One More Hit
Yesterday night I rewatched Danny Boyle's Trainspotting with my friends after a very long time and I still believe this is the best depiction of addiction in the history of cinema. My explanation for that is frankly straightforward: no film ever captured the dark side and "bright side" of the addiction as good as Trainspotting. It's undoubtedly easy to address the damages that drug abuse will bring to the person as we all willfully know that doing heroin is wrong and you should not take them if you want to maintain a healthy lifestyle but what if the happiness you're looking for is somewhere hidden inside this morbid way of living where you can't bear a minute without those drugs?
I think this is what makes Trainspotting a unique case. Boyle portrays how this group of junkies is happy together when they're taking heroin and not caring about what's happening outside their filthy little "restaurant". Boyle makes them "cool" while capitalizing on the worst possible alternatives and then at the point that they're taking pleasure in the most, a tragedy occurs; a tragedy in the form of overdose, theft, or death.
For Boyle, this "coolness" comes with a price and he successfully adds the catastrophic misfortunes to the plot to remind the audience at the end that there's no substantial long-term good in drug addiction. Definitely, it was easier to show the disaster over and over again but taking a more impartial perspective to demonstrate the motives why people tend to harm themselves in the long-term to achieve short-term satisfaction is a far more tricky approach that works remarkably promising in the case of Trainspotting while making it a true masterpiece.