“Choose the future. Choose life. But why should I do something like that? I chose not to choose life. I chose something else. The reasons? There are no reasons. Who needs reasons when you have heroin?” This is the monologue with which Ewan McGregor/Mark Renton opens Trainspotting. Danny Boyle’s film, released in 1996, marked the nineties and portrayed Generation X like few others: those born between the late sixties and 1980, raised within bourgeois society but at the same time alien to its culture. The film – back in theaters these days, from October 19 to 21, in a restored 4K version, to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of its release – shows us a group of boys from Edinburgh, almost all drug addicts, who get by in late nineties Scotland. They do this while living their ghosts, navigating through fragility, love, friendship, and failures. Here: in this vast and complex scenario, there is also space for sport. More specifically for football, used as a framework that helps define the characters. Boyle presents the group precisely through a sequence that captures a five-a-side football match: Sick Boy, clever and unstable, protests with the referee; Begbie, violent and alcoholic, sneers after a tackle from behind on an opponent; Spud, the most fragile, is in goal, retreats and concedes a goal; Tommy, the good guy, fights for every ball; Renton, positioned in the wall, takes the opposing free kick in the face, falls to the ground, and loses consciousness, as if after a dose of heroin.
The most famous football scene in the film, however, comes later. After spending the night with young Diane, Renton confesses: “I haven’t felt this good since Archie Gemmill scored against Holland in 1978.” The reference is a football gem. It refers to June 11, 1978, when at the World Cup in Argentina, at the Mendoza stadium, Scotland and Holland played for advancement on the last day of the group stage. The Scots needed to win by three goals, Gemmill played for Brian Clough’s Nottingham Forest, which that year had won the league as a newly promoted team and the following year would win the European Cup. Gemmill scored a goal by jumping over three Dutch defenders and beating Jongbloed. It was the goal that made it 3-1, the match ended 3-2, and Scotland was eliminated on goal difference, but that goal remains in the historical memory of Scottish fans.Here: that Renton compares the most intense pleasure of his life to a feat of a Scottish player says a lot about how much football weighs in his imagination. And, therefore, in the film. After all, for that generation (of Scots, of Britons in general), football was part of popular culture. Even in what could be defined as the underground scene, still far from the spotlight that would transform it in the following years. The bond becomes even stronger for Irvine Welsh, author of Trainspotting, the novel from which the film is adapted. Interviewed by Soccer AM, the writer recounted supporting Hibernian, one of the two major teams in Edinburgh alongside Hearts, and that he decided after a derby: “On New Year’s Day 1973 there was a seven-goal match between the two teams, and I chose the Hibs for that result.” Welsh speaks of the derby on January 1, 1973, in which Hibernian won 7-0 at Tynecastle, at Hearts’ home. It is still today the largest victory for Hibs in the derby and the worst home defeat in Hearts’ history.During his years in London, Welsh also grew fond of another team close to certain social contexts, namely West Ham: “When I lived in London, I even had a season ticket in the upper stand, so one week I would go see the Hibs and the next week West Ham.” Here, this closeness to football is clearly perceptible in the film, in the words of the characters, in the way they are presented and narrated.