109. We’re not so different, you and I

“What he says, goes.” “It’s my way or the highway.” “It’ll get worse before it gets better.” Few action-movie cliches go unuttered in Road House, along with several no action movie has ever used before or since. (“I sure ain’t gonna show you my dick.”) Remarkably, however, we never get a good “We’re not so different, you and I” out of Brad Wesley. There are moments when it seems he’s coming close—Mike Nelson notes this during the climax in his excellent solo RiffTrax on the movie, the first of three or four he and the other MST3K vets have recorded—and the Doc draws the parallel herself when things get really hairy, but the villain whose specialties are taunting Dalton and opening JC Penneys never goes there.

Given Rowdy Herrington’s direction, perhaps actually coming out and saying it would be gilding the lily. No, no one says “We’re not so different, you and I.” But in scene after scene both Dalton and especially Wesley react to annoyances and misfortunes with the exact same way. They cock their head to the side, shake it in “get a load of this” disbelief, and half-smile “ya just gotta laugh”–style. Dalton does it when he emerges from the Double Deuce after his first night of work and discovers his car has four flat tires, a broken antenna, and a shattered windshield (Nelson, in his RiffTrax again: “I have hours of backbreaking labor ahead of me. It’s actually pretty funny!”); Wesley does it the very next day when he spots Dalton practicing tai chi. You get variations on it for matters as minor (no pun intended) as Dalton finding Steve in flagrante with a young lady in the back room, and as grave as Wesley walking through his mansion and discovering the dead bodies of all his henchmen. Wade Garrett and Elizabeth may not do the head-shake thing but they spend the entirety of their three-person date with Dalton grinning at each other in that same can-you-believe-it way.

It can hardly be said that Ben Gazzara and Patrick Swayze have similar acting styles or training, so I can only assume this was Harrington’s go-to instruction, like George Lucas’s infamous “faster, more intense” on the set of Star Wars. But like so many of the film’s other foibles this winds up feeling both endearing and unique. Vandalism, tai chi, dead bodies, people fucking during their 15 minutes—Road House‘s reaction to each is “grin and bear it,” and there’s no other film with quite so untroubled an outlook on the totality of human experience. As Red Webster put it, “That’s life. Who can explain it.”

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