The very first people to give Dalton shit upon his arrival in Jasper aren’t Brad Wesley and his goons. They aren’t the corrupt members of the Double Deuce’s staff. They aren’t even Knife Nerds or other random ne’er-do-wells among the club’s clientele. They’re a biker gang, in the Double Deuce’s parking lot. “Mer-SAY-dees!” they whoop it up as Dalton parks his luxury work of German engineering in the unpaved unloading zone for the town’s worst element, glaring at him all the while. “Hey hotshot! What’s wrong with Dee-troit cars?” Dalton simply stares back at them and their bikes and their very cool ’80s bad-guy car, tosses away his cigarette, and goes about his business. You and I are left with more to ponder.
At first blush it’s just a bit of color, a way to convey that the Double Deuce is a rough and tumble environment before you so much as step through the doors, in the same way that watching Morgan the evil bouncer toss a guy through those doors a few seconds later (“Don’t come back, peckerhead!”) lets you know what you’re in for once you set foot inside. What makes it a uniquely Road House bit of color how none of it has the slightest relevance at any point in the future, and how no element of it is ever heard from again.
Are biker gangs a threat Dalton will face in his quest to clean up the Double Deuce, and eventually the entire town of Jasper? No. Not even a little bit, in fact. The problems all stem from Brad Wesley, the Fotomat King, and his merry band of assholes. This is Road House, not The Road Warrior. Though Dalton and Brad Wesley could well be the Mad Max and Lord Humungus of the post-guzzoline Missouri wastelands should it come to that, this is merely informed speculation.
Is there a slobs vs. snobs angle to the movie? Again, no. For one thing Dalton always stows away his fancy car and uses a ringer instead once he starts working, so he doesn’t even bring the Mercedes back to the Double Deuce, or anywhere else for that matter, until the end of the film. He doesn’t ostentatiously spend his money, or wow the local yokels with his citified ways, or even crow about his NYU philosophy degree to woo Dr. Elizabeth Clay. What’s wrong with Dee-troit cars? Nothing, as far as he’s concerned. (This is a question better directed at Brad Wesley.)
Maybe these guys play a role in the ensuing all-hands-on-deck barfight, the movie’s first? Once again, no. The instigators and all the primary combatants are just the usual drunken shitbirds and meatheads. While it is true that one of the bikers miraculously appears inside as the Shirtless Man about twenty seconds later, this is down to Road House‘s charmingly free-form approach to continuity, rather than the idea that this guy somehow raced around to a back entrance, bared his chest, and started boogying down in the time it took Dalton to cross the parking lot and enter from the front. The Shirtless Man, at any rate, is a dancer, not a fighter.
But in their own pointless way, the bikers illustrate the importance of Dalton’s First Rule: “Never underestimate your opponent. Expect the unexpected.” Your enemies could look like anyone, come from anywhere, and attack at any time, even if their offense consists solely of “Buy American” jingoism. A cooler of Dalton’s experience and skill would have devised a plan for combatting these creeps within seconds, and likely kept it filed away throughout the course of the film, in case Brad Wesley ever hired them to run his clunker off the road, or prevent him from accessing one of Jasper’s many auto and auto-parts dealerships—or, less facetiously, bring the fight to grizzled old road dog Wade Garrett before he so much as parks his motorcycle. Indeed, one could argue that Dalton’s purchase of a beat-up car to replace his Mercedes was his way of defeating these opponents by depriving them of their casus belli. Victory is his before battle is joined.
Tags: bikers, dalton, road house, the double deuce, the first rule, the shirtless man