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.
Tags: brad wesley, dalton, denise, road house