Dalton’s first name is James. There it is, in black and white, in his medical file, next to a drawing of his bare ass. (Not technically true, but you have to admit the resemblance is remarkable.) I forget this, frequently. I forgot it for the entirety of this project, until I happened across this frame while searching for something else in this scene, the one where he meets the Doc. Nothing’s gained by knowing Dalton is more than a mononym. For one thing, it costs him a certain air of humility. Jack, Hank, Younger, Ketcham, Karpis, Stella, Judy, the Uncredited Bartender—half the cast is not afforded the dignity of a name uttered onscreen. Why should Dalton be any different? Because he’s the cooler? That presupposes that, like Superman, he is like them but he is not one of them. That’s not a presupposition I’m willing to make. The Dalton Path is a path of humility, and you must trade in your Mercedes for a hooptie in order to travel it. I wonder if Dalton eschews the use of his first name, to the point where no one, not even his lovers and closest oldest friends, even use it, in order to annihilate the self in this way—like a maester dropping his house name, like a nun adopting the name of a saint, like Jack Napier calling himself Joker to represent his broader brighter outlook on life. Maybe that’s why my brain purges itself of this knowledge regularly, and then purges itself of the knowledge of the purging. It’s not like I could tell you when I learned Dalton’s name, but I know that I did, and I know I forgot it, and I know that I’m remembering it rather than discovering it for the first time, and I couldn’t tell you when any of those events originally took place. There’s a bit in Batman: Year One, by Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli, where the young Batman must dive off a bridge to save the infant of the young James Gordon. In the process he removes his mask, or his mask is removed, or he was dressed as Bruce Wayne all along and had to blow cover to make the save, which was to him more important than preserving his secret identity. Gordon gratefully accepts his still-living child from this strange man, then graciously lies that he’s misplaced his glasses in the confusion, and couldn’t recognize a face glimpsed without them if he tried. I’m sorry; what were we talking about?
Tags: annihilation of the self, dalton, dr. elizabeth clay, james, road house