“Choose a fucking big television, choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players and electrical tin openers”. Choose a middle-classed, middle-educated, middle-dressed, middle life. In Danny Boyle’s film Trainspotting, identity demands a step towards smack, living cheap and being young. And a step away from a fucking big television.

In the final scene of Trainspotting, Renton’s triumphant monologue embraces the mundane highlights of a modern, suburban, middle class, consumerist existence. And he strides into it. In the face of the apparent “horrors” of heroin, Renton ironically encapsulates a great Western longing to consume. Consumerism exploded from the flapper life and jazz of the Twenties into shellsuits and Sony walkmans by the Nineties and the release of Trainspotting. At the height of fashion, housewives in the Fifties wanted driers and cocktails. In Irvine Welsh’s original novel Trainspotting, Alison needs Sickboy to “slam the cocktail towards her brain”. It is what helps her survive such a world.

Heroin is freedom-freedom from the garish, ever-increasing demands of the West. “Choose leisurewear and matching luggage. Choose a three-piece suite on hire purchase in a range of fucking fabrics. Choose D.I.Y. and wondering who the fuck you are on a Sunday morning”. Life on the outside of accepted society offers heroin, sex, booze, cocaine, youth and identity. “Choose. Choose. Choose” makes you wonder “who the fuck you are”.

All sense of self and life is lost in adverts, television and everyone else. The constant demands of Western society warrant the turn to drugs and freedom. Heroin is a bit of peace from the world, a bit of silence, away from flashing adverts and booming voices of mass culture. “Sometimes I think that people become junkies just because they subconsciously crave a wee bit of silence”.
In the vein of similar works – Pulp Fiction, Requiem for a Dream, Withnail and I – drug culture offers identity. It offers a depth, character and philosophy that an electrical tin-opener or a three-piece suite cannot. In Welsh’s novel, Hazel complains: “You just want to fuck up on drugs so that everyone’ll think how deep and fucking complex you are”. Renton shows more intelligence and integrity by injecting smack into his veins than he would in buying a black, purple and aqua shell suit simply to endear himself to the rest of society.

Drugs literature seems to have intelligent characters as the heroes or victims of such a culture. Renton’s language in both the novel and the film depicts a powerful intellect and understanding of the world. Meanwhile, Sickboy aspires to the height of Western consumerism: “I am a dynamic young man, upwardly mobile and thrusting, thrusting”. Renton sees through the transparent society. Sickboy remains shallow and selfish. Renton uses the language of intellectuals as well as the language that comes with a being a Scottish junky.

Welsh’s novel depicts the trauma behind Renton’s addiction to heroin, as if this were an excuse for it. The film version, however, sticks to a youthful high life of smack and sex. Songs by Iggy Pop and Underworld on the soundtrack celebrate an unexplained need to be free from the rest of society. The characters are forever young. The materialist demands of consumer society seem faded and aged in comparison.

Even in Requiem for a Dream, the tragic soundtrack performed by the Kronos Quartet does not serve to show the sadness of drugs. Instead, it emphasises the beauty of the pain and suffering of heroin. The unfeeling world of game show television and ordinary life is not worth experiencing in comparison to heroin addiction. There can be no comfort or humanity found in the men and women of a consumer-driven West: “Man delights not me, no, nor women neither, nor women neither”.
In Bruce Robinson’s film Withnail and I, Withnail’s intelligence leads him to down lighter fluid as a substitute for alcohol. He is simply trying to find a meaning to a life in an Eighties consumer-driven London. This is a necessary amount of alcohol and cannabis. With modern addiction comes a dank bedsit, a pile of washing-up, poetry and disillusion. And it still seems like the better, freer option compared to Western monotony. With Withnail’s final soliloquy from Act Two of Hamlet, he takes revenge on a world of mass culture and conformity that he can’t be part of.

I have of late – but wherefore I know not – lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises; and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory.

Consumerism is the sterile promontory. Withnail and Marwood are outsiders, thespians. Renton is an outsider as the “scum of the fucking earth”, the Scots. Current society celebrates them and drugs and low-living. Drugs culture turns its back on appliances and Western living and celebrates the low life, a life of freedom from Western values. In this “perverse vision”, the very things that aim to make life comfortable constrain it and identity along with it.

This is a world where Western thought is rejected. Being young, injecting smack, wearing vintage clothes, downing lighter fluid and reciting Shakespeare is the height of cool. In a simplified world, Renton is “Joe-fuckin’ cool” and consumer society is not. Comfort leads to conforming to everyone else’s lives. Through literature like this, typical Western consumers demand a lifestyle which allows freedom. It is the High life of the Low.

Injecting heroin or swallowing opium or smoking cannabis is the way out. It is an identity. Down-to-earth kitchen-sink realism provides the escape that it never has before. At the explosion of consumer values and mass production in the Twenties, gang culture and drugs were the escape. Now, it has been exaggerated to the extent that a downtrodden, low existence of sex and drugs seems to be the best option for everyone. It could be anyone’s. If only they’d quit their office jobs, sell their widescreen colour T.V.s, buy poetry books, crack and booze. And choose life.