The signature Scottish film Trainspotting (1996) and its continuation T2: Trainspotting (2017) vibrate with symptoms of the United Kingdom’s post-1970s neoliberal economic program. Trainspotting channels neoliberal Thatcherite subjectivity in the relative eclipse of class consciousness and the ensemble of characters’ concerns with (licit and illicit) consumption—albeit, with contradictory elements that implicate the film’s highly stylized evocation of poverty and marginality. Twenty years later, in T2: Trainspotting , Edinburgh is constructed as transformed by neoliberalism’s convulsions that also drive intensified globalization, manifested by the Bulgarian immigrant (quasi- femme fatale Veronika) and the film’s tourism motif. T2 presents the ravages of the neoliberal regime on the ensemble of now middle-aged men (but not “phallically sufficient”) men while also cross-examining the dead-end of Brexit populism. In its closing, T2 retreats from critique into traditionalism in answer to what troubles the U.K., 40 years after the launch of neoliberalism.
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