Two darkly humorous movies about living life outside the bounds of polite society and overcoming dependencies - it's Trainspotting vs Ass Backwards.
Episode Transcription & Breakdown
Every episode of Tasteless, I take a critically acclaimed film and compare it to one that shares the same themes but didn't get the attention it deserves — and explain why that second movie is my pick. This week: two darkly humorous movies about living life outside the bounds of polite society and overcoming dependencies. It's Trainspotting vs. Ass Backwards.
The tone of these movies is different, yes. But at the end of the day they explore similar emotions and should hold equally important places in the pantheon of cinema.
Trainspotting
Renton, deeply immersed in the Edinburgh drug scene, tries to clean up and get out despite the allure of drugs and the influence of friends.
This movie came out in 1996. It has a 91% on Rotten Tomatoes and it was nominated for an Oscar for Best Writing for a screenplay based on material previously produced or published, for John Hodge. It's number 164 on the IMDB top rated movies, so it's pretty entrenched in movies that people enjoy.
My first thought when watching this movie is: I don't know what I'd want to be called less — Sick Boy or Spud.
Let's talk Renton, aka Ewan McGregor. Ewan McGregor can pull off a crop top and an earring so well. It's such a good look on him — except for the skinniness. To play the skinny, heroin-addicted Renton, he lost 26 pounds. IMDB trivia claims he achieved this by grilling everything and by drinking wine and gin instead of beer. It must be nice to be a celebrity. They're like, you want to lose some weight? I'll just grill my foods. Ho ho ho. Great. Whatever.
I was very annoyed by this very actor-y thing: McGregor considered injecting heroin to better understand the character but eventually decided against it. This is the thing that makes me mad about actors. Really? You were going to try heroin for your movie job? Come on, cool it. It's a real Jared Leto move, so I'm glad he didn't wind up doing it.
Back to the crop top. Imagine if everything else in Moulin Rouge was the exact same except the entire time Ewan was wearing the crop top he wears in Trainspotting at the club scene. What a delight that would be.
Look, Ewan McGregor has been part of these massive things. He was Obi-Wan in the Star Wars prequels, he was in Tim Burton's Big Fish, he was Dan Torrance in Doctor Sleep, he was on the Fargo show, he was recently really great as the villain in Birds of Prey. He's part of these massively famous properties and universes, but he gets to go a little under the radar because we don't know him better from a scandalous personal life. We really only know him from his work. He's very talented, he always brings something new, he always chooses interesting projects. I can hate one character of his and love the next — he's not always doing the same exact thing. And when he's not acting, he's out there motorcycling around. He delivers vaccines to remote villages. What a guy.
In this movie he is a heroin addict who tries to get clean and hangs out with a bunch of other heroin-addicted friends. One of his friends is Spud, played by Ewen Bremner. Spud's a nice guy, a little dumb, but there's no malice to him the way there is with some of the other characters like Sick Boy and Begbie. The actor, Ewen Bremner — another Ewan — is a face you know from everywhere: Wonder Woman, Snowpiercer, Pearl Harbor, Perfect Sense (which also has Ewan McGregor and is so good). He also played Renton in the stage version of Trainspotting.
Johnny Lee Miller plays Sick Boy — obsessed with James Bond, probably the dad of baby Dawn who dies. Yes, this movie has a baby die. It's tough because watching it now, the fake baby is so fake that you've got to really push that aside to get on board with the emotional turmoil. But the acting is great. Sick Boy is just always babbling, and he's the one who becomes kind of a pimp and a creep. He steals from Renton. He's just a real jerk. The actor Johnny Lee Miller is probably best known for Sherlock Holmes in Elementary and for being married to Angelina Jolie for a minute. I would love to hang out in a room with everyone who has had a long-term relationship with Angelina Jolie. It is such a varied bunch. That is a gang I want to start.
Robert Carlyle plays Begbie. Begbie doesn't do heroin, but he is a maniac. He just loves to attack people. He gets his jollies from fighting. I knew him best because he plays Rumpelstiltskin in Once Upon a Time, a show that I loved on ABC. He was one of the most compelling elements of the show along with Lana Parrilla as the Evil Queen. They were two perfect villains.
Now, usually, if you know anything about me, you know I've always had a problem with J.K. Rowling. Before it was cool, okay? Before we found out she was a TERF. I was always a little annoyed that she waited until all of her books were sold and her movies optioned and then she said, by the way, Dumbledore was gay. Okay, well, why couldn't you have said that? Don't start with me, Harry Potter fans. I can't, I'm too tired.
But I thought this was interesting — maybe a little hypocritical of me. In 2009, Robert Carlyle told a BAFTA interviewer that he played Begbie as a closeted gay man whose outbursts of violence were due to his fear of being outed. Irvine Welsh, who wrote the movie's source novel, confirmed that he wrote the Begbie of the book to have an ambiguous sexuality and agreed with Carlyle's interpretation of the film's version. That's interesting to me because Begbie has a scene where he's going to go home with a woman and then finds out that she is a transsexual woman and gets very upset and fights with Ewan McGregor over it. For all of their faults — the heroin use, letting a baby die, et cetera — they are very accepting of their friends. Whatever, whoever you want to go home with, it's cool. So I think that's an interesting layer.
Also in this friend group is Tommy, played by Kevin McKidd — he was the cute one. I felt so bad for him because the actor missed the photo shoot for the promos, so he's not in any of the promotional photos, not on the DVD cover. But guess what? He's been in 288 episodes of Grey's Anatomy. He's fine.
This movie also has Kelly MacDonald, who plays a young woman that Ewan McGregor meets when he's in his crop top at a club, goes home with her, has sex with her, and finds out she is in school. She is a schoolgirl. It is illegal. So she blackmails him to keep hanging out with her. Upsettingly — not because I'm a pervert, but because I'm sick of films doing this — the sex scene between Ewan McGregor and Kelly MacDonald had to be trimmed for the American release because it appeared that Diane seemed to be enjoying it too much. You find that's often the case with what they want cut when it comes to sexuality in a movie: they want anything having to do with women cut out. But Kelly MacDonald, for being so much younger, really holds her own with this group of guys when we do see her.
This movie is known for a couple of its upsetting parts — baby Dawn dying, the worst toilet in Scotland, which is this disgusting poop scene. Every trivia thing, every video about Trainspotting, they're all like: don't worry, the poop was actually chocolate and smelled quite pleasant. Well, yeah, I didn't think it was poop. So thanks though, I guess.
This is one of those movies you need to watch because it's a slice of life of people you probably would never be exposed to. And for a movie this dark, humor can go a long way in making you empathize with the characters. The movie is funny. It has really funny moments and really dark moments and is just beautifully acted. Ewan McGregor is, I think, really an unsung hero.
Ass Backwards
Two best friends (Kate and Chloe) embark on a cross country trip back to their hometown to attempt to win a pageant that eluded them as children.
This movie came out in 2013. It has a 27% on Rotten Tomatoes.
I saw this movie at Outfest in Los Angeles when it premiered, because I'm such a big fan of its co-writers and co-stars, Casey Wilson and June Diane Raphael. After the movie screened there was a Q&A, and then I nervously approached Casey and June and June’s husband Paul Scheer after and just said how much I loved it and scurried away. It was one of my first very exciting Los Angeles experiences.
Casey Wilson and June Diane Raphael are brilliant women, friends, writers, comedians, actresses. Together they wrote Bride Wars, which I did an episode on. Love that movie. But this is a very different kind of comedy, although it does share themes of friendship.
Casey Wilson plays Chloe. Individually, Casey was on one of my all-time favorite shows, Happy Endings. I enjoy her podcast Bitch Sesh with Danielle Schneider where they talk about the Real Housewives and have great guests — whenever June shows up on that show, I'm dying laughing. Casey is currently on Black Monday, which looks up my alley but I don't have Showtime. She popped up in Gone Girl. I'll listen to any podcast she guests on.
There's a point at the end of Ass Backwards where she starts doing finger guns. She's on stage at the pageant, doing finger guns, and it's just such a great small moment. She can sing — she has an incredible voice — but will also utilize it for comedy. There's a Comedy Bang! Bang! sketch on the TV show where she sings a song about Cheez-Its. I think it's a Les Mis song but about Cheez-Its, and I think about it all of the time. She's so talented, so funny, and she has a book coming out called The Wreckage of My Presence, which is essays by her, and I'm really excited for that.
Her character Chloe is a mess. She works dancing and singing in a box — a glass box at a club — so no one can actually hear her sing. She's hung up on an ex-boyfriend from almost a decade ago. And all she has is her friend Kate.
Kate is played by June Diane Raphael, also a genius actress. She's in Grace and Frankie. I adore her podcast How Did This Get Made, which covers a lot of the same movies that I fight for here. And I love her love for Grease 2. She's so funny and brilliant. She has put her weight behind important political information and movements, writing a book along with Kate Black called Represent: The Woman's Guide to Running for Office and Changing the World. She participated in Fire Drill Fridays with her co-star Jane Fonda and founded a space called The Jane Club in Los Angeles, which started as a co-working space for women, for moms, but has morphed into an online sanctuary with classes and connection. Basically, June and Casey walk the walk. They are incredible women in addition to being the funniest.
A moment in Ass Backwards where June really got me: her and Casey go up on stage at an amateur night at this strip club because they need to make money to get to their next location — it's a road trip comedy. She gets up on stage and there are guys surrounding it, and she just starts shaking hands with the guys surrounding the stage and says, nice to meet you. Very politely. Her delivery — she's really good at a deadpan, whereas Casey is really good at an insane reaction. Then June gets very centered and quiet, and they're both equally crazy in the best way.
Also featuring in this movie as Kate and Chloe's rival — although the rival doesn't know it — is Alicia Silverstone. Clueless, The Crush, the Aerosmith music videos — but she has appeared in so many really interesting, darkly comedic roles in recent decades. Ass Backwards, Catfight with Anne Heche and Sandra Oh, The Killing of a Sacred Deer with Nicole Kidman and Colin Farrell. She's really picked some interesting projects.
There's a delivery she has — because she can do so broad, but she can also do dark, she can do somewhat oblivious, and she can be an awful person. She's talking about her charity and she says, it gives makeovers to low-income gals so they can have the opportunity to look like me, if only for one day, and says it with such conviction.
Kate and Chloe have seen this woman — she plays Laurel, who won the beauty pageant against them and now has a book and is successful. Kate and Chloe are trying to find their way in life. They go to see Laurel and Laurel has no idea who they are. She keeps calling them the wrong name. At the end, after they have a full-on meltdown at the pageant, Alicia Silverstone just very firmly says, Sherry, Faith — which is of course not their names. It's a perfect moment of comedy. It's so good.
Vincent D'Onofrio plays Casey's father — from Men in Black, Daredevil, Ratched. He has given everything to his daughter and her friend. He has not retired because he has been trying to help them. And they have to realize the way that they are hurting him.
Brian Geraghty, from The Hurt Locker, Chicago PD, Big Sky — he plays a guy who was on a show like Intervention but called Rehabilitation that Kate and Chloe love to watch. They see him, they meet him in real life, and he shows them some hard truths about themselves.
I love the darker comedic elements of the movie and I also really enjoy the just strange moments. When the two women get into a fight and are going their separate ways, there's this instrumental of "I Touch Myself" playing, and Kate runs into all these children — because there's been this overarching theme. Kate calls herself a CEO; she sells her eggs. She starts thinking about the fact that there could be all of these babies, little girls, out there from her eggs, and it starts to weigh on her. She's curious about what's happened. She meets these weird kids in the woods and is spinning around with them while Chloe tears pages out of this stalker book she has, where she keeps a lock of hair from her boyfriend who broke up with her nine years ago. It's so strange and so perfect.
This movie really captures this weird comedic feeling. I watched this with my dad and he is a tough sell on comedy — he's a dad's dad, he loves Airplane! and Young Frankenstein. And I watched this and he loved it. I was like, look, it has Penny from Happy Endings, okay? And he's like, all right, I'll give it a try. And he loved it.
I have such a fascination with the comedy of beauty pageants. They're such a specific, odd, foreign-seeming thing. This is a very strange, great movie.
Shared Themes
I know you're thinking, what? How? But let's get into it. I'm pretty proud of this one.
Our characters in Trainspotting and Ass Backwards live their lives outside the boundaries of polite society. They have chosen a different path from what is traditionally set out for us, and while it fulfills them in some ways, it does make their lives more difficult, and they have to come to terms with that.
Renton admits in Trainspotting that he knows what normal life is supposed to be like and that he is continually choosing a different path. His opening monologue is famous: Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. I chose not to choose life. I chose something else. And the reasons? There are no reasons. Who needs reasons when you've got heroin?
He knows he isn't part of the status quo and he doesn't care. He cares more about feeling good right now, having his little routines, getting off heroin by locking himself in a motel then getting right back on it. He doesn't want responsibility. He doesn't want commitment. He wants what feels good now.
Renton has a lot going for him — parents who are supportive, who do everything they can to try to wean him off drugs, then take a tougher tactic and make him go cold turkey. It's not that he was abandoned and that's why he shuns society. No, it can happen to anyone. I think we all have a friend who hates being bored more than anything else, who will torpedo their life to feel something. And that's Renton — always wanting to feel, wanting something to be going on, except when he does heroin and just lays there.
When Renton gets into a more socially acceptable life working in real estate, his friends come back and rope him into a drug deal where he quickly agrees to test the product for them. He thinks he's not a slave to drugs, that he decides when he does or does not partake, but that risk just shows that he will always have that desire in himself to live on the outskirts. He has to forcibly rip himself from that world by disengaging from his friends at the end of the movie. It's the only shot he has at going clean — to get out of this situation.
In Ass Backwards, Kate and Chloe are not quite so purposefully rebellious, but they also don't choose a career, a family, a big television. Instead they're trying to make ends meet while also still maintaining the closeness to one another and the freedom from the system that they think is important. Kate calls herself a CEO — she sells her eggs. Chloe is a singer in a box. The movie is Ass Backwards because that's these women's approach to life: it's backwards, it's not the norm. Instead of becoming part of the regular system, getting a boring 9-to-5, it's more important for these women to feel as though they have freedom. Yet always scrambling to keep the lights on is a strange kind of freedom — much like struggling to find your next heroin dose doesn't feel incredibly freeing.
Kate and Chloe have spent money on a waterbed but don't have money for rent. They refuse to acknowledge the obligations one has as a grown-up in a big city. When we see them walking the streets of New York discussing its beauty, we are also witness to their delusion. They talk about how friendly people are as they are screamed at. They talk about what good people they are as they give a homeless person a coupon that's valueless. They basically just live in a fully different world.
I was so struck when I was looking up the posters for these two movies. The tagline on the poster for Ass Backwards is "choose your own reality." And, you know, the Trainspotting poster has the "choose life" monologue.
They choose to live on the outskirts. They choose to not integrate. And there's something in watching people like Renton, like Kate and Chloe, that's therapeutic. There's a schadenfreude to it — getting satisfaction from witnessing another person's failures and troubles. The humor of both films comes from witnessing absolutely ridiculous situations, cringing at them, laughing, even as we know and hope we won't have to experience anything half as harrowing, half as embarrassing. It's a very specific type of humor, and I think it's what unites these movies in my mind the most. I Googled to make sure and, thank God, people call Trainspotting a dark comedy. I'm not just a monster.
Renton and his friends in Trainspotting, and Kate and Chloe in Ass Backwards — they all have a dependency that holds them back. Renton to heroin, while Kate and Chloe have a codependency on one another.
We never delve into the beginning of Renton's heroin addiction. We meet him when he's accepted it as part of his life and his days are focused on getting another fix. We see how Spud is unable to get a job — Renton encourages him not to interview too well because they don't actually want to hold a job down. They want to collect unemployment and hang around and do heroin. We see Tommy living a relatively productive life — although he isn't a great boyfriend — until he is broken up with. Then he starts heroin and can't focus on anything else.
It was important and touching that Renton would not give Tommy heroin when he wanted to try it, because Renton knows deep down it's not the right choice, despite making it for himself. He doesn't want to be the one to lead Tommy astray.
But in addition to the drugs, there's a connection among the men who do them — a camaraderie, a shared experience that makes these men close and makes that lifestyle hard to escape. It's what draws Tommy in, wanting to be part of things, something that seems to soothe his friends when they're at their lowest points. He wants that. And they all encourage each other's behavior. They keep each other down like a bucket of crabs — all crawling over each other, keeping any of them from actually reaching the rim.
That's exactly what's going on with Kate and Chloe. After a shared beauty pageant trauma that haunts them — where they lose, do a really bad job — these two women feel that they are the only two people in the world that understand each other, and they encourage one another in deeply unhelpful ways. Kate keeps telling Chloe that a guy who broke up with her nine years ago will definitely want her back. Chloe tells Kate that she's a CEO as she sets up shop in a Starbucks to try to get people to buy her eggs. These women don't understand why they aren't winners, while also not working to better themselves. They tell each other that Kate's poor question answering in the Q&A portion and Chloe's awful singing in the talent portion actually deserve to win.
You should be there for your friends, but you also need a bit of honesty. You can't live in delusion; it's not healthy.
When Kate pretends to be Chloe's therapist and asks Chloe questions about Kate, it's very dark. And that's acknowledged by Brian of Rehabilitation when they meet him, an actual drug addict. They meet him in jail and see that he's not clean despite the TV portraying him as such. They do crystal meth with him. He reaches his rock bottom when he sees how sad the two of them are — how they are still not working through the issues that have been haunting them for decades. He sees them leaning on each other, having the same fight about the pageant that they've been having this entire time, and it opens his eyes.
The addiction Kate and Chloe have to each other, to a delusion, to a different reality, is the closest I'm personally ever going to get to heroin use. That out-of-control feeling, out-of-body feeling, as you watch yourself make the worst, most embarrassing choices.
These movies make a perfect double feature — two sides of the same coin. There's an inevitability in the actions of Renton and of Kate and Chloe, a circular nature. Like that quote about insanity being doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. (By the way, people attribute that to Einstein. It's not him. It's not confirmed as having been said by him. But it's that inevitability.) Just trying the same thing, doing it over and over, and it's just not working, but you don't know what else to do.
To move past that, Renton, Kate, and Chloe have to acknowledge the ways they've hurt others and work to become more adult. Doing things that come naturally to most people are a struggle for them. They have to make the choice to actively be better. They don't even really fully commit to that choice, but they start taking the baby steps to get there.
Renton does choose life at the end of the film. Yes, he has to screw over his friends to do so. But they were mostly not very good friends. Who knows if he sticks to it, but for now he's choosing to extricate himself from the bad habits that have plagued him, from the people who have encouraged him to be his worst self, and to become part of polite society.
I know it's not cool. Like, I hate the man. I don't want to — there's falling completely in line with everything that you're told to do, and then there's just being part of humanity. And I think people blur those two too often and think that it's cool to just say "F it" to all of it. No — you're part of a system. If you're living in a house and not a shack in the woods, you're part of a system. Is this episode revealing that I'm very uncool? I'm like, very uncool.
Kate and Chloe get all their pent-up frustrations out when they return to the pageant. They no longer feel like they have an axe to grind, and they choose life as well. They get jobs as baristas — a big step for them. Finally, real jobs with hopefully benefits. They get an apartment in the Bronx that they can afford as opposed to the spot they were trying to live. They come to terms with the realities of the world, realities they had been ignoring for far too long. They pay back the people they had borrowed from. They acknowledge that there is a world around them, there are people around them, that they are not the only ones trying to make it in this world. And they try to right their wrongs.
What Ass Backwards Does Better
So much of both of these movies is about friendship, for better or for worse, and I love that the films explore how important friendship can be in our lives.
But Renton washing his hands of Spud did bum me out a little, whereas I appreciated that Ass Backwards ended with Kate and Chloe still learning with each other. I know Renton says a million times that he's not a good person — they let a baby die, so this isn't the worst thing they do. But so much of the film is about these integral relationships, and they sort of rush by Tommy's death.
Here's what happens at the end. Renton has been sucked in by Sick Boy into another scheme and they wind up with a bunch of money. He, Sick Boy, Begbie, and Spud are all at a hotel. Renton had just gotten his life together and this is really setting him on the wrong path. He tried drugs again. It just isn't a good fit for him. So he decides to take the money and run. Spud opens his eyes in the night when Renton gets the money, and Spud shakes his head at him, but he doesn't stop him. Renton makes a break for it and leaves two thousand pounds in a locker for Spud.
After a movie all about camaraderie, he ditches them. He does need to get away to escape these bad habits. But his whole life has been so dedicated to these friendships, to being this pack animal. And then he just fully ditches them. He bails. He leaves Spud a couple thousand in a locker, but Spud definitely still has an awful life. These friendships are such a crucial part of who he is, and yeah, you need to get rid of friends sometimes, but it was just so unceremonious. Bup, bye.
Kate and Chloe in Ass Backwards may pull each other down, but their friendship is also the strongest foundation they have. If they can overcome their demons and also maintain a healthier version of their bond with each other, that is the ultimate outcome. They have become each other's chosen family in a difficult city in pursuit of their dreams. It's nice if they can still have each other's backs.
And there's an important distinction here as well — the camaraderie over heroin versus the camaraderie over beauty pageants. You'd think in both that you're only out for yourself. In heroin, at the end of the day, if there's only one dose, you're going to take it. Renton says after baby Dawn dies that her mother asks him to mix her up a dose, but she understands she'll only get her dose after he has his. You're out for yourself when push comes to shove.
In the world of beauty pageants, yes, there can only be one winner, but there's also a camaraderie amongst those who lose. Kate and Chloe both didn't place and share the resentment built up after years of feeling that they weren't good enough. I've always had a fascination with beauty pageants. I think they're so rife for comedic interpretation. Miss Congeniality and Drop Dead Gorgeous are two of my favorite films. There's a darkness but also a togetherness of women facing the same chopping block, of all being told they're not worthy. And the exploration of that allows for the women to still have each other's backs up until a certain point, and for there to be redemption afterwards. It's such an interesting space to explore friendship in.
The drug use in Trainspotting feels almost uniquely male, and it really is the ultimate guys-being-guys. There have been papers written on the over-representation of males when it comes to heroin use. The women we see in the film are complaining about the men — the two girlfriends — or they're blackmailing them. While Kelly MacDonald is an interesting figure, these women don't have much going on for themselves.
In Ass Backwards, we cover the shades of gray of all sorts of men and women. And yes, I'm coming from my same old same old not-enough-women-in-films shtick, I get it. This doesn't take away from Trainspotting. Not every movie has to be all things to all people — that would be fully insane. Just like how we can look at older movies and books that are now absolutely not PC and we can still learn something from what they represent from a time. But this podcast is about highlighting something I love, bringing it to the forefront and convincing you of its value.
To that end: Ass Backwards explores the darkness of women and of men. Our heroes are also our villains.
Trainspotting has a horrifying moment when a baby is found dead and her mother is screaming, but we focus in on Sick Boy's reaction to the death. Renton talks about Sick Boy likely being the father. The baby's mother is an afterthought — merely the one who alerted us to this upsetting moment that changes the course of Sick Boy's life. Kelly MacDonald lies about her age to Renton, then blackmails him when he realizes she's a student, but kind of doesn't show up again. The girlfriends of Tommy and Spud are only seen in conversation with one another when it's about Tommy and Spud. Obviously a movie can only have so many main characters, but it's a little derisive.
Then Ass Backwards — a movie where our two main women are troubled, are not typical heroes. We come into contact with Chloe's overly accommodating father, a kind man who will give everything he has to these girls but is relieved when they tell him they can support themselves, even if he doesn't quite believe it. We have Brian, who bails the girls out of jail and shares his stash with them and sees in them something he hates in himself, deciding to go clean and later relapsing. We see Jon Cryer in a great role as the poor stagehand at the pageant who deals with the rage that Kate and Chloe bring. We see Paul Scheer at the amateur club night as just a very funny monster.
We get so many well-rounded figures populating this world of Kate and Chloe, which then allows them to be crazier because they're grounded by all these other people.
There's a hollowness to Trainspotting. Everything feels very surface, very bright, but it's all disintegrating if you look too long at it. And again, that's the sort of movie it is, and that's not necessarily a bad thing.
If you're looking for a movie about living life outside society's rules with dark humor that will make you think about yourself and how you relate to the world, give Ass Backwards a try. It's currently streaming on Amazon Prime, Free Peacock, Paid Peacock, Tubi, Crackle, and Epix. You have so many ways to watch Ass Backwards. Trainspotting is on CBS All Access. Fun. What a fun choice for CBS.
Hit me up at @tastelesspod on social media. We can talk about Casey Wilson and June Diane Raphael, how much I love them, the incredible work they do, the incredible podcasts they put out week after week. Or we can talk about Ewan McGregor in a crop top. Whatever you're into.
