Neoliberal-Spotting: Reading the Socioeconomic Symptoms of Trainspotting (1996) and T2: Trainspotting (2017)

A Convulsive Doctrine

In a leading scholar’s characterization, neoliberalism pivots on “liberating individual entrepreneurial freedom within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets and free trade” (Harvey, 2005, p. 3). Neoliberal doctrine contends that market mechanisms must be unencumbered by putatively market-distorting entities, such as State-backed industrial planning and regulations as well as labor union power. Neoliberal doctrine insists that even activity characterized by economies of scale and long delivered by universal government service—education, water, postal service, social security—demand the ostensible rigor of markets seeking quasi-mystical, exquisitely-measured equilibria (Friedman & Friedman, 1980).

The complete neoliberal program is a tall order to achieve due to its devastating impact on subject populations (Polanyi, 1944/2001). A society can nonetheless take significant steps in the direction of fuller market empowerment. Since its implementation, the neoliberal program has been broadly associated with de-taxation and intensified concentration of wealth in a “restoration of class power” to traditional specifications (Harvey, 2005, p. 16). Neoliberalism’s intensification of class striation has implicated stagnating wages for laboring classes despite concurrent increases in productivity. Further concomitants of neoliberalism: spiking debt (personal, State, corporate), economic crises that are severe and frequent as compared with the Keynesian decades immediately following World War II, while the countervailing power of unionization has been rolled back (Harvey, 1990). Political philosopher Nancy Fraser describes the resultant situation as “a lethal combination of austerity, free trade, predatory debt, and ill-paid work,” steered by corporate interests that largely hover above political accountability when the State is captive to neoliberalism (Fraser, 2017, para. 1).

Thatcher’s original neoliberal program was stepped-up dramatically after 2010 by the austerity fundamentalism of the Conservative administrations of David Cameron (2010–2016) and Theresa May (2016–2019). Observing the wreckage, United Nations Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights Philip Alston (2018) reports that while the United Kingdom is the world’s fifth largest economy “one fifth of its population, 14 million people, live in poverty” (p. 1) Moreover, 1.5 million Brits “are destitute, unable to afford basic essentials” (p. 1). Child poverty will soon trap one in three British children alongside spikes in reliance on food banks and homelessness. In the neoliberal U.K., life expectancy is falling in some demographics, while the scythe has come down on police services, libraries, community and youth centers, and legal aid. In its chilling response to the consequences of gutted safety-net services, the government has responded not by reversing course, but by appointing a “Minister for suicide prevention” (p. 1). In Alston’s view, “the driving force” behind harsh austerity “has not been economic” but an ideologically-motivated “commitment to achieving radical social re-engineering” (p. 2). Scotland has been less beholden to market sadism that makes goods and services artificially scarce (pp. 20–21). Nonetheless, Scotland has necessarily been caught in neoliberal undertows that condition its representation in the two films under discussion.

Trainspotting and Neoliberal Subjectivity

The real-life concomitants of Mark Renton and his Trainspotting mates “Sickboy,” “Spud,” Francis Begbie, and Tommy would have experienced some difficulty remembering life before Thatcher’s (1979–1990) neoliberal premiership. After 18 years in opposition, Blairite New Labour engaged in some willful amnesia about its own socialist-inflected past and adopted many neoliberal premises upon assuming power in 1997. By the moment of Trainspotting’s release in 1996, support for the Conservative Party had “entirely collapsed” in Scotland (Smith, 2002, p. 9)—yet neoliberalism had become embedded as a symptomatic reading of the film suggests.

Murray Smith interprets Trainspotting’s protagonist Renton as voicing “corrosive appraisal of the goals, cherished objects, and implicit values of ordinary consumer society” that is championed by neoliberalism (Smith, 2002, p. 44). At the same time, Renton and his ensemble of mates display “self-interest, greed” and pursuit of “short term gain [. .] that constitute a revealing mirror image of the political and economic” program of Thatcherite neoliberalism (p. 48). In this view, subjects may accommodate to, and simultaneously resent, the doctrines that regularly oppress them; a pervasive contradiction when capitalism generates a subject population’s dependence for day-to-day sustenance, even as it exploits them.

I posit that Trainspotting’s construction of Renton and his cohorts presents both a product and a further reproduction of a neoliberal subjectivity. As concerns reproduction of neoliberalism, the Trainspotting ensembles’ activities are structured around maniacal consumption of drugs. The continuity between drug use and other forms of conspicuous consumption arise in one of the first shots of the film: Renton stops in mid-escape from the police to ogle an impressive commodity (a fancy car), entrancement that leads to his arrest.

While Renton and his mates are gripped by desires for consumption, the film largely elides the characters’ hints of class consciousness. In contrast with British “kitchen sink” cinema protagonists’ keen awareness of class striation, the Trainspotting ensemble is largely agnostic to class consciousness as a consciousness. Renton and mates act as if their market-driven ecosystem is simply a fixed feature of the world. Vestiges of class consciousness arise more indirectly. In Trainspotting’s staging of Renton’s thunderstruck response to first seeing Diane, the wise-beyond-her-years teen radiates the socioeconomic class distinction already deeply inscribed onto her. Diane’s precocious confidence is expressed in her mode of dress (at once sexual and redolent of sophisticated standing), in handling foppish men at the club, and in verbally castrating older male Renton before bedding him (during which she also rides on top). Diane mesmerizes Renton as far beyond the limited horizons of his lumpen circumstances. For her part, Diane exudes similar attraction to Renton as an authentic subject from far outside the perimeter of her class habitus. Diane’s fascination is evident in singing New Order’s “Temptation” in the shower the morning after she meets him, a musical motif reprised in Renton’s later hallucination of her. The “I’ve never met anyone/quite like you before” lyric flags Renton’s class-based difference within her frame of reference. In Trainspotting, Britain’s “kitchen sink” cinema of class consciousness is recast as lust towards the class-marked “exotic.”

“Free to Choose”

In Renton’s famous opening rant in Trainspotting, he sardonically narrates successful modern life as the consumerist mission to “[. .] Choose a fucking big television, choose washing machines, cars [. .],” among other mass-customized ephemera. Renton’s monologue is built around the motif of choosing (he uses the word 18 times) and chimes with neoliberal tenants. Indeed, Milton Friedman’s popularly-pitched primer at the advent of the neoliberal era is entitled Free to Choose (Friedman & Friedman, 1980). In Friedman’s aggrandizing account of neoliberalism, the implications of selling of one’s labor in generally unfavorable circumstances is suppressed in favor of the ostensibly liberationist majesty of selecting commodities (on the assumption of sufficient disposable income to do so)!

Renton’s soliloquy at the end of Trainspotting echoes the film’s opening—albeit, with added cynicism in having “made it,” with a rucksack of stolen money slung over his shoulder. Cascades of consumption are imminent in Renton’s rap:

I’m gonna’ be just like you. [. .] The washing machine, the car, the compact disc and electric tin opener, good health, low cholesterol, dental insurance, mortgage, starter home, leisure wear, luggage, three piece suite, DIY, game shows, junk food, children, walks in the park, nine to five, good at golf, washing the car, choice of sweaters, family Christmas, indexed pension, tax exemption [. .]

Über Market Individualism

In “core” economies, neoliberalism has revolved around consumption of products rather than production of durable commodities. By the 1990s, the relative shift to a service economy—from high-end services such as law practice to the low-wage domains of food and retail—was well underway in Britain (Harvey, 1990). Unionized industrial production was partly relocated to low-wage offshore export platforms. Trainspotting channels the shift away from the unionized and industrial base of the economy that had formerly enabled a decent life for manual laborers. Under a neoliberal regime, bonds between workers and class consciousness are also far weaker. Solidarity within work places is undermined when more employees are contingent, subcontracted and/or “disposable.” Competitive individualism gains further impetus in an economic environment in which the necessities of a decent life are commodified and made scarce. As philosopher Jason Stanley (2018) argues, de-unionization is organic to far-right ideology for atomizing workers and inciting them to look toward a maximum leader to sort out the neoliberal jungle, rather than looking toward each other (pp. 170–176).

Renton’s closing speech largely aligns with unapologetic survivalist capitalism:

[. .] we’d outgrown each other, you know, that sort of thing. But let’s face it, I ripped them off—my so called mates. But Begbie, I couldn’t give a shit about him. And Sick Boy, well he'd done the same to me, if he’d only thought of it first.

Renton and his mates may not appear to be ideal subjects of the neoliberal order as their activities are almost wholly outside of the licit economy. However, as concerns consumption, they are indeed über market subjects as they operate outside of regulation; a purer free-market condition to Friedmanian specifications than prevails in the official economy. Moreover, the illicit, “black market” economy exhibits fundamental parallels with the formal economy—albeit, in rawer form. When Renton and cohorts buy the heroin that fell into Mikey Forester’s hands, they pay 4,000 pounds for the effectively stolen illicit goods. In turn, they assume risk for Mikey and sell the bags of heroin onto a professional racket in London for 16,000 pounds. In the next moment in the daisy-chain of transactions, the London pushers’ bureaucratic apparatus will manage street-corner distribution and generate massive profits as the drugs are sold onto their eventual consumers. It presents a standard career for a commodity, with “value added” and profit skimmed in each moment in the opaque chain of transactions.

Mother Superior is a smalltime Edinburgh pusher, but his heroin den also has (some) trappings of the licit economy: his ultraviolet machine ascertains that legal tender is paid for his drug wares. At the same time, fakeness and alienation in market relations are endemic. As a commodity passes through many hands en route to its consumer, ambiguities arise about the composition of the commodity, where it is from, and under what conditions it was produced. Mystification of commodities is evident in situations that range from the murky supply chains implicated in the U.K.’s 2013 horsemeat scandal (The Good Idea Channel, 2013) to the opaque financial products at the heart of the 2008 financial collapse. So it is in Trainspotting when Begbie violates market norms by stealing jewelry. Begbie uses a fake gun for his “armed robbery”—for a commodity that, in turn, he discovers to be a faked version of authentic jewelry. Mystification reigns in the hall of mirrors of the deregulated, neoliberal market milieu, in Trainspotting and beyond!

Despite their enthusiasm for commodities and consumption, for Renton and colleagues, “work is simply anathema,” as flagged by Spud’s sabotage of his job interview (Smith, 2002, p. 28). On this score, neoliberals like Friedman may believe their own ideologizing that diagnoses a society-wide “need” for the “spur” of market discipline; and subjects of neoliberalism may have had no voice in the top-down decision to empower the market more fully. However, in drifting outside the formal economy, Renton, et al., at least find ways to selectively take up parts of the neoliberal program they want (consumption) over the ones they do not (menial paid labor).

“All that is Solid [. .]”

The youngest, but most worldly character in Trainspotting has her finger on the pulse of what is happening under the auspices of an unbridled market order. Diane counsels Renton as follows:

The world’s changing. Music’s changing. Even drugs are changing. You can’t stay in here all day-dreaming about heroin and Ziggy [sic] Pop.

Spurred on by teenage sage Diane, Renton moves to London in the last third of Trainspotting and encounters the market on different terms than in Edinburgh. He dons a tie as a housing agent and simultaneously rents his own London domicile. “For the first time in my adult life, I was almost content,” Renton confides in voice-over; subjectivity centered within legitimate market practices that is interrupted when Begbie and then Sickboy squat in Renton’s dwelling. Renton’s turn toward a subjectivity within the licit economy leads him to rhapsodize about the market’s mystifying mediations between people, and between people and things: “I quite enjoyed the sound of it all. Profit, loss, margins, takeovers, lending, letting, subletting, subdividing, cheating, scamming, fragmenting, breaking away.” Within these alienating, nontransparent chains of transactions, Renton avers in direct homage to Thatcherite tropology that, “There was no such thing as society” (emphasis added). He concludes in an atomized neoliberal register that, “even if there was” a wider society, “I most certainly had nothing to do with it.” Renton thereby embraces hyper-individualism and the market’s corrosive impact on social solidarity and the general .interest.

Renton’s and Diane’s observations prove prophetic toward the further transformed world that Renton finds in his return to Edinburgh 20 years later for T2. Before turning to that discussion, I will analyze the relation between Trainspotting’s style and its sociopolitical contradictions. Trainspotting’s hyperkinetic stylistics can be read as evoking the roller-coaster of neoliberalism’s stomach-churning and destructive dynamics. In any event, the film’s stylistic signature has attracted attention in the form of both polemic and analysis.

Sorting Out Style: Political Implications

Along with praise and acclaim for Trainspotting, it has also attracted derisive polemic. Carl Neville (2011) characterizes Trainspotting as uncomplicated in its saturation with neoliberalism, among other faults that he finds with the film (notably, middle class pretensions of class mobility and crypto-Americanism). Neville focuses his attack on Trainspotting’s stylistic signature that he characterizes as “stupidly” betraying an “inability to provide anything other than a glossy rush” (p. 15), style that has been “co-opted from MTV” (p. 16). By contrast, Neville demands “stridently politicized, thoroughly traditional realism” (p. 15)—although he elaborates neither of these terms, as if they are self-evident. Neville posits that the “non-realism” he identifies with Trainspotting as “thoroughly in the service of the dominant ideology” (p. 15). In Neville’s reading, the alpha and omega of Trainspotting is to summon one-note celebration of neoliberalism; and toward this conclusion, he expressly dismisses plot turns that would complicate his interpretation (pp. 16–17). In far less polemical and more scholarly frames of reference, Paul Dave (2006, pp. 83–99) converges with Neville’s perception of an implicit middle-class gaze upon poverty as animating Trainspotting and its style.

However, style comes with no guarantees of aligning “organically” with a political program. Consider Sergei Eisenstein’s devoutly communist practice of “dialectical montage,” in which shots jarringly clashed with each other, like antagonistic socioeconomic classes. The dynamism of dialectical montage has since been readily conscripted to, for example, the aesthetics and capitalist practices of commercials. Moreover, as Robert Stam (2000) argues, the shape-shifting term “realism” in itself implicates contested, culturally and historically contingent sets of representational and decoding practices. In this view, reality is real, representational “realism” by definition is not. Black-and-white cinematography (or long takes, or wide angles lenses) may connote realism. However, we do not see in black-and-white but, rather, read it off the screen as a cypher for “gritty” “realism.” Neville’s characterizations of Trainspotting demands a particular style of realism—a style that he simultaneously does not recognize as a style but instead implies to be indexical to reality.

By contrast with Neville’s tout court dismissal of Trainspotting as an infomercial for the neoliberal subject, Murray Smith (2002) praises Trainspotting’s “stylistic panache” as “intellectually complex” (p. 86) in representing the contradictions engendered by drug- and hormone-addled youthful excess. He claims that, “Trainspotting struck a chord with a large audience in addressing big issues with a deceptively light touch” (p. 87). Smith adopts the term “black magic realism” to account for the film’s dialectical tensions between staging the neoliberal wasteland, on one hand; and, on the other, capturing still youthful subjects of neoliberalism as they navigate through this wasteland.

In Smith’s (2002) appraisal, Trainspotting captures the material concomitants of the neoliberalism in its mise-en-scene “of domestic squalor, cramped tenements, ruined council estates, [and] industrial wastelands” (p. 32). Smith argues that the film’s complex stylistic ensemble of narrative, editing and music generate “propulsive forward momentum” (p. 52) as it conjures the “grotesque and comic absurdity” in which neoliberal subjects must live (p. 76). In this view, Trainspotting’s investment in style “is not a betrayal of reality, but an insistence that destitution need not stifle all imagination and will, mirroring the youthful defiance of the central characters” (p. 33). It is this insistence that may differentiate Smith’s version of left-inflected class analysis from more traditional postures assumed by Dave and Neville. Indeed, if imagination and will are crushed and even symbolic pushback against the market (in film and beyond) is deemed to be futile, the class war has already been won—by the one-percenter elite.

Swinging Dildos, Un-Swinging Men: Gender in T2

The original Trainspotting dwells on its male ensemble with particular focus on Renton. Diane presents the central female figure in the earlier film, enveloped within commanding class standing even as she is largely a spectral presence. Similarly, Lizzy’s significance in Trainspotting mainly pivots on her absence that triggers Tommy’s spiral into addiction and death. By contrast, in T2, Bulgarian immigrant Veronika is a more visible on-screen presence as she enacts a version of the femme fatale. Moreover, the construction of gender in T2 can be interpreted as conditioned by an intensified market milieu, as will be discussed below.

While both Trainspotting and T2 present various forms of destructive male behavior, in the latter film it is textured by the male ensemble’s experience of middle-aged defeat. A signature element of this defeat is the extent to which none of the four central males (Renton, Sickboy, Spud and Begbie) have successfully enacted fatherhood, even if they have procreated. On this score, Renton simply lies and claims to have two children. In T2, Renton also engages with male-coded voyeurism. He surveils Diane at work in her glass and concrete law office, watching literally from below as her precocious upper-class trajectory exhibits its material destiny in middle-age. Sickboy is a similarly failed patriarch as he bitterly admits seeing his child in London once every ten years. In the gendered realm, Sickboy also undertakes construction of a brothel as a means of “keeping” what is not his—to wit, Veronika with the promise of appointing her as brothel madam—even as it is made humiliatingly apparent that the established sex-work mogul Doyle will not tolerate competition (an allusion to capitalist monopolism that neoliberalism tends to promote in practice).

As for Spud, he is so dispirited by his failures as a wage-earner, father and companion to Gail that he attempts suicide. In the film’s closing, he gains a measure of redemption when Gail reads his stories—derived from his nostalgic retellings of the past, the only “commodity” he has to “sell.” At the same time, it is not evident that Spud has achieved any beachheads toward relating to his son Fergus. Finally, Begbie has “lost” his tie-clad and university-enrolled son to the market’s imperatives. Francis, Junior studies hotel management, a calling aligned with the tourism industry and its place within neoliberal globalization.

The middle-aged men ache to be centered within traditional masculinity, but they have failed to enact its “breadwinner” and familial-hierarchal trappings. The film further betrays shadings of traditionalist sentimental yearning about androgenic lineages in the closing sequence. Begbie reconciles with his son after being reminded of his own pain around an absent father—in a scene that is striking for his lack of interaction with Francis, Junior’s mother who sits on the couch as if part of the furniture. Renton’s closing sequence centers on reuniting with his father in the family home for what augers as a long-term stay, with no women to dilute androgenic bonding as the mother/wife has passed away. Market failure collapses into the inability to enact traditional male authority in T2 with, as noted, shadings of compensatory androgenic sentimentality in closing. Paradoxically, neoliberal’s market-driven convulsions may drive its subjects back into the safe harbor of attempts to reconstitute tradition that has been battered by market forces.

On the other side of the gendered situation, twenty-something Veronika demonstrates a degree of mastery while she negotiates a subaltern subjectivity. Veronika is an immigrant, evident each time she speaks in heavily accented English, and a sex-worker. Beyond being coded as “exotic,” Veronika’s formidable qualities are on display in the first shot of her. To wit, she dons a dildo that swings mightily before she delivers sodomy to a paying client (whom the parasitic/voyeuristic Sickboy is also covertly filming for blackmail purposes). From her bemused expression, Veronika obviously relishes Renton’s later viewing of her dominance over men in a laptop copy of her dildo-powered sodomy exploits. Renton’s earlier, furtive voyeurism toward Diane lawyering at work may be read as an effort to enact male power as author of a gaze. By contrast, Veronika’s “Voyeurism 2.0” in real time on Renton’s voyeurism of her sex tape cancels even the pretense of him having power over her. ¹

Veronika is constructed as not simply strapping on a dildo. She is “phallically sufficient” in efficaciously finding her path through the neoliberal world. In Shohini Chaudhuri’s (2006) account, phallic sufficiency refers to the dominant cultural fiction that has traditionally collapsed possession of a penis (i.e., being biologically male) into possessing an essence of efficacy, the capacity to lead and enact authority in the family—and, by implied extension, in the community and larger nation. The construction of Veronika in the film retools the dominant fiction of presumptive male phallic sufficiency. Despite the absence of a literal penis, Veronika is the most phallically sufficient character in T2—far more so than the males who are failures in the spheres of family as well as within the neoliberal ecosystem.

Veronika is coded as a constantly shape-shifting, mysterious personage. However “exotic” her Balkan origins and sex-work tasks may be, Veronika simultaneously presents as a level-headed young woman assaying to get ahead. Her practicality is evident in her initially unexplained comment to Renton following coitus. She alludes to attachments at home in Bulgaria to which she hopes to return—but cannot do so without some palpable advancement in qualifications or wealth. Veronika’s comments foreshadow and motivate her later femme fatale turn. Indeed, Veronika’s aspirations and the hold she has over men drive a great deal of the narrative. As Sickboy suspects, Veronika is probably the reason that Renton remains in Scotland, and her seductive hold over Spud sets up the film’s keynote betrayal.

In later double-crossing Renton and Sickboy, Veronika absconds to Bulgaria with the 100,000 British pound grant of European Union funds. Upon arriving in Bulgaria, it is evident that Veronika is at once the mysterious, perilous femme fatale—and, the audience learns, she is circumscribed by being a single mother who has been assaying to provide for her family in a low-wage corner of Europe. The construction of Veronika in the film oscillates between a plausible backstory for an immigrant sex-worker—and a construction of her that is laden with male anxiety as the foreign sex-work woman who is dominating and exploiting not only particular men, but the E.U.’s phallocratic bureaucracy as well!

In other words, Veronika may be interpreted as the femme fatale for her allure and ambition; and at the same time, she is also the dutiful woman who presents a foil to the femme fatale (Place, 1978), a sacrificial single-mother, a femme attrape constrained by circumstances and making the best of them (Wager, 2005). As Veronika oscillates between seemingly contradictory tropes of femininity—phallically sufficient, practical, femme fatale, femme attrape—the cinematic construction of her enacts the trope of the woman as mystery with depths that are finally ineffable and mind-bending.

Stepped-Up Market Mania

In reflecting on Trainspotting in 2003, producer Andrew Macdonald observes that the film was significant in presenting Scotland’s face to the world in the 1990s (Trainspotting El Montaje Definitivo, 2003). However, in a short slice of time, Scotland and the world of which it is a part exhibited profound changes. Globalization’s convulsions and lurches forward are by no means new (Brook, 2008), notoriously difficult to pin down conceptually (Steger, 2009), and impact across a wide swath of human activity (Flew, 2007, pp. 66-68). However, in displaying symptoms of market-driven globalization and its concomitants, T2 complicates prevailing theories of globalism. More specifically, the film dethrones the cosmopolitan assumptions that Marko Ampuja (2012) has, in scorching terms, appraised as keynote premises of many (widely-circulating, class-agnostic) theorizations of globalization. In this view, T2 is alert to the broken promises of neoliberal prosperity and its collapse into a tawdry, class-divided and relentlessly commercialized version of globalization. In a bitter reprise of his “Choose Life” voice over from Trainspotting, Renton caustically flags the mystifications and exploitation of the globalization regime in these words: “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.”

Renton’s return to Edinburgh after 20 years in exile has the quality of encountering a world transformed. By contrast, globalization is an almost spectral entity in Trainspotting. The only non-Brit who speaks onscreen is a hapless U.S. tourist whose accent gives him away as a rube—and he is promptly mugged. By contrast, 20 years later, Renton encounters a greeter as the face of tourist-friendly, globalized Edinburgh as he alights from the international airport terminal. When Renton asks, the greeter at the portal of Scotland, she reluctantly reveals that she is Slovenian (in fluent English, of course)! Aside from the ephemeral greeter, T2 features a significant character from abroad in Veronika—a trace of globalization that was not conjured for Trainspotting’s 1980s-90s setting. Moreover, Veronika’s origins abroad are not an incidental detail, but drive her motivation to return home with something.

The transnational E.U. is constructed in T2 as open for business—and provides grant largesse for small businesses enterprises, as astute-about-money Veronika realizes (while the men do not). During Renton and Sickboy’s pitch to a tribunal to obtain funds, globalizations old and new are referenced. T2 again flags the signature globalization industry of tourism as Renton and Sickboy’s ostensible plan is to construct a bed-and-breakfast. Renton vows to inspire local children, presumably by attracting B&B clients from far and wide in a globalized milieu. Notwithstanding the uplifting visions of a cosmopolitan business to the grant tribunal, Renton and Sickboy are actually planning another kind of tourism-responsive enterprise: a brothel, with E.U. funds.

During their pitch, Renton and Sickboy tacitly acknowledge that globalization is not itself new, but that it is assuming new forms to which their business plan is attuned. They reference (verbally and with their visual aids) the area’s significance for shipping that long connected it with the world. However, what Sickboy dubs “Leith 2.1” will no longer be defined by ships and commodities that circulate in and out of port—but by flesh-and-blood tourists for more intimate and open-ended encounters within the variegated service economy. While their plan is actually attuned to sex and sex tourism, Renton and Sickboy are simultaneously appealing to a moment in which tourism (and its many subsidiary industries, such as transport, hotels and language courses) constitute a central venue for globalized encounters; and, in the world of the film, the plan is rewarded with transnational E.U. funds.

The market milieu is constructed as having intensified in both its licit and illicit forms in T2 as compared with Trainspotting. On the illicit side, Mikey Forrester’s drug-pushing from a lumpen apartment has, in 20 years, notably scaled up. In T2, he commands an Amazon.com-like warehouse that features apparently stolen automobiles and refrigerators. On the licit side of T2’s construction of the market, Francis Begbie, Junior is a university student who precociously dresses as a “professional” in a tie. Junior is an aspirant to participate in the globalized market via his study of hotel management—an adjunct to tourism and the globalized service industry. During his long absence in jail, the film implies that Begbie “lost” his son to the seductive fortunes of globalization that continuously wash over subjects within the neoliberal milieu.

Celluloid Contradictions

T2’s presents a chimerical construction of the stepped-up market regime of the neoliberal order. On one hand, Renton, Sickboy, Spud and Begbie are all phallically insufficient “losers” for having failed to efficaciously act on the cues of market discipline. Renton may have accommodated himself best to the system of market relations, but nonetheless returns to Scotland at a personal and professional dead end (divorced, soon to be down-sized). Sickboy’s parasitic pretensions of being a market player as a pimp and blackmailer predictably collapse by the end of T2 as he settles into his fate as bartender at his aunt’s pathetic pub. Spud is chronically unable to make it to work or to government service appointments on time, in T2’s critique of the sadistic, austerity-driven regime of “sanctions” to penalize benefits seekers (Standing, 2019). Begbie’s market endeavors consist of selling goods he has stolen to Mikey Forrester (from whom he also steals Viagra) before he is finally bundled back to prison. Unable to perform within the market framework, Begbie is effectively reduced to being a ward of a hard-nosed State. To one degree or another, the men all enact and internalize failure in the market milieu with its attendant low status.

While T2 presents the life-defining impact of “losing” in the market system, the film nevertheless pulls back from this implicit critique when it is cross-hatched with gender. To wit, Veronika is a sex-worker and thus positioned at the bottom of the service economy ladder. Nevertheless, she is constructed as having leverage over Sickboy in her threats to work in Doyle’s brothel: worker empowerment! In the end, Veronika outsmarts the system in which she is immersed. While T2 marshals shadings of realism around the men’s position in the neoliberal market system, the hints of realism are negated in favor of fairy tale logics in the final reel as concerns the attractive young woman of foreign origins who scores a nest egg of 100,000 British pounds.

T2 may imply that women’s “skill sets” are better aligned with service-intensive environment of the neo-liberal order. The implication reads as being as bogus as the trope that women are more verbal and relational than men—and thus better suited for “caring,” lower-prestige sectors of service work (Cameron, 2007). Alongside women’s merit-based advancements in recent decades, wage inequalities stubbornly persist in rebuke to claims, tacit or otherwise, that neoliberalism has served women well; independent analysis by Financial Times journalists shows the U.K.’s gendered pay differentials “persist in all 20 sectors of the economy, with none paying women more than men on average” (Wisniewska et al., 2019, para. 7). In any event, when examined through a gendered perspective, T2 presents a significant if partial retreat from its critique of class in the neoliberal order in implying it to be woman-friendly.

Symptoms of Brexit

While the word is never uttered in T2, one scene reads as comment on the U.K.’s Brexit agonies that followed the June 2016 referendum, less than a year before the film’s release. In particular, Renton and Sickboy scheme to steal the credit cards of a hardline Scottish unionist group. They assume (astutely) that the unionist card holders would use the PIN number “1690” in homage to William of Orange’s triumph over Catholic forces in the Battle of the Boyne in that year. The scene stands out from the rest of the film for Renton’s didactic voice-over narration, a device that the rest of T2 eschews. Renton refers to the 1690 group as hailing people “abandoned by the political class” who “feel estranged from modern, secular United Kingdom”; in turn, they are inspired by a “simpler, less tolerant time.” Given that shameless xenophobia was a pillar of pro-Brexit discourse, the scene presents as commentary on the referendum. Moreover, the four-minute sequence is not narratively vital, suggesting that it was included for purposes other than advancing a causal plot.

The filmmakers’ construction of the scene sardonically parodies the ease with which populist appeals can be mobilized. After Renton and Sickboy are dragooned into singing, Renton awkwardly improvises the lyric that there were “no Catholics left” following the Battle of the Boyne—and the unionist audience roars approval. The group signals its visceral recruitment into the “no Catholics left” chorus through shouting, dancing, and removing shirts. Having successfully distracted the victims of their theft with strong doses of ideology, Renton and Sickboy gallop to the car, gobsmacked by the ugly display of chauvinistic populism they were able to contrive.

In staging the scene, the filmmakers flag to the viewer that they do not share the desire for a “simpler, less tolerant time.” Indeed, Danny Boyle’s film career after Trainspotting has been marked by transnationalism with a number of films in the U.S. as well as his most critically decorated film that was set and filmed in India (Slumdog Millionaire in 2008). For his part, Ewan McGregor has become one of the world’s best-known faces as a film cosmopolitan and the rest of the cast has also worked abroad extensively. Indeed, McGregor claims that as he has not lived in Scotland for thirty years, since he was 17, he was better suited to play the prodigal Scotsman Renton (Sony Pictures T2: Trainspotting DVD, 2017).

At the same time, even as T2 makes a statement against the insular populism that drove Brexit, the film’s narrative thrust enacts its own retreat from Europe. Renton’s extended stint as a European cosmopolitan in Amsterdam has been exhausted. In the closing sequence of T2, Renton enacts his own form of Brexit and ratifies his withdrawal from the continent—indeed, all the way back to his childhood room with train wallpaper in Edinburgh. In a corresponding movement in the opposite direction, Veronika also retreats from the U.K. for her native Bulgaria—another element of the film’s closing sequence that is Brexit compatible. The film’s principal characters may not have been finally atomized by neoliberal prerogatives in the film’s closing. However, Renton’s and Veronika’s retreats into family life suggest attempts to take shelter within tradition—already devastated by neoliberalism—as the means by which to finally cope with the unfettered market’s impact.

Conclusion

From the preceding analysis, it is apparent that one can interpret both Trainspotting and T2: Trainspotting as chimerical in the symptomatic meanings about the neoliberal regime that they give off—and, in T2’s case, meanings that also more prominently implicate the current, front-page issues of globalization, Brexit, and changing gender roles. In line with Wood’s epigram, the two installments of Trainspotting dramatize criticisms of the sociopolitical order that produced them and of which the films are also a constituent part. In further alignment with Wood’s insight, the two films also rally in the end to a life of consumption (Trainspotting) or retreat into tradition (T2). In other words, Trainspotting and T2 do not resolve the problems that they illuminate—an observation that should not be held against the two films, since sudden eruptions of revolution as a narrative deux ex machina would raise eyebrows (for the film industry, for audiences) as facile or annulling the logics that the structure the narratives. However, that sociopolitical problems cannot be resolved in the final reel on screen with magic narrative formulas suggests the desperate need to materially change—palpably, even if little-by-little—the societies that produce those films and the recondite injustices within them. As concerns the two installments of Trainspotting, the ravages of neoliberal economics and the society that it produces—more class divided, more vulnerable to seductions of Brexit retreats into insular identity—present whisperings for a new configuration of the economy and society, when decoded symptomatically in line with Wood’s logics.