Never before has the U.S.A stood up and took notice of Britain in regards of film-making. ’Trainspotting’ depicts the life of a group of social cast offs, focussing on Ewan McGregor. The main narrative revolves around his quest in whether he should or shouldn’t ’choose life’.
There are so many ground-breaking techniques adopted by the director, but what I am going to talk about in most detail is that of how the ’trips’ are presented to the audience. In nearly all the drugs I have seen the same few methods used time and time again. For instance within ’Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’, the director introduces strange, eerie lighting and camera angles that have a slow staggering movement, supposedly representing the characters actual feelings. However within ’Trainspotting’, the characters drug induced adventures have something extra. As well as using obscure, bizarre camera angles and the same cliched lighting; running metaphors and imaginative, ground-breaking hallucinations are used. For example, when Renton (Ewan McGregor)injects himself and collapses, subsequently sinking into his own metaphorical grave, right there in the house/flat. The way he slowly sinks into the ground, representing a coffin being lowered into the ground. This is a look into the future, telling him that this is what is to come if he continues. The hallucinations are no better illustrated than when he is attempting to go ’cold turkey’. The flashbacks of the baby could be deemed as the heroin’s long term effects.
All in all I feel that the way that this film clearly demonstrates a social group that society so blatantly neglects; makes it a living legend, never to be forgotten.