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Trainspotting and the depiction of addiction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

Peter Byrne
Peter Byrne*
Affiliation:
Professorial Psychiatric Unit, Cork University Hospital, Cork, Ireland
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Trainspotting, the “best British film of the decade”, arrived on 23 February 1996. Such were the expectations of the film (1996) that the face of its narrator-hero Renton (Ewan McGregor) appeared that month on the front cover of two influential London-based film magazines, Premiere and Sight and Sound. One year after its release, the film stands as both a critical and commercial success. The total Box Office receipts for Ireland, at IR £800 000 in the first 3 months, were comparable to a major Hollywood blockbuster. The film was still being screened 10 months later in Dublin's north inner city, the heartland of Dublin's heroin epidemic. Given its subject-matter, it is important to examine both the film itself, and its points of contact with the realities of drug addiction. In this respect, three questions suggest themselves: is the film showing anything new (representation), is it doing anything new (technique), and what is the film saying (ideology)?

Type
Psychiatry and the Media
Information
Psychiatric Bulletin , Volume 21 , Issue 3 , March 1997 , pp. 173 - 175
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Copyright
Copyright © 1997 The Royal College of Psychiatrists

References

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