Danny Boyle’s weird fascination

“I chose not to choose life and the reasons? Who needs reasons when you’ve got heroin?”

I recently watched Trainspotting! Needless to mention, I loved it! Danny Boyle received an Oscar for Slumdog, but he truly deserved one for Trainspotting. While Slumdog Millionaire was a film with excellent screenplay and cinematography, it didn’t have the heart in right place. It tried to merge fantasy with reality in the non-Frank-Capra way, and failed terribly.

Well, as an element of surprise, I couldn’t help but notice Danny Boyle’s fascination with shit. Who can forget the remarkable scene in Slumdog when Jamal exits an outhouse via the hole below, landing in a huge pile of excrement, and dashes off to get the autograph of his favorite Bollywood star, Amitabh Bachchan? He’s successful, despite being covered from head to toe in shit, and triumphantly celebrates his deed!

Well, Trainspotting has two such scenes that involve shit. And both scenes are equally remarkable as the one in Slumdog. The most memorable one is undoubtedly Ewan McGregor diving face first into the filthiest toilet in Scotland in order to retrieve two opium suppositories that he’s accidentally lost. This scene symbolizes ‘how much shit he is in’! The second scene, when Spud wrestles his girlfriend’s mother over a dirty sheet comes in a very close number two. I really don’t know the reason behind Danny Boyle’s fascination with shit, but somehow they tend to make his films more graphic and end up adding extra dimensions to them.