Essays on Road House by Sean T. Collins.

Road House is a film about a very famous bouncer. Not the most famous bouncer; that man is a supporting character. And not technically a “bouncer” either; our hero, played by Patrick Swayze, beautiful and terrible as the dawn, is a cooler, which is to say the Head Bouncer In Charge. But his job is basically bouncing, and he’s so good at it that he’s become famous for it.

So that tells you something about the kind of film Road House is: It respects the people who beat up people who beat up other people in bars so much that it affords them significant renown. Other men will fly across the country and offer these men hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for their services. Barfolk, for want of a better term, whisper their names in reverent awe. In the land of the blockheaded, the two-fisted man is king.

Because their reputations precede them, or because to invoke them inaugurates the ritually contracted cycle of redemptive violence for which they’ve been hired, the bouncers of Road House are reluctant to share their names.

“You got a name?” asks Carrie Ann, waitress at the Double Deuce, the ultraviolent Missouri honky-tonk at the heart of the story. “Yeah,” answers our hero.

“What’s your name, buddy?” asks Pat, the Double Deuce’s thieving failnephew bartender, who is played by John Doe of Los Angles punk institution X. “Coffee, black,” responds our hero.

When he conducts his first official bouncing during his tenure at the Double Deuce by smashing the face of a man with a switchblade and a Hawaiian shirt through a table adjacent to the one on which this man’s girlfriend has been dancing and thus lowering the overall atmosphere of class in the establishment, it falls to our hero’s blind white blues-playing guitarist friend Jeff Healey (appearing as himself) to reveal his identity to the amazed, and in several cases visibly aroused, patrons.

“The name,” he says, “is Dalton.”

Dalton is by this point in the film known to the Double Deuce’s staff, over whom he’s been given absolute authority by the bar’s bizarre owner Frank Tilghman. “What he says? Goes,” Tilghman tells his employees.

“It’s my way or the highway,” Dalton concurs.

The first person to learn his identity other than Tilghman himself is Carrie Ann, who powers through our hero’s extremely badass rebuff as described above and gets him to name himself, the way Superman tricks his gnomish extradimensional enemy Mr. Mxyzptlk into saying his own name backwards to eliminate him. (Carrie Ann has no such goal, of course; it is perhaps for this reason that she is rewarded later in the film with a glimpse of our hero in the nude. to which she reacts with slackjawed lust so powerful, courtesy of actor Kathleen Wilhoite, that it all but glows with its own internal erotic energy.)

“Shit,” Carrie Ann says when Dalton reveals himself. “I heard a’ you!”

The news spreads like wildfire through the waitstaff, bartenders, and bouncers already in the Double Deuce’s employ, none of whom need its import explained to them. Like I said, a famous bouncer’s reputation precedes him. One man has heard he ripped a guy’s throat out with his bare hands. Another has heard he has balls big enough to come in a dump truck. “Sometimes you wanna go where everybody knows your name,” runs the song from another artifact of Eighties bar culture. Dalton can go anywhere.

Which gives us some indication of his exact level of fame. No one at the Double Deuce recognizes him on sight, which means he’s not so famous that his face alone writes his ticket for him. However, the moment he says “Dalton” in response to Carrie Ann’s query, she immediately assumes he is the Dalton famous for being a bouncer, and not any of the other myriad possible Daltons in the world—B. the bookseller, for example. It’s as if she asked a woman who was new to the Double Deuce for her name, and that woman replied “Gaga.” Only one person leaps to mind.

This separates our hero from his hero. “Wade Garrett’s the best,” Dalton tells Tilghman when the Missouri restaurateur says he’s heard he, Dalton, is the best. “Wade Garrett’s getting old,” Tilghman replies. But age has not dimmed his starpower. Arguably, age is responsible for it. The longer he’s been out there, bouncing and cooling, the more time the dive-bar demimonde has had to put a face to the name.

The face belongs to Sam Elliott, who in this film has long greasy hair, tight black jeans, five o’clock shadow that creeps up his face nearly to his eyes, and a grizzled sexuality that wafts from the screen like a musk. When he arrives at the Double Deuce to help his one-time protégé Dalton defend the establishment against the depredations of Brad Wesley, a local business tycoon and J.C. Penney franchisee played by Ben Gazzara (The Killing of a Chinese Bookie), no one asks his name, because no one needs to. Practically the entire staff stares at him with the wide eyes of children in a film directed by Chris Columbus when he limps bowleggedly into the place looking for his mijo.

Grinning slyly, his eyes twinkling with a sinister delight that seems to be actor Kevin Tighe’s natural mien and has no basis within the character itself, Tilghman looks at this man and says, “I know you.”

Wade Garrett, it can be concluded, has achieved a level of fame so total that even people steeped enough in bouncer culture to know Dalton by name know him by sight. Michael Jordan fame. Michael Jackson fame. Santa Claus fame. Wade Garrett is the best, Dalton tells us. And when Dalton speaks, we would do well listen. It’s his way or the highway. What he says? Goes.

Directed by Rowdy Herrington, written by David Lee Henry and Hilary Henkin (Academy Award winner, Wag the Dog), released in 1989, directed  by Rowdy Herrington (the name bears repeating), and starring Patrick Swayze, Kelly Lynch, Sam Elliott, Ben Gazzara, and an assortment of people with anywhere between one to six lines of dialogue all of whom I adore completely, Road House is one of my favorite movies ever made. I like to talk about it. I hope you’ll like to listen.

Here’s what we know about Brad Wesley.

He grew up on the streets of Chicago, where he “came up the hard way.”

He came to Jasper, Missouri after serving in the Korean War.

His grandfather was an asshole.

He has one sister, whom we don’t meet.

He has a nephew, Double Deuce bartender Pat McGurn, whom we do.

He has a cousin in Memphis. (This unseen—or is he?—cousin tells him Dalton killed a man down there. Said it was self defense, which Brad doubts.)

He owns a helicopter, an ATV, a red convertible, and a monster truck, all of which he enjoys driving, or paying someone else to drive, erratically.

He loves the song “Sh-Boom.” (The Crew Cuts version, not the Chords version, which if you know Brad is unsurprising.) He can’t stand today’s music, which has “got no heart.” He prefers when bands “play something with balls.”

He employs a squad of goons for whom he enjoys throwing topless poolside bacchanals, and whom he also enjoys beating up arbitrarily when they displease him for reasons such as bleeding too much.

His favorite goon is Jimmy, a martial artist who I believe to be his bastard son. Strictly speaking this is not supported by the text—Wesley refers to all of his goons as “my boys”—but it’s in the eyes.

He’s “dating” a woman named Denise, whom he beats up for coming on to our hero Dalton. Later he has her do an erotic striptease at the Double Deuce to teach Dalton a lesson (?).

He used to be married to Dr. Elizabeth Clay, a surgeon or gastroenterologist with whom Dalton becomes involved after she treats him for several wounds incurred in his first barfight at the Double Deuce.

He lives in a waterfront mansion across a lake or river or something from the farm or ranch or whatever where Dalton rents an extravagantly appointed open-air apartment from a bearded old codger named Emmet who sleeps in a union suit. This provides him with a convenient vantage point from which to buzz the old man’s horses with his chopper or sit in a rocking chair and watch Dalton and Elizabeth have sex on the roof of a barn.

Now’s a good time to mention he’s played by Ben Gazzara, a frequent collaborator of John Cassavetes who created the role of Brick in the original Broadway production of Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

He alternates between light-colored suits of the Boss Hogg variety and the fussily sporty apparel of a weekend warrior. As they do in the wardrobes of many characters in this film, boots play a disproportionately large role in his ensembles.

He has a trophy room full of the stuffed carcasses and mounted heads of both exotic and domestic animals that would shame a Trump son.

He runs a glorified protection racket called the Jasper Improvement Society that keeps all the local businesses under his thumb, including the auto parts store run by Elizabeth’s uncle Red Webster.

He controls alcohol distribution in the region, which provides him with a line of attack on the Double Deuce after his nephew Jimmy is fired for skimming the till.

He feels that his many achievements in building the town of Jasper up from “nothing” have entitled him to get rich off its inhabitants.

Here are those achievements, quoted verbatim.

I brought the mall here. I got the 7-Eleven. I got the Fotomat here. Christ, JC Penney is coming here because of me! You ask anybody, they’ll tell you!

Road House is the story of one bouncer’s quest to free a small town from the iron fist of the guy who is on the verge of opening the area’s first JC Penney. Over half a dozen men will die for this.

If you think this sentence is confusing, then change one pig. —Uilliam M. Bricken, Jr.

An English professor of mine used that self-reflexive riddle to illustrate the way Christ’s parables are both medium and message: The second the concept behind the parable clicks, so does the larger point about ethical behavior or spiritual enlightenment.

In his book The Three Christs of Ypsilatnti, psychologist Mark Rokeach recounts an experiment, which he would later apologize for and reject as unethical, in which he placed three men who believed themselves to be Jesus Christ in regular group therapy sessions in hopes that encountering each other would shatter their delusions, to which end he occasionally manipulated them directly by concocting imaginary elements of their collective story himself. The experiment was unsuccessful.

This man is Big “T” of Big “T” Auto Sales, or so it seems safe to assume. We meet him around 17 minutes into the film, as he watches The Patty Duke Show on his office television while preparing to eat his lunch. He then notices our hero, Dalton, checking under the hood of a beat-up old car in the lot. “She’s a runner!” shouts this walrus-looking sonofagun as he strides out to meet Dalton face to face, treating the singular requirement of any used car sale—that the car being sold is capable of movement—like a selling point. Dalton drives a Mercedes when he’s not on the job, but since angry patrons of the bars at which he serves as cooler tend to take their frustrations out on his car after they’re ejected, he replaces it with a cheaply bought beater when he’s got a gig. He takes the car. We never see Big “T” again.

This man does not have a name, not that we’re given to know anyway. We meet him about one minute after we meet Big “T.” This fellow presides over some kind of automobile junkyard Dalton goes to not to purchase a used car, which he could have done here since used cars are visibly on sale in the background, but to stock up on spare tires, since people who are pissed off that he smashed their face through a table because their girlfriend was dancing on another table often slash his tires in revenge. Dalton loads the trunk of his new old car with tires and gives the proprietor a little salute, which the old man returns. We never see this man again.

This man is Red Webster, proprietor of Red’s Auto Parts. We meet him around 33 minutes into the film, after which he becomes a major character. His store is the closest business to the Double Deuce, with which it shares some kind of vast dirt parking lot or road or whatever it is despite being about a football field away. His niece is Dr. Elizabeth Clay, former love interest of Brad Wesley and, soon, current love interest of Dalton. He is Dalton’s primary source of information on the protection racket run by Brad Wesley under the guise of civic improvement. Dalton goes to Red’s store to order a new windshield and buy a new antenna for his car after both were destroyed by angry ex-patrons of the Double Deuce the night before. This is the third scene in which Dalton makes an automobile-related purchase, and the third business establishment at which he does so. The movie is not quite 35 minutes old.

This man is Pete Strodenmire, proprietor of Strodenmire Ford. We meet him around one hour and 24 minutes into the film, at a hastily convened meeting of Jasper business owners, plus Dalton and Elizabeth, to discuss the prior night’s destruction of Red’s Auto Parts in an arson ordered by Brad Wesley. There are seven people at this meeting. Four are Dalton, Elizabeth, Dalton’s nominal boss Tilghman (seen above in the background), and Elizabeth’s uncle Red. The other three, including Strodenmire, are people we’ve never seen before; the two who aren’t Strodenmire have no lines, and we never see them again. The next time we see Strodenmire, Brad Wesley has ordered one of his goons to run over the man’s entire glass-enclosed showroom of new cars with a monster truck, which he does with glee. Strodenmire winds up being one of four men—along with Red, Tilghman, and Dalton’s nominal landlord Emmet—who murder Brad Wesley, the film’s antagonist, with shotguns during the climax. Again, we meet him an hour and a half into a two-hour film that has already included three other car or car-parts salesmen.

This man is Emmet. We meet him about half a minute after we meet the man from whom Dalton purchases tires, when he rents Dalton a barn-loft apartment that must have cost $50,000 dollars to build for $100 a month. He doesn’t sell cars or car parts, but you can see how he and the Four Car Salesmen of Jasper, Missouri share a similar aesthetic.

Road House is a movie about a road house, that much is true. It’s not a movie about roads, however, nor about what you drive on them. (Much more time is spent showing Dalton buying cars, parking cars, and buying car parts to fix what happens to the cars after they’re parked, than is spent showing anyone actually driving cars.) Thus, the film’s maximalist approach to automotive retailers is striking, and bears contemplation.

Could Dalton’s trips to fully four different stores for his vehicular needs have been consolidated to, say, two, perhaps the ones owned by the two men who wind up saving his life from the character played by Ben Gazzara (John Cassavetes’s Husbands)? Yes.

Would this have been an easy way to establish Strodenmire, who I stress fires a shotgun into the body of the movie’s antagonist and inflicts a mortal wound, before the movie was three quarters of the way finished? Yes.

Would this have made things less confusing to people for whom men whose vibe is best described as “Old Fart” sort of blend together in an indistinguishable blur of ill-fitting work shirts and bold facial-hair decisions? Yes.

Is understanding that Road House has its protagonist make car-related purchases from three different men (two of whom are never seen again), includes a fourth as a main character when he emerges from a nameless scrum of unknowns when the movie is almost over (and who has never been seen before), and casts weird old coots in all four roles (with weird old coots to spare playing other parts)—that is to say, understanding things that makes no sense—key to understanding Road House‘s unique rhythm in all its concussive dreaminess?

If this sentence is confusing, then change one pig.

Fantastic fiction often asserts that forces awesome, alien, or profound enough to overwhelm our senses will be processed by our puny brains in ways we’re capable of processing instead. The erratic movements and sudden disappearances of UFOs are how we see extradimensional travel. Vast unspeakable intelligences present themselves to us as dragon-winged squid-gods. Fire and life incarnate themselves in a flaming bird shape and a costume color-scheme change.

But can it work in the other direction? When faced with the inexplicable, can our minds process it into something more human, not less?

The life of Dr. Elizabeth Clay in Road House can be divided into five phases. She meets our hero, Dalton, when he’s admitted to the hospital where she works for the treatment of a knife wound he incurs on early in his tenure at the Double Deuce. After telling him the cut will require nine staples, she rattles off a list of previous injuries from his medical files, which he carries around with him. (“Saves time.”) She offers him a local anesthetic, which he refuses. (“Pain don’t hurt.”) She notes that his medical files say he graduated from NYU, where, he tells her, he studied philosophy. (“Man’s search for faith, that sort of shit.”) Given the damage that’s been done to his body, she facetiously asks him if he’s ever won a fight. (“Nobody ever wins a fight.”) Furthering one of the film’s recurring jokes, she says that she figured someone in his line of work would be bigger. (“Gee, I’ve never heard that before.”) Perhaps because nearly everything he says would look good as a back tattoo, she accepts his offer to take her out for coffee in the middle of all this.

Next time we see the good doctor, she shows up at the Double Deuce for their date, in a dress that looks like something Billy Joel and his first love ordered a bottle of white, a bottle of red over. She arrives in time to watch him finish beating the tar out of several of Brad Wesley’s goons alongside his fellow bouncers. During their date she brutally negs him for getting paid to hurt people, and for acting like a Nice Guy when he clearly isn’t. Perhaps impressed by how he tosses money on the counter of the diner where they’re eating so that the grumpy manager will allow a falling-down-drunk old man to sit there a while longer, or the good-natured way in which he reacts to discovering his enemies have rammed an entire stop sign through the windshield of his car, she gives him a chaste but heartfelt kiss goodnight before leaving. (He gives her the same little salute he gave the Second Car Salesman of Jasper, Missouri as she drives off.)

She meets up with him at the Double Deuce again a few scenes later, by which point Dalton has pretty much single-handedly reversed the place’s fortunes, which you can tell because the bartenders are wearing uniforms and there’s no longer any chicken wire around the bandstand to protect the performers from the audience. They go back to his place. He turns on the radio and, after they both reject Bullet’s “I Sold My Soul to Rock n’ Roll,” settles on “These Arms of Mine” by Otis Redding. They exchange five or six sentences about her Uncle Red, who raised her after the death of her parents, and her failed marriage. Then they have sex; he’s inside her, standing up, before they so much as kiss. She laughs while they fuck, like she’s in on the joke. Later that night they fuck again, on the roof, in full view of Brad Wesley, who lives across the water, and whose house she looked at ruefully shortly after arriving at Dalton’s apartment because he was the person she had the failed marriage to. (Though their relationship is confirmed, the actual fact that they were married is never stated outright, but the vacuum-sealed logic of the film allows no other possibility; there’s not enough room in anyone’s life for two major former disastrous love interests.)

When Dalton’s mentor Wade Garrett comes into town to help him in his battle against Wesley—Elizabeth has become a focal point in that grudge, and in Dalton’s desire to stay in town and take Wesley down rather than simply picking up stakes and moving on when things get ugly, as Wade advises—the two men and Elizabeth spend the night on the town, drinking beers and swapping stories about their old antics and injuries (the two are inseparable), which at one point involves Wade unbuttoning his jeans and revealing the dark thatch of his pubic hair to show her a scar on his hip that a woman gave him. They pull an all-nighter, during which Wade and Elizabeth dance in a diner (not the previous diner, nor the place they spent the night talking and drinking in, nor the Double Deuce, but a fourth dive altogether) and he comes on to her pretty heavily, with just enough plausible deniability that everyone can play it off with a smile. The sexual tension between all three is just insane, though it’s cut short by the start of the work day. (“Don’t mean to bust up the party, but my shift starts in a couple of hours—thought I’d go home, get some sleep,” says the trauma surgeon after spending the past five or six hours drinking.)

Elizabeth’s final emotional beat in the film is as the unhappy go-between in the Dalton/Wesley feud. She chastises Brad (she’s the only person who calls him that) for destroying Strodenmire Ford with a monster truck, and warns Dalton that if he’s trying to save the townsfolk from Wesley, “Who’s gonna save them from you?” Actor Kelly Lynch’s commitment to this line, which she shrieks at the top of her lungs, is so total that when Wesley’s lead goon Jimmy blows up the shack where Dalton’s landlord Emmet lives the next moment, at first it seems like she Carrie‘d the place. When Dalton kills Jimmy by ripping his throat out with his bare hands, she checks to make sure the man is dead, then leaves, horrified, and refuses to leave town with Dalton when he tries to convince her to do so at the hospital the next day. For some reason she goes to Brad Wesley’s house during the middle of Dalton’s killcrazy rampage through his army of goons; her arrival prompts Dalton to not tear Wesley’s throat out, which gives Wesley a chance to go for a gun to finish Dalton off, but fortunately four old men show up with shotguns and Sonny Corleone the shit out of the guy.

After she watches her ex-husband die during an attempt to kill her current boyfriend-ish guy, the doctor and Dalton are reunited and skinny-dip in front of his landlord Emmet happily ever after.

Every time I watch Road House I grow more and more fond of the Doc. And why wouldn’t you? She’s the smartest and most together person we meet, having one of the few jobs anyone holds outside of the automotive, alcohol, or beating-people-up industries. She has a good head on her shoulders regarding the lunacy of Dalton and Wesley’s blood feud, which has involved the total destruction of at least three buildings in town and the severe injury of dozens of human beings even before people start dropping like flies. Removed from the French braid she wears it in for work, her hair does this cool thing where it sticks out on the sides like an old Barbie doll. She’s one of the few human beings who could get bare-ass naked next to in-his-prime Patrick Swayze and hold their own.

However, she also accepts a date from a masochist who’s constantly getting his ass kicked, which she knows because she meets him while stapling his latest knife wound. She holds his job in open contempt and mocks the idea that he’s a force for good in town even when they’re getting along and used to be married to his arch-enemy, whose murder during the process of his attempted murder of Dalton she witnesses before settling down with Dalton for good. She goes into work at a hospital on two hours of sleep after spending the small hours pounding Miller High Lifes. Even by the standards of Road House, a film about famous bouncers, her behavior is hard to recognize as that of a normal human person.

Yet when I think about her, it’s always in terms of “Wow, way to put him in his place,” or “power move,” or “wearing that dress takes guts,” or “fucking before kissing, right on, this is a person who knows what she wants,” or “she must really love her uncle to hitch her star to Jasper, Missouri’s wagon on his account, I bet he was a great dad to her” or “she patches up Dalton’s knife wound but the next time we see her at work she’s looking at x-rays of someone’s colon, what’s her medical specialty,” or “she could absolutely talk Dalton into making out with Wade in front of her and she knows it, and just sits with it because knowing it is all the satisfaction she needs,” or “I wonder what she saw in Brad Wesley,” or “I bet she went to an Ivy League medical school because she’s just a little condescending when she talks about Dalton going to NYU.” In other words, things you might think about a normal human person, and a very interesting one at that. Confronted with Road House, the mind transmutes chaos into character.

This is Steve. (The one on the left.) Steve is a bit of an anomaly in the world of Road House, a bit of an enigma. He’s one of four people abruptly fired from the Double Deuce by Dalton when he assumes control of “all bar business” (per Tilghman) as the joint’s cooler. Morgan, a cantankerous thug played by hardcore wrestling legend Terry Funk, is fired for not having “the right temperament for the trade,” the wisdom of which he demonstrates by later attempting to murder Dalton on behalf of Brad Wesley. Pat, the weaselly bartender played by L.A. punk legend John Doe, is fired for skimming from the till. He too attempts to murder Dalton on behalf of Brad Wesley (his uncle), multiple times, indicating that Dalton has made another correct judgment call. Judy, a wiry waitress played by Sheila Caan (ex-wife of James Caan and ex-girlfriend of Elvis Presley), is fired for dealing drugs in the bathroom. She does not attempt to murder Dalton on behalf of Brad Wesley or anybody else for the rest of the film, indeed she doesn’t appear in the rest of the film at all, indicating that perhaps a reformist approach may have borne more fruit in her case.

Despite being a heck of a physical specimen, Steve is not a pro or even semi-pro ass-kicker like his coworkers Morgan and Pat; the one fistfight in which he participates ends with him groaning into a mirror about the shiner temporarily disfiguring his beautiful face. He’s not a drug dealer or a legbreaker or involved in any organized-crime capacity at all. Steve’s not a fighter, he’s a lover. The problem is he that loves young women who are visibly below drinking age, which may in fact be putting it generously.

We first meet Steve (Gary Hudson, a hunk) when he blows off the idea that he should break up a rolling-on-the-floor fight between two aggrieved pool players (“fuck ’em, they’re brothers”) in favor of telling a bosomy patron, whose fake ID is probably Mclovin-level, that he gets off at 2am, and (should she play her cards right) she could get off shortly thereafter. Later that night he incurs the shiner, presumably ruining his plans. In our next encounter he’s antagonistic toward Dalton during the meeting in which he fires Morgan and Judy and lays out the rules everyone will be expected to follow going forward.

Then comes Saturday night. When Beverly and Agnes, two women in, let’s say, his target demographic, get stopped at the door for presenting a Sears credit card as ID, Steve swoops in to wave them through. Why? Because he’s been thinking about Agnes, and tonight is a very special night: the night he’ll roger her in the supply room beneath a St. Patrick’s Day banner during his break. (Steve invented the “I was on a break” excuse, which he uses to no avail as he slides his high-cut blindingly white briefs back up and protests his firing. Eat shit, Ross Geller.) Stripped naked as a jaybird and rhythmically fucking her from behind standing up (everyone does their best work on two feet in this film), he pays her the ultimate compliment: “You’re gonna be my regular Saturday night thing, baby!” Then Dalton walks in, looks on in bemusement for longer than is perhaps necessary, then breaks up the party and sends Steve packing. (Dawn Ciccone, the actor who plays Agnes, has a “whoopsie daisy!” look on her face afterwards that’s one of the most endearing things in the whole movie.)

Road House is like Shakespeare in many respects, but foremost among them is its propensity to coin phrases. Most of these—getting “nipple to nipple” as a euphemism for sex, “balls big enough to come in a dumptruck” as an elaboration of “balls of steel,” replacing “does a bear shit in the woods?” with “does a hobbyhorse have a wooden dick?”—are wonderful, vulgar, stupid, and all but impossible to imagine anyone saying in the real world.

But “my regular Saturday night thing” is different. It’s an effective encapsulation of an entire type of relationship: people who like having sex with each other enough to do so regularly, but who are otherwise indifferent enough to each other to keep it on a relatively light schedule, with no real desire to treat it as much more than a thing they do on Saturday nights. Other people might have stayed home to watch the NBC comedy lineup (227, Amen, Golden Girls, Empty Nest, good stuff, I was a religious viewer). Still others might well have come to the Double Deuce, but to dance on tables, or to stab the people who try to get those people to stop dancing on tables, which is the other thing that happens on this fateful night.

But Steve’s desire to be a part of Agnes’s life that begins when they enter the stockroom and ends, I’m guessing, about three minutes later is heartfelt and modest and mercenarily horny enough to resonate beyond the walls of the Double Deuce. It’s the reason Loverboy was working for the weekend. It’s why the Bay City Rollers chanted “ESS AY TEE-YOU-ARE DEE-AY-WHY…NIGHT,” even if their teenybopper audience didn’t realize it. Readers of this series almost certainly have never thought of their sexual partners in terms of getting “nipple to nipple,” but I’d wager more than a few of you have had, or have been, a regular Saturday night thing. If so, I hope your cooler called out sick.

Emmet: It ain’t the money, you understand, but if I don’t charge you somethin’ the Presbyterians around here are likely to pray for my ruination. How does $100 a month strike you?

Dalton: Fine.

Emmet: You can afford that much?

Dalton: If it keeps you in the good graces of the Church.

Emmet: Ain’t it peculiar how money seems to do that very thing.

—Road House

David Brent: [singing] “Who is wrong and who is right? Yellow, brown, black or white?” The spaceman, he answered, “You no longer mind. I’ve opened your eyes—you’re now colorblind.” Racial. So,

—The Office

Aside from having His Name taken in vain, God doesn’t figure much into Road House. That’s worth paying attention to. In the roughly contemporaneous Rocky franchise Rocky wears a crucifix and often prays prior to a big fight, which particularly during his showdown with Soviet behemoth Ivan Drago takes on added political weight. Rambo is crucified in First Blood Part II. Yet despite a down-home setting conducive to that old time religion, the closest Dalton gets to spirituality by contrast is doing tai chi outside with his shirt off and referring to his study of philosophy at NYU as “man’s search for faith.” Though he and Dr. Elizabeth Clay do indeed meet when he goes to the hospital with one of the wounds of Christ—a stab in his side—it’s on the left side rather than the right, and rather than probe it, like Thomas, she seals it, like a doctor. No one’s making room for the Holy Spirit here, so to speak.

Played by “Sunshine” Parker, who was just 61 at the time of filming but looks like something hobbits might meet in an ancient forest, Emmet rents Dalton an outrageously huge and beautiful loft apartment open to nature with a view of the nearby water for one-fifth of what Dalton earns as a cooler every single night. He likes his horses and he likes company, and there you have it. Those are his wants and needs, and a few extra hundred dollars a month are superfluous. Why charge rent when it’s no skin off your ass not to? Why participate in a system that offers you nothing but things you don’t really need?

That this appears to be his attitude toward organized religion—and the film’s, since Emmet and Dalton are consistently portrayed as operating with unerring moral compasses, at least until Dalton commits the sin of despair at film’s end and pays for it dearly—is delightful to me. Sure, it seems thrown in there like it’s a David Brent–style attempt to open people’s eyes, as if anyone’s counting on Road House for enlightenment. But it works. There’s no Jesus, no Bible, not even any talk of praying to the Good Lord in his own way. There’s just a funny old codger summing up Christianity as a chauvinist capitalist scam. Brad Wesley with hymns, pretty much. When you’ve got the man himself to make your life miserable while singing “Sh-Boom,” who needs the hassle of godbotherers?

You can’t make a JC Penney without breaking some eggs. That’s where these fellows come in. Organized crime boss, mall developer, and job creator Brad Wesley employs a small army of goons, thugs, henchmen, minions, and muscle to do his dirty work around the town of Jasper, Missouri. Blowing up an auto parts store, blowing up an old man’s shack, and running over a car dealership with a monster truck are just the most glamorous aspects of the gig: These guys’ main function is to punch people in the face, and get punched in the face in turn. The following is a brief survey of the Wesleyans with speaking parts. You’ll be seeing more of these gentlemen for sure, but this should bring you up to speed.

Morgan

Ornery brute. Originally a bouncer at the Double Deuce. Fired by Dalton because he doesn’t have “the right temperament for the trade.” Doesn’t take it well. Played by pro wrestling legend Terry Funk. Strengths: Looks and acts like a guy who could kick someone’s ass. (Not for nothing did he prompt the “It’s still real to me, dammit!” incident.) Weaknesses: Syllable emphasis.

Pat McGurn

Vicious weasel. Nephew of Brad Wesley. Originally a bartender at the Double Deuce. Fired by Dalton for skimming from the till, sparking the Wesley/Dalton feud. Played by punk legend John Doe. Strengths: Convincingly sleazy mustache. Weaknesses: Uncle’s Boy.

Jimmy

The main man. Wesley’s favorite. Rarely far from his boss’s side. Martial-arts master who fights both Dalton and Wade Garrett to near-standstills. Gets the film’s most famous non-Swayze line: “I used to fuck guys like you in prison!” Played by Marshall Teague. Strengths: Smoldering eyes, witty banter, maniacal laugh, actual fighting skill. Weaknesses: Sore throat.

O’Connor

Middle management. Basso profundo beanpole who leads the expedition to restore Pat to full employment at the Double Deuce, among other crucial tasks requiring minimal competence. Played by Juilliard graduate Michael Rider. Strengths: Business casual wardrobe. Weaknesses: He’s a bleeder.

Tinker

Lummox. Portly core component of the Wesley team. Frequent partner of O’Connor. Partial to trucker hats and suspenders. Played by John Young. Strengths: Comes closer to actually killing Dalton than almost anyone else, inflicting the knife wound that leads to Dalton meeting Dr. Elizabeth Clay; perhaps for this reason he is the only member of the Wesley Organization to find forgiveness and redemption. Weaknesses: Polar bears.

Mountain

The tallest. Towering doofus who serves primarily to dance amusingly during Wesley’s pool party and engage in brief but memorable dick-based repartee with Sam Elliott. Played by Check It Out! with Dr. Steve Brule fry cook Tiny Ron. Strengths: Hell of a dancer, very tall. Weaknesses: “Give me the biggest guy in the world: You smash his knee, he’ll drop like a stone.”

Ketchum

Serious business. Wesley’s most all-American thug. Trusted with the most hardcore tasks. Almost entirely forgettable despite performing several of the film’s greatest acts of villainy unless you’ve seen the movie enough to write about it every day for a year. Played by stuntman Anthony De Longis. Strengths: boot-mounted knife, regular knife, monster truck. Weaknesses: …wait, who are we talking about again?

Karpis

Man of mystery. Piercingly handsome guy in a smart-looking suit worn with rakish dishevelment. Present in background when Wesley’s chopper lands during the character’s introudction. Present in background when Wesley throws a pool party. Wordlessly witnesses Wesley’s punishment of O’Connor for failing to secure Pat’s job. Tosses Red Webster’s store to keep him in line and says “Life is good” as his one line. Vanishes completely from the film after these four scenes. Lives forever in my heart. Played by Joe Unger, aka Sgt. Garcia from A Nightmare on Elm Street. Strengths: Looks like he plays rhythm guitar for Dr. Feelgood or the Strokes circa the $2 Bill show, dangerously sexy. Weaknesses: Barely in the movie, named “Karpis.”

Road House is a film in which a man runs over a car dealership with a monster truck.

Not a car. A car dealership.

He runs it over.

With a monster truck.

They mount a camera between the tires and everything. To capture every nuance. Of running over a car dealership. With a monster truck.

During Wagon Days, no less.

Obviously I’ve known that this happened ever since I first saw the film. I appreciated how over the top it is, even for Brad Wesley and his goons, and even for Road House. The presence of the monster truck at all is…well, it leaps right out at you the first time you see Ketchum drive up to Wesley’s mansion in it, like his brother had borrowed his Mercury Cougar for a trip to St. Louis so he drove his other car to his boss’s house, and his other car just so happened to be a monster truck. But it wasn’t until the other day, when I wrote the phrase “running over a car dealership with a monster truck,” that…no, actually, it was some hours later, when I reiterated the point on twitter. That’s what brought it all home for me. Road House is a film in which a man runs over a car dealership with a monster truck.

It sounds like any other wanton act of vehicular destruction, at first. “Oh yeah, he ran over a c—wait, what?” It takes a second to sink in. The closest point of comparison I can come up with is in the post-show interviews at the end of Waiting for Guffman, when Parker Posey’s character talks about her dad getting out of jail because he didn’t do anything that bad, “he just ruined some property.” Stole, destroyed, sure, whatever, but then you register the word choice. Ruined? Now I’m intrigued. Now I want to know, but also I don’t want to know. You know? Ruining property, like running over a car dealership, is understating an overstatement.

The other film I think of when I think of this moment is Citizen Toxie: The Toxic Avenger IV, because that’s the movie that was in pre-production when I interned at Troma Studios in the summer of 1999. I had very little to do with the finished product; my main contributions were scouting for a production office (unsuccessfully) and taking an uncredited rewrite pass at the screenplay (also unsuccessfully, though interns rewriting screenplays says a lot about Troma).

What I did do was read All I Need to Know About Filmmaking I Learned from The Toxic Avenger, the memoir cum how-to manual by Troma co-founder and creative force Lloyd Kaufman and a then-unknown James Gunn. The idea that’s stuck with me the longest since I read the book, aside from Karo Syrup making the best fake blood, is that if you have any means at your disposal by which to raise the apparent production value of your film, you avail yourself of those means. An eccentric uncle with a crazy-looking house? A rich friend with an insanely nice car? A major urban metropolis with a tourist mecca where there are simply too many people for the cops to catch you should you choose to film someone running naked through Times Square without a permit? (The filming, not the nakedness.) It doesn’t matter whether or not these things are germane to your movie. They look awesome and/or expensive. Make them germane.

I think about this every time I see a movie about barfights at one in the morning set a scene in a Ford dealership in broad daylight where a deranged businessman orders his minion to drive a monster truck through a glass enclosed showroom and over every single new car inside of it. I think about it every time I see the monster truck in this movie at all. Road House had access to a car dealership and Road House had access to a monster truck, ergo Road House has a scene in which a man runs over a car dealership with a monster truck. Those who can, do.

Who is Denise? Denise is Brad Wesley’s girlfriend, and the most stylistically sophisticated and culturally aware human being in the entire film. You can tell this at first glance, and glances are really all you get. Her lines are minimal: She rebuffs a vulgar proposition, makes one of her own, and…that’s it, I realize now. That’s all Denise gets to say.

But she makes an impression, I can tell you that much, and she does so long before she enthusiastically strips on stage at the Double Deuce with Wesley looking on approvingly, some time after he beats her off-camera for coming on to Dalton. Even when the bar looks like it might collapse around her ears at any moment, even when its atmosphere resembles a Tables Ladders and Chairs match more than a nightclub, she’s there with her girlfriends, leader of the pack, out on the town and dressed to kill.

Sure, she attends Wesley’s ludicrous backyard pool party/dance party/orgy/whatever it is. But when he’s not around and she gets her first good look at Dalton, the camera whip-zooms in on her dilated-pupil look of desire like Cupid’s arrow. It’s such a jarring moment in this straightforwardly shot film—easily the most cinematographically adventurous thing that happens—that in any other movie it would indicate the start of a major plotline.

But it goes nowhere beyond her asking Dalton to go to her place and fuck, an offer she cleverly cushions with a rhetorical flourish: “Would you be shocked if I said ‘Let’s go to my place and fuck?'” Yeah, it sounds like the writers don’t understand that “If I said you have a beautiful body, would you hold it against me” is a play on words. But her forthrightness is admirable, as is the fact that she still has her own place and isn’t relying on Wesley’s largesse. Like O’Connor, whom he beats for the crime of bleeding, she knows you can’t count on staying on Brad Wesley’s good side.

By the end of the movie that’s not an issue anymore. Freed from Wesley’s influence and the watchful eyes of his goons, she’d theoretically be able to enjoy more nights out with the girls, in a renewed and revamped Double Deuce that better suits them. But we don’t know. Denise’s final moment in the film is being ridiculed by an uncharacteristically ugly Dalton as a pet that Wesley should keep on a tighter leash. She’s afforded no payback for that slight, or for Wesley’s abuse. Imagine if she’d wielded one of those shotguns instead of, say, Pete Strodenmire, the guy we see in a grand total of one scene before his car dealership gets run over by a monster truck. That would be something, right?

But there’s nothing instead. Awkwardly covering her bare breasts, she gets dragged off stage, off camera, and out of the movie. Freaking Tinker gets a better redemption arc. Still, during that one shot, there’s the promise of a whole world in her eyes—her apartment’s decor, her girls’ nights out, her love for buoyant late-’80s dance pop, her desire for a relationship with Dalton worth risking Wesley’s wrath for, even if it’s only for a night. She is Road House‘s great mystery, its Mona Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam. Who is Denise? We’ll never know. But she’s in there somewhere.

In the beginning was the Mullet, and the Mullet was with Dalton, and the Mullet was Dalton.

Mullet-based humor is now so old that I remember having to make sure the audience knew what mullets were when I wrote a sketch about them for my comedy group in college—in 1998. That isn’t what this about. The very first shot of Dalton in Road House shows the back of his head for a reason.

Please note that the director of photography on this film is Dean Cundey. His credits as a cinematographer include Jurassic Park, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Back to the Future, The Thing, Big Trouble in Little China, The Fog, Escape from New York—a murderer’s row of SFF classics from directors who convey story primarily through image and character through portraiture. The shot of Dalton’s mullet establishes him as recognizable first from behind, and then in silhouette. No one else in the movie has a head of hair anywhere near this magnificent and distinctive.

As the camera tracks in on Dalton, we watch him survey the crowd at the filled-to-capacity hotspot at which he currently works. He nods along absently to the beat of the music played by the band on stage, so absently in fact that his head tilts upward with the beat rather than downward. It reads more like a gesture of regal approval and command than a guy mildly rocking out, because that’s what it is. (He’ll make similar gestures a minute or two later, when he wordlessly instructs the bouncers in his charge in how to handle some ruffians.) At that moment, all is right with his world. The cooler has cooled.

Then things heat up. Dalton turns his face toward the camera and his eyes focus. A cut along his eyeline reveals what he’s looking at: a man soliciting a woman as if she’s a sex worker, putting a hundred-dollar bill down on the table for her services. Insulted, she takes out a knife and slams it downward, pinning the money to the table. Insulted in turn, the man kicks her chair right between her legs, tipping it over and knocking her on her ass. Bouncing and cooling ensue.

Pay close attention to the editing here, by Frank J. Urioste and John F. Link. Between them, and sometimes in tandem, these men cut Die Hard, RoboCop, Predator, Commando, Total Recall, Basic Instinct, Tombstone. They’re as responsible for establishing the rhythm and language of contemporary action-thriller cinema as any two people in the business. Do they cut from Dalton to the troublemakers once the trouble has started? No. They cut slightly before, after the sound of a single broken glass and a raised voice, in a jam-packed nightclub with a rock band playing.

Urioste and Link are not likely to have done this by accident. They’re establishing Dalton’s near-superhuman ability to detect, defuse, and defeat any bar’s bad element. They’re demonstrating what happens when his cooler-sense starts to tingle.

Thanks to these three top-tier filmmakers, Dalton’s mullet is as meaningful and memorable as Batman’s cowl or Darth Vader’s helmet.

You’re sitting down to watch Road House is the first time. The action opens on a big glowing keyboard running down the side of the screen. The camera pans down and you hit a big neon red letter “R.” Awesome, Road House is about to begi—

Huh! “B.” Okay, not what I expected.

“BA.” BAR, it must be BAR.

“BAN.” Okay I give up.

The word is BANDSTAND, which is the name of the bar at which Dalton works at the beginning of the movie. Perhaps Road House will be the name of the bar where he works later on and oh no nevermind it’s the Double Deuce.

The first time I read A Game of Thrones I got confused by the very first proper name I saw: Ser Waymar Royce. This was before the show, and before I really knew anything about the books at all beyond “Tolkien but more hardcore,” so I had no way of knowing “Ser” was just a fantasy-universe way to spell “Sir.” I thought the guy’s name was Ser Waymar Royce, like Jan Michael Vincent or whatever. I can’t tell you how flummoxed I was by this. For some reason “Ser Waymar Royce” feels much more alien and strange than “Waymar Royce,” more alien and strange than I’d anticipated a series described as “The Sopranos with swords” was gonna get, and I had to shift my expectations pretty dramatically—only to shift them right back when I realized it was just a funny way to spell a familiar honorific.

The first time I saw Road House, this sign had a similar effect on me. In its first five seconds the movie went from comprehensible to incomprehensible, on a very small scale of course, but enough to have a disorienting effect that lingered long past the point at which the camera finished revealing the word “BANDSTAND” in radiant crimson. I can’t imagine this was the intent, but the opening shot prepared me for a movie in which anything could happen. In that respect, what followed did not disappoint.

When men look at women in Road House it means trouble. Steve the bouncer ogles his teenage would-be conquests. A husband with a cuckold fetish and a goofball barfly fetishize and fondle his wife’s breasts. A belligerent drunk starts a knife fight when people try to prevent him from watching his girlfriend dance on a table. Brad Wesley throws an absurd string-bikini pool party for his army of goons. A horned-up soldier rushes the stage in the topless bar where Wade Garrett works. Denise strips in front of the Double Deuce’s wolf-whistling bad seeds under Wesley’s approving eye in a strange act of macho-sexual judo. With two exceptions—the superimposition of the film’s title over an anonymous woman’s rear end, echoed by Wade hating to see Doc leave but loving to watch her walk away—the traditional male gaze is an indication that something is wrong.

When men look at Dalton, it’s different. And men look at Dalton alright. All kinds of men, for all kinds of reasons.

When they first meet, goons like Karpis and Jimmy lock eyes with Dalton in staredowns that sizzle with psychosexual challenge. (In Jimmy’s case the sexual element is made abundantly, infamously clear later on in the film.)

Frank Tilghman stares at Dalton and smiles over and over again, like a man seeing his favorite meal on the way over to his table. “I want you,” he says during one such glance, followed in that same conversation with a knowing “I thought you’d be bigger.” “He’s good. He’s real good,” he says to another man during another. Honestly Tilghman is such a strange character that he probably deserves an essay series of his own, but his open near-worship of Dalton is a start.

Both Dalton’s friendly landlord Emmet and his evil neighbor Wesley watch Dalton perform tai chi, shirtless and slick with sweat. Wesley has the look you often see on the faces of men in movies who’ve caught a glimpse of a topless woman through a window. Emmet looks like he’s questioning a whole lot about the world and his place in it.

Wesley even watches Dalton and Elizabeth have sex. You might think that Elizabeth is the object of the gaze here, but at no other point in the film does Wesley bring her up as a point of contention between himself and Dalton, even though their relationship does seem to catalyze a new level of hostility between the two men. There’s no “she’s mine, if I can’t have her no one will,” and when he talks to her about Dalton it’s to express regret that she’s wound up with a lowlife drifter, not to threaten her to come back to him. He only has eyes for Dalton.

And honestly, who wouldn’t? Look at him.

By constantly showing us men who visually appreciate Dalton, Road House models behavior for its primarily male audience. Which is not to say women were not a target as well. Surely a decision was made to capitalize on the sex symbol status of the man who plays Dalton, Patrick Swayze, for the women in the audience—by then he’d starred in the smash hit Dirty Dancing, and another romantic blockbuster, Ghost, was on the horizon; his sex scene with Kelly Lynch set to Otis Redding beat the pottery scene with Demi Moore set to “Unchained Melody” to the punch.

But Road House‘s life since its theatrical release has been one of basic-cable afternoon screenings for dudes. I myself never caught it that way, but I first saw it during a Road House/The Warriors/The Road Warrior triple feature with a bunch of drunk and high friends, which is more or less the same idiom. I came away from my first viewing feeling just an unbelievable amount of affection and admiration for Patrick Swayze, an actor I’d never really thought about at all before. When he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, I held a Road House/Steel Dawn/Point Break triple feature at my place and charged everyone a twenty-dollar donation to pancreatic cancer research for admission. I love Patrick Swayze just as I love Dalton. I believe these shots of men looking at Dalton, capturing the blend of admiration, envy, desire, and awe they feel when they look at him—call it the male swayz—are, at least in part, the reason why.

I’ve been saying this for years, but it’s risky to write about what turns you on. When I first started reading the work of the woman who’d eventually become my partner it was hot in such a raw, unvarnished way—to me anyway, which explains a lot about what happened afterwards—that I wondered if she felt particularly bold or scared or vulnerable just putting it out there. Sex scenes are one thing, pretty much everyone who has sex enjoys it and even people who don’t usually enjoy watching it. But sex scenes, or scenes of sexuality, that tease out or revolve around a specific fetishized behavior aside from the basic forms of erogenous-zone contact or what have you…writing that stuff, or writing about that stuff, is in its own way as revealing as taking off your clothes.

Anyway, the scene in which Double Deuce waitress Carrie Ann sees Dalton nude is the single most erotic thing I’ve ever seen in a movie.

Played by Kathleen Wilhoite in one of the film’s least bizarre, most straightforwardly fun performances, Carrie Ann is what might have been called in earlier times a broad. She’s got a great brassy voice that she uses to dress down the Double Deuce’s belligerent bad element when Dalton first arrives and needs to get the lay of the land, eg. “Don’t let him bahhhther yew—Morgan was born an asshole and just grew bigger.” She’s the only female member of the core cast we ever see throw hands, when she smashes a bottle over a dude’s head during the movie’s first big brawl. Later in the film she’s revealed to have a terrific blue-eyed-soul voice, which she demonstrates by taking lead vocals for the Jeff Healey Band’s cover of “Knock on Wood.” (“I didn’t know she could sing!” announces the most adorable member of Dalton’s bouncing crew as the two men look on, grinning from ear to ear.) During the early-morning breakfast-delivery run she makes to Dalton during this scene, she’s mostly there to dispense greasy food and hard truths about the trouble he’s getting himself into at the bar, with a fuck-em-if-they-can’t-take-a-joke smile on her face the whole time.

That’s what makes her reaction to Dalton’s bare ass, and implicitly other parts, so powerful. This beautiful man’s naked body strikes this seen-it-all chatterbox dumb.

And like, on one level, yeah, of course it does. I mean, look at him.

Carrie Ann isn’t the only woman bowled over by Dalton’s attractiveness—you’ll recall, perhaps, Denise sizing him up—and she’s certainly not the only person to look at him in this way either. Indeed, the way women look at Dalton is largely indistinguishable from how men look at him, which is part of why the “male swayz” is such a standout phenomenon. The gaze of Carrie Ann, Denise et al conditions us for the gaze of Emmet, Wesley, Jimmy, Karpis, Tilghman and so on.

But no one looks at Dalton the way Carrie Ann does, because she’s the only person we ever see looking at him naked. (Dalton and Elizabeth are fully clothed when they start having sex; when they go for round two in the nude, it’s shown from a distance. We never see what Doc looks like when she looks at her man’s bare body.)

Carrie Ann shows up with breakfast the night after Dalton cleaned house at the Double Deuce, waking him up. He moans and groans and staggers out of bed like he’s hung over, which is funny since after he got home from work all he did was look across the way at Brad Wesley’s pool party in between chapters of the Jim Harrison novel he stayed up late reading. (For real.) But he sleeps in the buff, so when he slips out of bed, there he is.

Carrie Ann stops seemingly in mid-thought, like a rabbit in the headlights. Her eyes glaze. Her mouth opens. She gasps audibly. Her eyes heat up and a smile of pure horned-up delight briefly crosses her lips. Finally, she controls herself and looks away, abashed. There’s one final double entendre when he asks her how she tracked him down—”So how’d you find me?” “Oh! I, uh, it wasn’t too hard. I mean…you know what I mean.”—and by then he’s put on his jeans and begun his morning stretching-and-smoking routine. The scene moves on.

But I sure haven’t. Carrie Ann experiences something very rare for women in film: a moment of unguarded lust and guileless sexual objectification of the male body. She’s not doing this for Dalton, or even with Dalton’s observation and reaction in mind, since he’s not looking at her and has no idea what she’s doing. She stares and gasps and grins at him for no one’s entertainment or arousal but her own. Indeed, she’s sure to cut things off before he has a chance to notice and react. Perhaps this is done for his benefit, so as not to embarrass him, or for her own, so as not to embarrass herself. But the effect is that of a woman experiencing sexual desire in a totally personal, private, inviolate way.

What does this mean for us? We become voyeurs of another person’s voyeurism. And because her voyeurism is so accidental and unexpected, there’s a purity to it that avoids the fetish’s usual connotation of sleaze or outright violation, which lets us off that particular hook in turn. Without anyone trying, she gets to see something that turns her on, and we get to see her get turned on, and then it’s over. The eroticism of the moment is brief and blameless and beautiful. The fact that Carrie Ann is herself lovely helps, but it’s almost incidental. Arousal is lovely. Desire is lovely. And here they are, embodied in a moment and preserved, as in amber.

A key piece of the ambience during our introduction to the Double Deuce, the Shirtless Man is an unsung hero of Road House. He’s on screen in the shot that immediately follows the “DIRECTED BY ROWDY HERRINGTON” chyron, shown over the exterior of the Double Deuce as Dalton enters for the first time. This means he’s a tone-setter both in-story and on a meta level. In the Road House world, he is implicitly Dalton’s introduction to the place he’ll be working in, and an indication of the kind of place this is. In the audience, he is implicitly crucial to director Rowdy Herrington’s vision, and an indication of the kind of movie this is.

This pans out in both respects. It’s true that the Shirtless Man does not participate directly in any violence; in the massive, bar-destroying brawl that begins a few minutes after we first see him he’s a non-factor. He’s just a huge blond musclebound cornfed doofus, dancing his ass off to the musical stylings of the Jeff Healey Band. Picture the way Rocky rocks out to Meat Loaf singing “Hot Patootie – Bless My Soul” in The Rocky Horror Picture Show and you’ve got a good handle on his overall affect (and talent as a dancer).

But I think of the Shirtless Man often later in the film, when Dalton institutes his clean-up regime to turn the Double Deuce into a place decent people will want to visit. We’ve discussed some of the personnel changes he makes already. The other problem, as he sees it? The thing that’s keeping “people who really wanna have a good time” away? “Too many 40-year-old adolescents, felons, power drinkers, and trustees of modern chemistry.” It’s unclear into which category the Shirtless Man falls, but it’s almost certainly at least one, if not more.

Sadly, the new and improved Double Deuce has no room for men this brazenly bare-chested. There’s a time and a place for shirtlessness, and it’s on the shore of the lake, doing tai chi. The next time we see the Shirtless Man is on Dalton’s first real night of work there; what he’s wearing wouldn’t pass a high school dress code, but it certainly qualifies as a shirt. After that things really turn around and we never see him again.

Yet his ebullient presence at this stage in the film points out a rare flaw in Dalton’s reasoning. Later in the movie, when Brad Wesley’s knife specialist Ketchum (please note that he is never named in the film, unlike all the other prominent goons who make it to the end, which is a part of why he’s impossible to remember) arrives to rough the place up, Dalton says the place is closed, despite all the people “drinking and having a good time.” Ketchum says that’s why he and his henchmen are there too, and promptly tries to kick-stab Dalton’s head with a high kick from his boot-mounted knife. Dalton doges the kick, catches his leg in mid-air, and bellows “You’re too stupid to have a good time!”

The emotional logic of the fight that follows puts Dalton in the right; he and the bouncers defeat Ketchum and his fellow goons, with a late-arriving Doc looking on. But he didn’t factor the Shirtless Man into his calculations, did he? That big towheaded slide of beef is most likely stupid, and is very clearly having a good time when we see him. You can push him and his kind out to make room for people who don’t violate the basic tenets of entrance into a 7-Eleven, yes, but you can’t erase his existence. Dalton may deny it, but if Road House teaches us anything, it’s that stupidity and good times often go hand in hand, and the Shirtless Man is living proof. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy degree from NYU.

Where to begin with Frank Tilghman. As played by Kevin Tighe, silver-haired proprietor of the Double Deuce is a singularly unpleasant person to observe. He walks like a man who’s sneaking up on you even when he’s coming at you straight on. His smile is stuck in the “leer” setting. His eyes gleam with the dubious good cheer of a man who knows a secret enjoyable only to himself, like the retiree who leaves out bowls of antifreeze for the neighborhood cats, or the assistant manager at the Stop & Shop who occasionally rubs his genitals on the produce. He is the first main character we meet, when he shows up at the Bandstand to hire Dalton; anyone who doesn’t assume he’s the villain from his look and behavior during that sequence should be a prime target of the social-engineering hackers your office information-security training module warned you about. Yet he isn’t the villain, because somehow there’s an even weirder and more inappropriately chipper old man out there waiting for us.

But until we meet Brad Wesley, the only proof of Tilghman’s good intent we have—virtually our only glimpse of his interior self at all—is when he changes the word “FUCK” to “BUICK” in the graffiti next to the Double Deuce’s payphone.

I won’t say I know what you’re thinking, because when Tilghman’s the topic of discussion all thoughts are permitted. But you might be thinking “Changing an obscene lavatory-wall come-on into a classified ad for a used car isn’t necessarily Good Guy behavior. The whole thing smacks of Capital.” That much is true. It’s the way Tilghman goes about this completely ridiculous act of appropriation that indicates his true character.

After hanging up the dangling handset back in the cradle, he notices the vulgar legend “FOR A GREAT FUCK CALL 555-7617,” which stands out amid all the other crude scribbles (“KATHRN THE GREAT & MR. ED” is written in white nearby, for instance) due to its size and bright red color. Looking over his shoulder, as if he’s the dirty-minded solicitor who might get caught by the owner of the bar, he produces a black Sharpie, unconvincingly converts the “F” to “B,” and slips an “I” between the “U” and the “C.” Voila: FUCK is now BUICK. Somewhere out there, the Four Car Salesmen of Jasper, Missouri rest a bit easier. (They’re most likely in Jasper, Missouri, admittedly.)

Then, before smiling in self-satisfied fashion and walking away, comes the coup de grace: He adds a little dot over the “I.” Yes, everything is in all caps, and no, he doesn’t care. He’s going to dot his I’s and cross his T’s, goddammit, even if it costs him in terms of verisimilitude. A man with pretensions to class that unwavering is absolutely a man who’d hire a wandering philosopher-bouncer to clean the joint up for a mid-six-figure yearly salary with no ulterior motives whatsoever. I respect this strange man. Not enough to risk death every night so that his house band doesn’t have to play behind chicken wire for safety’s sake anymore, perhaps, but I respect him.

Dalton has worked at the Double Deuce for a while now, and business is booming. The place is packed every night. The bartenders and bouncers wear jaunty red shirts as uniforms. The band is out from behind the chickenwire. The facade has been remodeled to look like a place the gang from Saved by the Bell might visit. There’s just one problem: Brad Wesley has cut off the liquor supply. Dalton, an excellent cooler but not the most excellent cooler, knows this is no job for one man. He makes a call. (He has sex with the Doc.) Then, as Dalton requested, Wade Garrett arrives. Senpai has noticed him.

Wade Garrett is played by Sam Elliott, and what you’re picturing is almost what you get. The voice is there. The sense that you’re looking at a person who’s more beef jerky than man is there. But this isn’t the fine upstanding cowboy who wishes the Dude wouldn’t use so many cusswords. (Nor even the actual pitchman for beef.) Wade Garrett is a bit dangerous, a bit sleazy, a lot sexy. “Louche” might cover it.

So when Wade Garrett pulls up on his motorcycle, he doesn’t so much dismount the bike as ooze off of it. You can all but hear his bowlegs creak and stretch, smell his two-day post-shower aroma spiked with cigarette smoke and exhaust fumes and hot asphalt, feel him adjust his hips to ensure he’s doglegging in the proper direction within those skinny black jeans.

Wade Garrett looks up at the Giuliani Times Square marquee Frank Tilghman has erected over the former dive bar where young Dalton works, runs his hand over his greasy gray hair, and reads the name aloud: “The Double Douche.” [Sic.]

Why does he pronounce it this way? On one level I assume it’s a tip of the hat to the all-time god-emperor of pronouncing “deuce” as “douche,” Manfred Mann’s Earth Band’s version of the early Bruce Springsteen composition “Blinded by the Light.” Wade does have his shades on, and it is very bright out.

But it’s more than that. It’s a demonstration of Wade’s contempt for anything but the work of cooling itself. You can wrap it up like a Deuce, or a Douche if you will, but beating up the people who beat other people is what he’s here for. No delusions, no pretensions. He came to fight. To quote the man himself when he’s asked “Are you gonna fight, dickless?” a couple minutes later, “I sure ain’t gonna show you my dick.”

And it’s a signal that whatever his affection for his protégé Dalton, he shares little of the younger man’s philosophical outlook. It’s hard to imagine Wade Garrett telling anyone that being called a cocksucker is just “two nouns combined to elicit a prescribed response.” Wade is too much of the wild man, too much the heir to Mifune in Seven Samurai. Wade’s world is one of George Carlin’s seven words, several of which he lets fly before his untimely demise. It’s a world of sweat and blood and sexual fluids. Those are things he understands. Those are things he treasures.

This is not to say that Dalton is a slacker in any of those departments—far from it. It’s just that he maintains a certain detachment from it all. Not so Wade. He’ll pull his sidekick’s ass out of the fire one minute and compliment his sidekick’s girlfriend’s ass the next. He’ll show a woman he just met his pubic hair in order to reveal a wound incurred from a previous woman who was presumably well acquainted with his pubic hair before things went south, so to speak.

Speaking of bad breakups, the horrible crime of passion that haunts Dalton? Wade blames the woman whose husband Dalton murdered with his bare hands more than Dalton himself on account of her never revealing her marital status, and sees it as a simple matter of kill or be killed. Yet he’ll expose intense feelings like that only when pushed by the man closest to him, Dalton himself. Otherwise Wade Garrett is, as Billy Joel would put it, quick with a joke or to light up your smoke. He’s still cracking wise the last time we see him alive, after he’s been beaten half to death.

Put succinctly, Wade Garrett the type of guy to ride hundreds of miles to the rescue of his best friend, then make a sophomoric douche joke when he arrives. There are many ways to be an itinerant bouncer-sage in this world. The path of Wade Garrett is but one, as valid as any other.

This is Keith David. In 1982, he played Childs in John Carpenter’s The Thing. Childs is the primary antagonist for the main character, R.J. MacReady, played by Kurt Russell. I mean, everyone is everyone’s antagonist, but Childs is the person who’s the most openly suspicious of MacReady and hostile to the way he sort of naturally slides into a command position. It’s too much to say the two men must learn to work together to have any hope of defeating the shape-shifting alien that has infiltrated their remote Antarctic outpost, since there’s no learning involved, but they must work together, that’s for sure. The extent to which they do or don’t is, in the end, the final question asked by the film. David plays the character like a pot of water set to boil at any moment; his chemistry with the less demonstrative but no less gruff and argumentative MacReady is considerable, and essential to the success of the movie, which is one of the greatest horror and science-fiction films ever made.

In 1988, David reunited with carpenter for They Live, in which he played Frank. Frank is the primary antagonist for the main character, Nada, played by “Rowdy” Roddy Piper. Again, everyone is everyone’s antagonist in this film, another stone sci-fi/horror classic about distrust and paranoia in a world where alien invaders can look just like you and me. Beneath the anti-consumerist, anti-capitalist, anti-cop, anti-corporate-media agitprop for which it has become justly famous, They Live takes The Thing‘s survival-horror cabin-fever claustrophobia and simply expands it outward, until the entire planet is the remote outpost on which the last sane men and women are trapped. Having slipped on a specially treated pair of sunglasses that enable him to see the true faces of the alien overlords and the mind-numbing subliminal messages they’ve implanted in every TV screen, billboard, and printed page, Nada is one such sane man, but he can’t fight back alone. He needs Frank, a guy even bigger and tougher than himself whom he met while they made just-above-starvation wages at a construction site, to put on the sunglasses and see for himself, so they can join forces and fight the real enemy. Frank, understandably, thinks Nada is out of his mind. The only way he’ll wear the damn glasses is if he is beaten up badly enough to literally be unable to stop Nada from putting them on his head. This is what happens, during an ugly, sloppy, seemingly endless one-on-one brawl in an alleyway that lasts for six full minutes. It’s just Roddy Piper and Keith David whaling on each other, over and over, for roughly the length of “Hey Jude.” In the end, Frank is made to see the truth, and the two combatants become allies. It’s one of the greatest fight scenes ever filmed.

In 1989, David joined director Rowdy Herrington and star Patrick Swayze for Road House, a film that is to men punching other men in the face and torso what the children’s book series Clifford the Big Red Dog is to big red dogs named Clifford, in which he plays Ernie Bass. Ernie is not a bouncer. Ernie is a bartender. He says “Whiskey’s running low.” I think maybe he says hello to Dalton at some point but I’m not sure. He does not fight anyone, at all, ever. Not one punch. Not even a raised voice. Who knows, though. Maybe he helps guard Jasper, Missouri from the forces of evil by Dalton’s side after the end credits roll. It’s possible, anyway. Why don’t we just wait here for a little while. See what happens.

Brad Wesley isn’t the only man in Jasper, Missouri with a goontourage. The employees of the Double Deuce whom Dalton does not fire when he assumes the role of cooler can generally be counted upon to have his back. I don’t think this is just the dubious whipped-dog loyalty of working stiffs to the middle manager who spares their jobs while shitcanning other people instead, either, though god knows we’ve all been there. Dalton brings out the best in good people and the worst in bad people. He’s a moral refinery. Here are the people who emerge purified from the kiln of his character. Most go unnamed, but let us not allow them to go unsung.

Jack

Bouncer. Expressive eyes. Quick on his feet, literally and figuratively. Played by Travis McKenna, whose body type sets him up as the opposite number to Brad Wesley goon standout Tinker, but never used as comic relief (except maybe once, when Brad Wesley goon standout Jimmy uses his prone body as a fulcrum to pole-vault onto the stage at the Double Deuce with a pool cue) and shows much higher levels of emotional intelligence. Fastest-moving character in the film save for Dalton himself. Visibly receptive to Dalton’s advice and instructions. Demonstratively appreciative of his fellow employees’ talents (he’s positively delighted to discover Carrie Ann’s singing voice). Frequently is the first to warn Dalton of Brad Wesley’s bad acts. Most likely to become the Dalton to Dalton’s Wade Garrett sometime down the line. Steve the Horny Bouncer whom Dalton fires due to his regular Saturday night thing calls him “Bear.” No one ever says this character’s name in the movie.

Younger

Bouncer. Just a big ol’ mumble-mouthed meathead, played by Roger Hewlett. Politely raises hand to ask a question during Dalton’s orientation session. Has the least screentime of the three bouncers, leaving the nature of his skill set largely to the imagination. The guy I would least like to tangle with personally, as he seems like he might not notice he’d beaten you to death until long after it was too late. No one ever says this character’s name in the movie.

Hank

Bouncer. The most visually dashing of Dalton’s crew, and the most openly fanboyish about his renowned exploits. Reenacts Dalton’s infamous throat-ripping maneuver, alerting us to this chapter in his checkered past. Frequently takes point in breaking up hostilities prior to Dalton stepping in. Smokes a lot. Played by future real-life murder-suicide perpetrator Kurt James Stefka, because every Lost Highway needs a fucking Robert Blake. No one ever says this character’s name in the movie.

Carrie Ann

Waitress. Singer. Breakfast delivery person. Engine of pure erotic power. Pal and confidante. Just a kickass character in every way. It helps that people do say her name in the movie, that’s for sure. Played by Kathleen Wilhoite and god bless her for it.

Stella

Waitress. Has that weird “German schoolgirl” vibe (description courtesy of MST3K/RiffTrax genius Mike Nelson) common to waitress types circa the filming of the original run of Twin Peaks, which you could probably convince anyone she was a character in as well. Tosses a bottle and hits a nitwit at one point. Played by Lauri Crossman. No one ever says this character’s name in the movie.

Ernie Bass

Bartender. Keith David. Unrealized potential. For some reason people say his name in the movie, though considering how badly he’s wasted who knows why.

The Nameless Bartender

Bartender. Prominent throughout the film. An original employee of the Double Deuce, unlike Ernie, who is brought in when things are flush. Multiple lines of dialogue. No one ever says this character’s name in the movie. No one ever bothered to name this character for the movie. Played by James McIntire, uncredited. There’s gotta be a story here, man.

Cody

Lead singer and guitarist of the Jeff Healey Band. Played by Jeff Healey. Not named Jeff Healey in the movie, though. Plays pretty good for a blind white boy, according to Dalton, with whom he has a long-standing working relationship. Possibly the person who recommended Dalton to Frank Tilghman, though this is never established and neither man seemed to realize the other would be working at the Double Deuce at the time of Dalton’s arrival. Adds much-needed verisimilitude and is a lot of fun to watch and listen to, even if acting is not Jeff Healey’s first calling. Recently I discovered that it’s Cody, not Dalton’s landlord Emmet, who sits on the shore as Dalton and the Doc skinny dip in that water at the end of the movie. They did seem pretty close, certainly.

Cody’s Drummer and Cody’s Bass Player

Drummer and bass player of the Jeff Healey Band. Played by Tom Stephen and Joe Rockman, who are amazingly not related despite both looking like they rolled off the dollar-store Eric Bogosian assembly line in the same batch. Silent observers of the events of the film, a mute Greek chorus. Great hair. No one ever says these characters’ names in the movie, not even “hey, Cody’s Drummer” or “Congrats on the chickenwire coming down, Cody’s Bass Player.”

???

??? That’s him on the left. I don’t know who this man is. This man is in a grand total of one scene, Dalton’s orientation session. This implies he’s an employee of the Double Deuce, but he is never seen before or since. No one ever says this character’s name in the movie. No one ever says his name outside of the movie. No record exists of the actor who played him. No evidence of his existence can be found anywhere beyond these few minutes of footage. Where he’s from the birds sing a pretty song, and there’s always music in the air. LET’S ROCK