Retrospective: Filth – trainspotting’s grimy younger brother

utter depravity and a truly unlikeable protagonist: bella rough reflects on filth (2013).

Content Warning: This article discusses film depictions of drug abuse, mental illness, and suicide

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Filth was released in 2013, seventeen years after another Irvine Welsh adaptation that you are probably a bit more familiar with: Trainspotting (1996). Choose life, choose a job, choose heroin-chic Ewan McGregor in a crop top. We all know it. Trainspotting put Irvine Welsh’s work on the map, so when Filth (the novel) was released in 1998, it only added to the wave of Cool Britannia youth subculture practically begging for a silver screen adaptation. But Filth got stuck in development hell, and although we have it now, we barely even remember it. Since it turns 10 this year, let’s have a little celebration for Trainspotting‘s grimy younger brother, and reflect on why Filth never quite lived up to its potential. Hip hip, Hooray!

Much of the filth in Filth is concentrated on its protagonist: Detective Sergeant Bruce Robertson (James McAvoy). He’s a dirty cop and a dirty man, saddled with solving the highly-publicised murder of a Japanese school girl. But that’s boring. Bruce instead divides his time between cross-dressing as his estranged wife, scheming against his colleagues for a coveted promotion, hurling obscenities at his best friend’s wife while prank-calling as Frank Sidebottom, flirting with psychosis, ingesting copious amounts of drugs and alcohol, scratching his balls, having weird sex, and being a general misogynist-racist-bigoted-misanthrope. And McAvoy plays him with such fervour and energy that you cannot help but revel in it.

Filth reeks of Irvine Welsh. It really is Welsh at his Welshiest: full of profanity, drugs, sex, and offensive content ranging from satire to borderline incriminating (though the novel is way worse than film). Where the depravity of Trainspotting often exists peripherally to its protagonist, Filth hinges it all on Bruce. Mark Renton is our guide through the addiction and poverty of Trainspotting’s Edinburgh. Literally, he’s the film’s narrator. He’s the straight-man amongst his group of more colourful characters, and his self-awareness, wit, and charm hook us in as he tries desperately to overcome his circumstances. We want him to be ok, even though watching him and his friends dick around is pretty fun. 

Bruce Robertson, in contrast, is genuinely not nice.  He doesn’t have the romance plotline or endearing group of rag-tag friends like Renton; instead, Bruce is police, he’s middle-aged, he’s been married, he wears a suit – he may once have been working-class, but not anymore. You can count on one hand the number of times Bruce is likeable: he tries to save a choking man when no one else does (1), and he expresses genuine sympathy towards the man’s wife and child (2). That’s about it. Any emotion elicited by Bruce that could maybe resemble likeability is pity, and even that is expressed through clenched teeth as you cringe through another scene of him ejecting some sort of bodily fluid. Hey, it’s called Filth, what did you expect?

But I think what makes Filth a hard pill to swallow is that unlike Renton, Bruce does not have a redemption arc. His story ends with his death, after he’s alienated any friend he had, been demoted at work, stopped taking his medication, and lost his family.  The last scene of the film is Bruce ending his own life, after which we are abruptly thrown into the credits, where a red curtain is drawn back as a cartoon pig (too on the nose?) engages in animated debauchery, all the while Billy Ocean’s ‘Love Really Hurts Without You’ plays in the background. It feels like the movie is laughing at us for caring, or maybe that we should be laughing for having tried to care. It’s bleak. 

It begs the questions: at what point is a bit of depravity no longer fun? What does it take for audiences to tolerate a truly unlikeable character? It is true that Bruce is perhaps on the extreme end of the unlikeable character spectrum, but he’s in good (bad?) company with Travis Bickle, Patrick Bateman, and possibly most other film-bro protagonists you can think of. But Taxi Driver was released in 1976, and American Psycho in 2000 – the unlikeable protagonists we were watching by 2013 were cut from a different cloth.

Think The Wolf of Wall Street (also 2013), The Social Network (2010), There Will Be Blood (2007) – all of their protagonists are in some way vying for wealth and upward social mobility. Whilst they may make decisions we can recognise as contemptible, they are the “temporarily embarrassed millionaires” that convince us a little corporate espionage and violence is all worth it in the long run. That glossy Hollywood veneer is working overtime here too, where Jordan Belfort could conceivably pull Margot Robbie, and Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t look like a robot made of sweaty ham. And since their ‘depravity’ seems to veer away from the consequences of heroin-injecting to the much cooler revelries of cocaine-snorting, it’s less depraved and more so hedonistic.  

This is not to say these characters are likeable, but they are at least, in some way, enviable – particularly for their largely male audience. They represent an idealised form of masculinity where ambition is everything, empathy is a hindrance, and women are disposable. Although we see these characters’ downfalls in one way or another, this is reserved for their final act, and usually softened by an epilogue in which they get their final word in, or – you know – murder their arch nemesis in a bowling alley. In Filth, however, we are treated to an entire runtime of Bruce hitting rock bottom after rock bottom.

But Bruce is the perfect unlikeable protagonist because he is actually unlikeable! Filth never wants us to envy Bruce, it is clever enough to not need gratuitous nudity and fast cars to position us alongside him. Instead, the brief glimpse we get into Bruce’s troubled childhood, and McAvoy’s impeccable balance between comedy and tragedy always keeps us re-evaluating where we stand, and how much filth we can really tolerate. And that’s what a good movie does.