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.
Tags: road house, the bandstand