scene that Renton experiences as part of his caring parents' attempt to help him.
But there's something deep inside us that wants to try that thousand-fold orgasm thing just once to see if it's true. For some of the more impressionable viewers of the movie, such words are all that's needed to tip the scales in the wrong direction.
**Trainspotting** is an intelligent film. Unfortunately, moviegoers are notorious for taking the wrong message from a movie, or even worse, creating a message where there was none. In this case, we are shown both sides of the issue and allowed to choose for ourselves how we feel about the effects of heroin.
Tomorrow I'll come down from a high I’ve never been on.
By Erin Rooney
Kansan staff writer
Film gives reason to express need for drugs
When I crash, I'll have to decide if I want to choose life.
And choosing life doesn't mean I'll be refusing death.
"People think it's all about misery and desperation and death and all that (expletive) which is not to be ignored, but what they forget is the pleasure of it. Otherwise we wouldn't do it," proclaims the character Mark Renton in the first scene.
Trainspotting is more than a movie that makes you think about your life. It stops you in your upper-middle class college-educated tracks and asks if you want to go over the edge.
The movie kills the innocent and lets the twisted make off with the pot of gold. It's filled with users injecting their passions, hallucinations and soliloquies from junkies trying to explain why they need their heroin highs.
But through all this intensity,
REVIEW
through the MTV-like camera angles and the thick Scottish accents, it never takes you over the line. It stops short, just like Pulp Fiction and The Basketball Diaries.
Leaving the theater I had no idea why the characters corrupted their lives. I couldn't understand their lusting for heroin. A wall was still standing between their needle-infested apartments and my house with its white picket fence.
And this contradicts everything I've heard and read about the film. It was supposed to be the first real breakthrough into the minds of addicts. Trainspotting was going to tell me why I would want to take a needle and thrust it into my arm. Well, it didn't.
It was like every 'just say no' to drugs movie I've ever seen but with a better plot and some male frontal nudity.
The reason it didn't cross the line is because it's impossible to do so. A movie can't tell me what
it feels like to be high. It can't tell me what it's like to care about nothing in life but to get my hands on the heroin that will help me survive until my next dose.
Having conversations with users can't bring you closer to understanding either.
I have freaked out over a friend coming off of a day on acid. I didn't realize he could sleep so soundly that he couldn't hear the phone ringing, the doorbell clanging or the car alarm whining outside the window.
More importantly, I didn't realize he didn't care if he woke up the next morning or not.
He was not suicidal. He is just like all the characters in the movie. He is not alive, and he isn't seeking out death. He just wants more drugs to keep him high, to keep him further from reality.
I's stuck in a reality that has not laid out its arm to experience the ultimate high, and Trainspotting didn't make me want to.
Greed drives reunions of'70s rock bands
Rv Jeff Ruhv
By Jeff Ruby
Kansan staff writer
I can't decide who I despise more: ballplayers making $15 million a year or dilapidated "70s rockers returning to packed arenas and huge bank accounts.
At least Shaquille O'Neal scores 23 points a game. But Gene Simmons is 15 years past his fire-breathing, blood-spitting, tongue-waving prime. Watching him and his Kiss cronies strut around on stage in their platform shoes singing Lick It Up is like listening to your grandfather tell a dirty joke, pelvic thrusts and all.
Was Kiss this big the first time around? Maybe I was too young to rock 'n' roll all night and party every day back in the band's heyday, but now I'm just too old to wear leather unless it'd below my ardes.
OPINION
I missed the boat both times. But this time I'm watching from the shore, glad I'm not on board.
Thousands of rock-crazed kids and Volvo-driving yuppies with Led Zeppelin bumper stickers lately have been filling stadiums for bands reuniting to play songs that lost meaning years ago. How many times can we hear More Than a Feeling when we lost that feeling in 1979?
The list of bands cashing in is impressive. To name a few of the geezers, we've been exposed to Jethro Tull, Styx (with Kansas opening, of course) The Eagles ("What do you mean, $125 to hear Hotel California?"), the Steve Miller Band, Peter Frampton and Steele Dan.
The most offensive of all reunions,
however, has to be the Sex Pistols. Lead singer Johnny Rotten admits his band mates detest one another, but they just couldn't pass up a chance at so much money.
And kids who grew up listening to their older brothers' worn Pistols records aren't missing the opportunity to see the legends live. It's quite a racket; but at least the band is forthright about its motives. They are aware that they have nothing more to offer us that they have nostalgia.
I'm not saying these bands have no right to continue performing. My disgust for them is misplaced. It's our fault, every one of us. As long as we are willing to pay big bucks to stare down at Foreigner's balding heads from our seats in the bleachers, why shouldn't they make money off us?
I'm simply scolding us all for allowing them to do so.
The honor of the flag
leitendant Colonel Don Denmark (left), presents the colors to incoming Jayhawk Battalion commander Peter M. Sittenauer,
Edmée Rodriguez / KANSAN
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