Twenty-one years ago, Ewan McGregor, albeit briefly, tapped into prevailing anxieties over the spiritual bankruptcy of western consumerist society. “Choose life,” began his monologue as smackhead Mark Renton in Danny Boyle’s film adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s novel Trainspotting. “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 fixed-interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home …”
Can Ewan do it again? Can he speak to 2017’s zeitgeist as he did in 1996? In the sequel, T2 Trainspotting, Renton, sexy druggie nihilist turned 46-year-old failed accountant with heart problems, updates the iconic speech from the original film over dinner with an underwritten Bulgarian sex worker-cum-ex-communist-bloc-femme-fatale called Veronika. The must-have consumer goods of 1996 – CD players, electric can openers and starter homes – have gone, replaced by a scattergun assault on dismal features of millennial life, especially social media. “Choose Facebook,” says middle-aged Renton, “Twitter, Instagram and hope that someone, somewhere cares … Choose reality TV, slut shaming, revenge porn. Choose a zero-hours contract, a two-hour journey to work. And choose the same for your kids, only worse, and smother the pain with an unknown dose of an unknown drug made in somebody’s kitchen …”
It is Veronika I feel sorry for, having to listen to this middle-aged blether from a privileged white western-European man. If only scriptwriter John Hodge had had Veronika roll her eyes and say, in her fluent Scots demotic: “Och stop whining, y’auld radge.”
Back in 1996, though, Renton’s rant struck a chord. If you were a student between the mid-90s and now, the safe money says you or at least one of your peers had the poster with this speech printed on it on your wall and can quote the rest of the monologue more accurately than anything you were supposed to be studying.
Leisure wear. Matching luggage. DIY. Three-piece suites bought on HP. Gameshows. Junk food. On and on went Renton’s monologue, snarlingly excoriating ostensibly must-have consumer goods and pre-millennial lifestyle options (were electric can openers really must-have in 1996? It seems unlikely).
The monologue, as Renton explains to Veronika in T2, riffed on a “well-meaning slogan from the 80s” from an anti-drugs campaign. It was more than that. “Choose life”, in those days, was a sunny post-punk comeback to Johnny Rotten’s “no future” philosophy, a reactionary switcheroo typified by Wham! on Top of the Pops in 1983. There, the late lamented George Michael, and Andrew Ridgeley, mimed Wake Me Up Before You Go Go wearing Katharine Hamnett’s oversized T-shirts emblazoned with the “Choose Life” slogan. Renton’s rant belatedly turned that upbeat Wham! into a splat! of Schopenhauerian pessimism about the nature of human existence, bedevilled as it was by the curse of fatuous and insatiable human desire for inherently degrading stuff. It was also a speech, in case you didn’t get it, that indicted the lie-dream of capitalism; the idea that knuckling down in straight society delivered contentment rather than economic exploitation and spiritual ruin.
Renton’s speech came at the fag end of nearly two decades of Tory rule, at a time when Guardian cartoonist Steve Bell imagined our prime minister as a grey man who wore Y-fronts over his suit trousers. Conformist society, as personified by that Major embarrassment, was ripe for the takedown. And Renton’s monologue delivered it.
What is more, Renton’s rant chimed with another monologue delivered three years later by Edward Norton in Fight Club, David Fincher’s adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk’s novel. There our hero explains how realising the gimcrack nature of Ikea-like consumerism led him to choose another more spiritually enlivening lifestyle path, namely getting beaten crapless by strangers suffering the same white-collar existential malaise.
“You buy furniture,” recalled Norton’s nameless character in voicoever. “You tell yourself, this is the last sofa I will ever need in my life. Buy the sofa, then for a couple years you’re satisfied that no matter what goes wrong, at least you’ve got your sofa issue handled. Then the right set of dishes. Then the perfect bed. The drapes. The rug. Then you’re trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you.” And then the dismal kicker, psychosexually speaking: “And I wasn’t the only slave to my nesting instinct. The people I know who used to sit in the bathroom with pornography, now they sit in the bathroom with their Ikea furniture catalogue.”
What both Welsh and Palahniuk were addressing as the last millennium hobbled towards its end was not just consumerism’s existential void, but a crisis in masculinity, wherein men bridled at the domesticated half-lives they were leading and dreamed of a wild transvaluation of prevailing values. (Whether women were similarly bridling wasn’t considered in Fight Club or Trainspotting. Not really.)
Palahniuk’s hero chose the spiritually refreshing path of violence to wake up from his dogmatic Ikea slumbers, while Welsh’s Renton opted instead for the even more demanding path of drug addiction to escape the prevailing ideology of (non-) choice whose remit has extended further over our lives since McGregor spoke. “I chose not to choose life,” says Renton at the end of his monologue. “I chose something else. And the reasons? There are no reasons. Who needs reasons when you’ve got heroin?”
What made Renton’s rant so profound to my mind, though, was not the checklist of dismal commodities so much as its unreasonable, unreasoned Lear-like howl against the way of the world. Why choose heroin? Oh, reason not the need! But the need was clear – to step off what Schopenhauer called the wheel of Ixion on which us humans are trapped, with one desire leading to another in a degrading, neurotic repetition, and each human generation of desiring machines doomed to repeat that unfulfillable quest for happiness. That is why the line in the monologue about the fate that awaits us when we have finished with our CD players (or, more accurately, when they’ve finished with us) is so heartbreaking: “Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pishing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked-up brats you have spawned to replace yourself.” Its implicit suggestion was that your selfish brats were doomed to repeat your biography, that humanity could never get off the burning wheel of Ixion. It was Freud who posited the Nirvana principle as an innate psychic drive or death instinct that aims to end life’s inevitable tension. It was Renton who suggested that heroin may help end that tension. Or, as Cabaret Voltaire put it in a single, Why Kill Time (When You Can Kill Yourself).
Intolerably, in the interim, Welsh’s nihilist critique was co-opted by the plutocracy. In 2014, George Osborne riffed on Renton’s rant in a speech announcing £3bn of welfare cuts. “Choose jobs. Choose enterprise. Choose security,” the then chancellor of the exchequer’s address went. “Choose prosperity. Choose investment. Choose fairness. Choose freedom. Choose David Cameron. Choose the Conservatives. Choose the future.”
Irvine Welsh was not best pleased. “Would rather have Fred and Rose West quote my characters on childcare than that cunt Osborne quote them on choice,” he tweeted. Fair point, though that is the risk of writing quotable material: it can always get repurposed by your enemies.
Three years on, the Trainspotting sequel offers a chance to riff on Renton’s original speech like Osborne’s speechwriter. The problem, for many young critics, though, is that the resulting speech in T2 feels like an opportunistic checklist – a boomer bleat about those spirit-crushed millennials choosing dog face Snapchat filters, Bitcoin economics and hashtag ideologies. “It feels pretty gloomy to reduce the things young people care about to, primarily at least, just social media. Oh, and zero-hour contracts. And shit coke. Hobbies, jobs and drugs which are somehow worse now than they were in the 90s,” complains Róisín Lanigan in the Tab.
There is nothing more eye-rollingly risible than a middle-aged white bloke whining about the way the world is going, especially when he is whining before an east European sex worker facing slightly more pressing problems of sexual commodification, economic migration, not to mention the sickening shortage of plausibly written film roles for Bulgarian women in today’s cinema.
Renton’s rant 2.0 is hardly as bracing as the original version. Welsh could have done so many things with it. He could have retooled the speech to bring us up to speed with the past 21 years of British politics. Here’s how it could have gone. “Choose Blair. Choose things can only get better. Choose Blair again in 2005, even though he led us into a witless war in Iraq by means of which things could only get worse. Choose an Etonian plutocrat who wants to be called Dave because he wants you to believe he’s just like you. Choose masochistic austerity punishment for financial crimes you didn’t commit. Choose free schools that close in six months. Choose a party that promises you the choice of hospitals, though you don’t want choice, just nearby public health services not decimated by government cuts. Choose a Brexit so hard you could land Concorde on it. Choose ignoring refugees, demonising Muslims and hating foreigners. Choose Nicola Sturgeon as nationalist deliverer from Westminster evil. Now why would I want to do a thing like that?”
But Renton’s rant 2.0 is too slender a thing to bear the weight of this critical opprobrium. The film in which it appears is hardly a zeitgeist movie but rather a character-led drama about four middle-aged numpties in Edinburgh reuniting to reminisce about fitba, skag and Edinburgh before there were trams on Princes Street and Sturgeon in Holyrood. “Why don’t you get naked and fuck each other?” inquires Veronika understandably when Renton and Jonny Lee Miller’s Sick Boy get too lubriciously mired in nostalgia for Hibernian FC’s 1979-80 season. Trainspotting is too lost in its past to speak eloquently to our present.
In any case, the reboot of the iconic speech itself is a self-ironising, inward-looking thing, touching most distinctively not on what bothers us today, but on middle-aged regret of a life lived inadequately (hence: “Choose looking up old flames, wishing you’d done it all differently”). Strikingly, too, it backtracks on the original speech’s rejection of straight society in favour of the tempting course of oblivion offered by illicit pharmaceuticals. “You’re an addict, so be addicted, just be addicted to something else,” Renton tells himself during this new speech. That line chimes with something Renton tells Spud (Ewen Bremner) earlier in the film after getting his old junkie mate to jog wheezingly to savour the view of the Scottish capital from Arthur’s Seat: what addicts need to do, counsels middle-aged Renton as Spud hyperventilates, is to channel their addiction into something healthy. Jogging. Boxing. Just possibly, Renton 2.0 is – totally unacceptably – choosing life, opting for straight society’s sensible addictions. His younger self, you would hope, would be appalled.
To be fair, the checklist of 2017’s social media delusions in Renton’s new speech is premised on them beguiling us as much as the old snares of starter homes and furniture on HP. We still live in a society of consumerist delusion in which technological innovations numb us to the exploitative nature of capitalism and the disappointing reality of modern living. The speech also evokes the same nightmarish circle of life that Renton indicted in 1996: “Choose the same for your kids only worse.” The means of our domination have been upgraded in the past 21 years, but the nature of it remains the same. Western consumerist society is still as spiritually bankrupt as it was, but today we can choose Facebook Live to delude ourselves it isn’t. Such at least is the tenor of Renton’s new rant.
But really, if you want Ewan McGregor speaking urgently to how we’re living 2017, forget T2 and check his Twitter feed. It was there that McGregor revealed this week he would not appear on Good Morning Britain with Piers Morgan because the latter had attacked “rabid feminists” on last weekend’s global anti-Trump marches. Good for Ewan: Choose Hollywood. Choose Moulin Rouge. Choose a career path in an ailing sci-fi franchise. Choose belated redemption by sticking it to journalism’s oleaginous disgrace.
But there is a twist. If Renton’s speech in T2 doesn’t speak especially pressingly to us today, other versions of his words can do that job. His speech, thanks to the very social media middle-aged Renton excoriates, has become a meme. “Choose Trump,” tweets Andrew R. “Choose fascism. Choose lies. Choose trampling on women’s rights, choose deporting immigrants, choose building walls, empowering racists, accepting Klan endorsements, fucking Stephen Bannon in the Oval.”
Renton’s rant is proving endlessly repurposable. Earlier this week, for instance, John Humphrys used it as a cod BBC indent: “Choose life,” said the Today presenter. “Choose Radio 4.” Say what you want about Radio 3, but Sara Mohr-Pietsch would not stoop that low.
Other retools, no doubt, will follow. Here is one now. “Choose making a sequel to a 21-year-old movie. Choose to ignore the warning signs from other catastrophic examples of the reboot sub-genre (think: This Life 10 years on or The X Files’s revived for a 10th series after a 13-year-hiatus in 2015, not to mention Godfather III). Choose a script that is 50% about middle-aged disillusionment and 50% dramatising one-last-necessarily-doomed-stab at reviving the glory days, like Simon Pegg’s The World’s End but with fewer laughs.”
“But why,” Renton said in 1996, “would I want to do a thing like that?” Search me, pal. But, 21 years later, you did.
