“The job. It holds you. It’s all around you; a constant, enclosing absorbing gel. And when you’re in the job, you look at life through that distorted lens. Sometimes, aye, you get your wee zones of relative freedom to retreat into, those light, delicate spaces where new things, different, better things can be perceived as possibilities.”
—Irvine Welsh, Filth
We were looking for a few lines from the book Filth by Irvine Welsh and happened to come across the novel was being made into a film directed by Jon S. Baird.
Welsh, a Scottish author who wrote notably raunchy works like Trainspotting, that was recently named among Shortlist’s “50 coolest books ever,” and Porno, released Filth back in 1998. And just looking at the book’s cover one can see the intended metaphor of the pig with the police hat, knowing right away the story will tell the tale of a a scumbag cop.
But this cop, Bruce Robinson (James McAvoy), is a lying, scheming bastard living in Amsterdam, whose disgusting habits, crazed sexcapades, and drunk, ill-intentioned plots against his co-workers backfire on him in throughout the story; his bipolar psyche and chronic cocaine habit come back to him in strange ways like the tapeworm happens to acquire, that truly comes alive (speaking Queen’s English), bringing out Bruce’s dark protagonist.
And the fact we get to see this story on the big screen this year makes us want to re-read Filth all over again, getting inside the mind of Bruce Robinson and his cryptic manipulations, all while achieving his ill plea to get his very ironic potential promotion.
