“This has been, without question, one of the worst weeks of my life, but one man offers succor.” I tweeted this with the above picture a few minutes ago, as I sat down to write today’s Road House essay. I knew exactly what I was going to write about, too. I knew the scene, knew the moment, knew the angle, knew how to flesh it out. It’s one of the ideas that made me want to start this project in the first place. So I’ll get to it, probably soon, and I’ll enjoy it and hopefully you’ll enjoy it as well. But wasn’t until I opened up WordPress in a new tab that I realized the thing I posted on twitter before writing today’s Road House essay is today’s Road House essay.
I’m not going to talk about the week I’ve had, or why it’s been so bad, bad enough that as I type this I am home alone with my stepson instead of out with my partner and our friends because we were supposed to go to an all-sad-songs karaoke party together and I am too sad for Sad Song Karaoke. It’s not really my story to tell anyway. I’ll tell you what is, though: Road House. I don’t think I ever fully understood the concept of “comfort viewing” until Road House came into my life. I don’t think there’s any other film like Road House out there. Viewed communally, which is how I watched it the first time, it’s joy, an invitation to participate in the kind of drunken cinematic mental and verbal horseplay that always makes me think of Ozzy Osbourne saying “eat shit and bark at the moon.” It’s a bark at the moon movie. Viewed in a more intimate setting, with just one or two people who’ve never seen it before, it’s the closest thing to taking a child to an amusement park and seeing a world of delight open up before their eyes, seeing it through their eyes, that I’ve ever found this side taking my daughter to Coney Island for the first time. I have yet to screen this movie for any first-timer who didn’t fall in love with it immediately. Viewed with the person I love it feels like a comfortable couch, a long conversation punctuated by bursts of laughter, the easy romantic camaraderie of talking lightly while getting dressed after sex, a car ride soundtracked by songs we both adore, a hit of Gorilla Glue and a sip of Noah’s Mill, a shared secret, a private joke, a glance that means something to us and no one else. Everyone has these things, but no one has our things; that’s how Road House works. Returned to in isolation day after day, night after night, it has proven to be an inexhaustible source of pleasure and inspiration. This dumbass brilliant movie about a famous bouncer’s duel to the death with an unhinged 7-Eleven franchisee and his army of hapless meatheads for the soul of a town populated exclusively by beautiful blonde women, howling yahoos, and the living embodiments of old man smell is a case study in the rewards of close reading, the powers and boundaries of genre and style, the maxim held close to my heart that the energy of every character in any story can be kinetic rather than potential. At the heart of it all is Dalton, warrior, philosopher, guru, hero, lover, killer, smoker, fighter, fatherless son, living breathing erasure of class distinctions, poet of one-liners and vulgarities, preternaturally calm, childishly petulant, soul of a Blake and body of a Baryshnikov in a world that has made him a gladiator, a prophet and a pusher, partly truth partly fiction, a walking contradiction, played by a beautiful man who once said of the cancer that would go on to kill him “I’m in great condition. I’m a cowboy. I’m a dancer. I’ll beat this.” Every punch in the face, every grotesque insult, every dumb joke, every inexplicable line reading, every grin on Ben Gazzara’s face, every sauntering step Sam Elliott takes, every white-blues song on the soundtrack, every remarkable mutant in the cast, every glimpse of Dalton’s face and hair and chest and ass and credo feels to me to have sprung from the heart of the man that said those words—the cowboy and the dancer who raged against the dying of the light. This has been, without question, one of the worst weeks of my life, but one man offers succor.
Tags: dalton, road house