Easygoing Troublemakers

On Trainspotting Fiction, Bohemian Literature, and A Scanner Darkly

When the drug addicts were going to the station to take drugs, they would often say that they were going "Trainspotting"… Through the late '80s in Britain, it (trainspotting) began to mean anybody who was obsessive about something trivial, and part of that is drugs.—IMDb

About a year ago or so I was reading Philip K Dick’s seminal sci-fi classic, A Scanner Darkly, and something occurred to me.

Now if you’ve never read A Scanner Darkly, the book is about one Bob Arctor, an undercover cop looking to find the central supplier of a street drug called Substance D. Bob, meanwhile, is slowly but surely losing his sense of identity due to his own regular D use. If you’re not familiar with PKD’s works, this sort of thing is pretty on par for how most of his novels go. Mindbending genre tales, where the line between reality and delusion is a lot thinner than we the audience would like. Even if you weren’t familiar with Philip K Dick’s work, Darkly probably sounds like the kind of late 80s, early 90s cyberpunk schlock made by someone who missed the point of Robocop. Filled with sunglass-wearing gangsters with mechanical arms using kookie slang, samurai wielding anachronistic katanas, and slo-mo shootout with vaguely futuristic-looking guns.

The thing is though, if you have read the book, you’ll know that the above description is impressively misleading. There are are no cyborgs, robots, super-guns, or any such props of science fiction, even in that era. The only futuristic aspects of the book are the titular police scanner that keeps track of the flop house that Bob and company share, the “scramble suit” Bob wears to keep his identity a secret from other cops, and a hologram projector that one of Bob’s housemates messes with because he feels like it. The book isn’t even that noir-esque. Bob’s girlfriend and main source of D, Donna, is less of the “cyber femme fatale—such as “Neuromancer’s Molly Millions or “The Matrix’s” Trinity—and more a woman taking it easy with some dudes she knows. And while we’re not directly told how Bob met his several housemates, you get the feeling that they just happened to hang out in similar social circles and needed one another to afford a place. They aren’t gangsters huffing stimulants or whatever to get jacked and go kill people. They’re just a bunch of stoners who share a house. Most of the “action” of the book is just conversations Bob has with others and the various shenanigans that Bob, his housemates, and his girlfriend get up to. And while Bob’s mind slowly but surely splinters thanks to D, it’s treated as less a dramatic descent into drug-addled depravity and more like a medical condition that someone ignores until it’s too late. Like a headache that slowly but surely becomes a chronic migraine.

And as I read the novel for myself and came to understand how far it was from standard genre fair, I realized sometyhing about the book. It was, for all intents and purposes, a futuristic version of something I’ve come to refer to as a “trainspotting” tale.

Trainspotting books/movies tend to be about a group of outsiders, nerds, punks, goths, or junkies just trying to live their lives, while getting into the occasional bit of trouble. Stories with protagonists, but not necessarily a central conflict. Stories that are, for lack of a better term, about people’s lives. Films like Kevin Smith’s “Clerks,” “RENT,” “SLC Punk,” “Napoleon Dynamite,” and, well, Trainspotting. Stories with people who, while they may have some ambition or other, it’s not what’s driving their story. Nor is there some great evil force that is looking to undermine them. They’re just trying to live their life to the fullest, or at least get by in this mad world that people seem to think is acceptable.

Dante of Clerks fame, for example, may be dealing with things like drama with his girlfriend and his idiotic friend, but these aren’t entirely what drives him. For him, it’s the desire to get through another day working at a thankless job. And while Napoleon Dynamite may have popularized the whole “Vote for Pedro” thing, getting Pedro elected student body president wasn’t the film's central point. The film’s central point, for lack of a better term, was getting a peek into Napoleon’s small town life and the minor struggles that he regularly deals with. Such as dealing with bullies or his uncle would freaking out his girlfriend trying to sell her sketchy supplements.

RENT is mostly about Roger and company trying to stay authentic in a world that must seem deeply inauthentic for a wannabe hipster during the 90s. Even Trainspotting itself is less about Renton and co being faced with “the harsh reality of doing drugs,” and more about the various bits of fun the gang get into. If you wanted to get technical, you could say that Trainspotting tales are a subset of the “Slice-of-Life” drama, but I’d argue that the two aren’t necessarily synonymous. After all, slice-of-life can refer to a slice of anyone’s life, whether they be royalty, punk, scientist, or, well, anyone. Trainspotting tales, and their precursors, the Bohemian Drama, tend to be about people on the outskirts of society. Not necessarily because of race, religion, or ethnicity—though those can certainly be factor—but more because of the communities they’re a part of or because of they’re just a little different.

Darkly being, at it’s core, a Trainspotting tale, is interesting to me for a couple of reasons. For one thing, most of Dick’s books did feel like the pre-cyberpunk tales that A Scanner Darkly very well could have been. Books like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (the basis for “Bladerunner)”, “Minority Report,” Ubik, and We Can Remember It for You Wholesale (the basis for Total Recall).

What’s also interesting is that Darkly was first published in 1977, a good 15 years before Clerks or Rent came out. And while a hardcore fan of PKD would say that that’s just a testament to how underrated the man was, I’d argue that it’s a bit more complicated than that. I’d argue that, like a lot of literature, A Scanner Darkly wasn’t created in a vacuum. It was very much the creation of a melding of sci-fi with beat and post-beat era tales like On the Road and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Tales that were also just as much about the people the narrators and the drama of their lives as the places they visited.

When it comes to the origins of beat culture, something tells me that long there was a civilization, there were artist types that have existed on its fringes with a distaste for the grind and a deep respect—if not mild condescension towards—marginalized groups. At the same time, the basic surface scratching I’ve done indicates that the histories of various interconnected counter/sub-cultures out there is long and convoluted, not unlike Allen Ginsberg’s Howl (I said what I said).

That said, if I had to guess, I’d probably say that the Bohemian were probably the most direct ancestors of the subcultures that were the focus of the average Trainspotting tale. The Bohemians, or la boheme, as the French called it, were a bunch of city-dwelling artists and intellectual types who generally rejected social norms and what we today would call “the grind.” Whether that be through free love or anti-authoritarian sentiments.

Bohemian literature also sounded quite a bit like Trainspotting literature, hence why I sometimes call it Bohemian Drama. Hell, one of the examples I gave, RENT, was adopted from an opera called “La Boheme” which about a bunch of Bohemians living in the mid 18s. While it’s been a minute since I’ve watched RENT, and I haven’t read or watched “La Boheme,” my basic understanding is that the writers of RENT basically put the latter in modern day, made a solid chunk of the cast gay, and replaced Tuberculosis with AIDS. The wikipedia page for RENT even has a little table comparing the characters from each which should tell you all you know.

Fast forward to the 60s and 70s gets us to what is arguably the most direct precursor to the origins of Trainspotting tales—as well as what could have very well have been an inspiration for Darkly—in beat era literature. Specifically, “road trip” tales, which I use to refer to books like Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and Robert M. Persig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, not to mention the film “Easy Rider.” Like Trainspotting tales, On the Road tales tend to be about the various interesting figures that the main characters meets, as well as the interesting places they find and their thoughts on life, the universe, and everything. Unlike a lot of travel books, these books don’t focus on how exciting the cities are or the history of the places themselves. They tend to be about what things look like on a ground level. These are tales of people hitchhiking, sleeping in cars or on trains, or various other humble aspects of travel.

The big difference between Trainspotting tales and On the Road Tales is, of course, setting. While road trip tales tend to be about someone’s travels, Trainspotting tales tend to be focused on a single city, if not a single location. In some ways, the banality of the Trainspotting settings are characters in their own right. They’re the places that the protagonist calls home and have shaped that person in some way into the person they are when we first meet them, whether for good or bad. Road tales tend to be about the main character finding themselves or enjoying the various unique places and people they find on their travels.

The one book that comes to mind when I think of a possible predecessor for the Trainspotting tale, would be Hunter S Thompson’s seminal mind screw Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Like a lot of Trainspotting tales, Fear and Loathing is primarily about the mischief that Raoul Duke and his attorney Dr. Gonzo (based on Thompson himself and his own attorney proper) get up to in Sin City. Unlike most Trainspotting books, however, neither Duke nor the good doctor are residents of Vegas themselves, something that adds to the impression of Vegas being a decadent hellscape.

Getting back to PKD and Darkly, if you are familiar with Dick’s work, as previously mentioned, it usually is a little more like what you’d imagine prototypical cyberpunk to be like. Detective tales, dystopian futures, etc. So, where does Darkly fit into that framework? Why would a guy who is known primarily for giving us Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and Ubik, give us what could best be described as a futuristic “Trainspotting.” Well, there are a couple of reasons, but I’d argue that it boils down to the same reason any artist creates something: a part of him felt compelled to. Maybe he’d gotten tired of writing what most publishers considered dreck. Maybe—like so many outsiders both before and after—he wanted to write about something more personal for a change. While doing a bit of digging on the man, I learned that he was addicted to amphetamines, though whether it was so he could keep pumping out as much sci-fi as possible or because he was self-medicating—he had manic-depression and schizophrenia—is a question of the ages. And he wanted to write about someone like that for a change.

As for why A Scanner Darkly had to be sci-fi instead of just another beat novel or something similar, well, I have a couple of answers to that question. The first is that Dick was forced to make it sci-fi. Like a lot of writers, especially back then, he tended not to get the most respect from “literary” publishers, so he had to stick to the sci-fi genre and hope his weird book without any real stakes to speak of would make him at least some money. The second is that, well, he didn’t know how to write anything other than science fiction. There’s a saying in writing that goes “write what you know,” and while this usually means “write about your own life or aspects from it,” it can also mean “if you’re good at writing a particular genre—say speculative fiction—stick to that.” And even though he wanted to write about his life, Dick had over 20 years of being a science fiction writer by the time the book came out, meaning that he was pretty set in his ways.

Something else to keep in mind is that the 60s and 70s were when there was beginning to really be an overlap between the hippy movements and the “speculative fiction” genre. After all, Lord of the Rings only really became the pop-culture staple it is now because of the hippy movement. Aside from the assumptions that many made about the contents of Gandalf’s pipe, the book also touched on themes of coming together to fight against an anti-nature evil. It was also quite influential to the great Led Zeppelin. On the Sci-fi side, you of course have both Frank Herbert’s Dune and Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land. While the latter’s depiction of female sexuality has aged about as well as… the vast majority of depictions of female sexuality from that era, that didn’t stop the book’s themes of alternative takes on religion, free love, innocence, and intersectionality from striking a chord with hippies. The former was a intriguing, mind-bending tale of rival royal families and was a brutal deconstruction of the “mighty whitey” stereotype that was getting stale even 60 years ago (fuck me, does it feel disheartening to say that). This isn’t even mentioning the work of the duo of Alejandro Jodorowsky and Möbius.

Darkly was definitely a result part of this particular overlap. That said, while so many of the previous contained countercultural themes and were even seminal pieces of work within those communities, they were still grandois epics that had massive stakes and all that jazz. Darkly, as previously mentioned, feels more like a down-to-earth drama than a sci-fi epic. Like a lot of science fiction, it was mind-bending and asked some interesting questions, but at the same time, they weren’t in an overtly action-heavy context. In some ways, it felt like the reverse of the direction Science Fiction was going in at the time. While so much speculative fiction added alternative elements for flavor did the opposite. It added things like a scramble suit and substance D to expand on the themes of junkies being deeply misunderstood. And while it wasn’t out of the ordinary to use a fantastical setting to explore real world issues—1984 is literally just a surveillance state taken to its most extreme—usually this was done to make a point. Like how robots are typically a less than subtle metaphor for domestic workers. A Scanner Darkly doesn’t go that far. It is, at its core, a tale about outsiders trying to survive day-by-day and not get screwed over by the man, not unlike the very company Philip K Dick himself kept.

And that relationship between nerd-culture and alternative-culture continued well after Darkly came out. At the time, the standard soundtrack for most sci-fi or fantasy films wasn’t something orchestral like you’d see with Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings, but tended to have metal or rock-sounding tunes. If you’ve ever watched the likes of Last Unicorn, Heavy Metal, or any of Ralph Bakshi’s output at the time, you’ll know what I’m talking about. While smaller bookstores did contain things like obscure manga or science fiction, there’s a very real chance that they also had their fair share of zines and alternative literature. Something tells me that, like today, you were just as likely to find a comic edition of Dune or something similar in the exact same place you were likely to find independent comics that formed the basis for the likes of “Ghost World”. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised at all if folks like Eddie Munson—a metal-head, drug-dealing, dungeon master—were a lot more common during that era than people gave the show credit for. At the same time, this was probably around the time that independent comics and zines came into their own. Each is known for it’s embrace of simple stories about life and this or that. Like a lot of literature by underrepresented people, my impression is that both tended to be about the day-to-day lives of normal folks.

It was this co-mingling of geek and count-culture I think that really crystalized Trainspotting tales as we know them. Keep in mind that Kevin Smith is a major comic-book fan and is even responsible for the Batman villain, Onomotopia.

And I think that that’s the bridge between Trainspotting Tales and A Scanner Darkly. This sort of overlap of geek and alternative culture. An overlap that a lot of folks don’t seem to take quite as seriously as they should.