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.
Tags: carrie ann, dalton, desire, kathleen wilhoite, patrick swayze, road house