Choose [suburban] life

A matchbox of our own

A fence of real chain link,

A grill out on the patio

Disposal in the sink

A washer and a dryer and an ironing machine

In a tract house that we share

Somewhere that's green.

Little Shop of Horrors

Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a f**king big television, Choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players, and electrical tin can openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol and dental insurance. Choose fixed-interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisure wear and matching luggage. Choose a three piece suite on hire purchase in a range of f**king fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who the f*ck you are on a Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing f**king junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pishing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, f**ked-up brats you have spawned to replace yourself. Choose your future. Choose life . . .

But why would I want to do a thing like that?

I chose not to choose life: I chose something else.

Trainspotting

Two quotations from two very different films which each say something very different about aspiration.  

In the former, from Little Shop of Horrors, set in the 60s, Audrey daydreams about an escape from her grimy inner-city life to the peaceful suburbs; while in the infamous speech from 1996’s Trainspotting Renton viciously rejects the suburban ideal in favour of the oblivion of heroin.

Renton's speech is a rant against the acceptable face of consumerism.  Granted, he's justifying the car-crash his life has become due to his heroin habit, but the sharpness of his cynical mind still maintains a righteous anger and revulsion at what aspirational life has become; a cookie-cutter dystopia in which desire is managed and everyone wants the same stuff, the same respectable accomplishments, the same clean, predictable life.  By choosing heroin, Renton pugnaciously turns his back on ordinary life, on aspiration, on any sense of working to make things better.  A nihilistic impulse, born of privilege?  Of the boredom of always having enough, of not ever really having to fight for anything?  Or a refusal to fight, a refusal to play the game which he perceives is never really winnable, which will never actually make him happy.  If everything for which he is encouraged to work is meaningless to him, where is the motivation to work at all?  

Why not just get high?

In contrast Audrey has a touching trust in the most mundane of middle-class aspirations; wishing not for diamonds and a mansion, but simply an exchange of her grey, cramped inner-city life for a taste of the peacefulness and safety that her suburban dream represents.  The era is slightly different, but the things she idealises so in the 60s (‘a washer and a dryer and an ironing machine’) are the same sort of consumer goods which so disgust Renton in the 90s (‘choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players, and electrical tin can openers’).  For Audrey the very uniformity of the lifestyle she craves is a source of attraction, not revulsion; the ‘tract house’ for which she longs, known for its its unvarying, bland sameness; acre after peaceful acre of wide, quiet, tidy streets, inhabited by quiet, tidy people with peaceful, comfortable lives.

What for Audrey is safety, for Renton is suffocation; for him a prison, for her an escape from one.

But is Renton simply spoiled by not really having known hardship?  Growing up in Edinburgh in the 80s, he could expect a free education, subsidised housing and free medical attention if sick.  His immediate basic needs met, he was theoretically free to aspire to something other than inner-city poverty, it’s just that he chose to believe that the ‘better life’ suggested to him is not good enough for him.  If Audrey grew up in grinding poverty in a two-up, two-down with an outside toilet, sharing a bed with three siblings and with nothing to hope for in life but early marriage to a man working six days a week at the same factory as his dad and his granddad before him, spent and exhausted at 45 from hard work and cold and bad food; or seeing her children die in infancy from respiratory disease from the damp, or fevers which spread like wildfire in the cramped, unsanitary conditions or just never managing to thrive in a world where there is never, never quite enough for everyone, can she be blamed for her need for comfort, for peace, for predictability?  

How dare Renton sneer at her ‘sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing f**king junk food into [her] mouth’ when that comfortable couch and more than enough to eat and her own television represent wonders beyond Audrey’s wildest childhood dreams?  How dare Renton squander the advantages he has been given?  Give up on aspiration and responsibility and making something of the privileges he takes so much for granted?

Or is Renton right?  Have they both, in fact, been sold; their potential for uniqueness stifled by the only aspiration available being the aspiration of being just like everyone else?  In the deprivations given Audrey and the advantages given Renton, the missing element is the confidence in a world where personal aspirations are valued and where individuality is not only tolerated but encouraged.

What if the real poverty is not that of the lack of comfort and safety, but of hope?