I just watched Trainspotting again. Believe it or not, I had only seen it once before, but between my recent ruminations about Danny Boyle and thee sequel coming out, I thought I had better give it a second watch. What I just found myself watching, however, wasn’t quite the film I had expected to see. I had prepared myself for something gritty, hard-hitting and real; something about the dark, violent world inhabited by heroin users. Yet, to me, something about Boyle’s film did not ring true this time around: what it was trying to depict was not what it was depicting. The characters, especially the narrator Renton, all seemed too articulate and self aware. There seemed to be a sort of irony at the core of the film, and I can’t decide whether it was intentional or not: these people were supposed to be down and out, scum of the earth, on the fringes of society; yet they spoke and made references as if they had been to university. They had a bourgeois feel to them, even though we are supposed to see them as vermin. Was this irony deliberate? Was boyle trying to make a statement? I found myself fascinated by this question, this tension. It’s as if the director is reminding us that we’re watching a film. Boyle could have made these characters far more gritty, far more real, but instead he gave them a selfawareness one does not find in real smack-heads. They thus loose some of their authenticity, but was that intentional? And if so, what was the point Boyle was trying to make?