“You’re a dead man,” Morgan tells Dalton when he gets fired. Carrie Ann, Morgan’s now-former coworker, may not share his idiosyncracies regarding where to place the emphasis when speaking, but she does share his sentiment.
The morning after Dalton’s momentous first night in the Double Deuce’s employ, Carrie Ann heads over to his luxury barn to feed him breakfast and, lucky for her, see his bare ass and reenact that gif of Ariel the Little Mermaid leaning on a rock as a huge gush of water erupts around her as a result.
But she brings business to go along with her culinary and visual pleasure. Firing Pat McGurn, one of the Double Deuce’s bartenders, is something Dalton should not have done, she tells him. As a mostly mute (but for grunting and an admittedly sincere-sounding “thank you”) Dalton sits down with a lit cigarette in his mouth and no shirt on his torso, disgustedly tossing aside the bacon and egg sandwich or whatever it is she brought him and moving in on the coffee, Carrie Ann starts cracking up while saying “Oh my god.”
“What is the joke,” Dalton asks, sounding like a cop on a TV show who just got a call at 3:30am saying there’s been another homicide down at the docks.
“Well, there’s no joke,” Carrie Ann says. “I just think I’m looking at a dead man, though.”
“Seems everywhere I go I hear that same joke,” Dalton mutters, shaking his head.
“Yeah? Well, something tells me you bring it on yourself,” Carrie Ann says saucily, nibbling on her breakfast in eating the popcorn/sipping the tea mode.
The variation in affect between the two actor makes it tempting to write this scene off as a minor bit of light-comedy character building. Dalton, who is hung over from a long night reading A River Runs Through It, is gruff and world-weary, too tough to worry and too tired to care. This is just how he lives his life: an endless cycle of naked wake-ups, shirtless stretching, cigarette-flavored coffee for breakfast, some tai chi or perhaps hitting the heavy bag for a workout, grabbing an unstructured jacket, heading to work to get stabbed by various men in the course of kicking their asses, repairing the damage done to his car by those men on their way off the premises, driving back to his luxury bachelor pad right next to the horse pen, taking off his shirt, reading a book, spying on Brad Wesley’s in-ground pool orgy, and finally doffing his jeans and hitting the sack. If during the course of those events people pronounce him a dead man, it’s a job, it’s nothing personal. And Carrie Ann is just the platonic female foil, the funny best friend, who’s able to poke holes in his machismo but not actually call his narrative into question or anything of that threatening nature.
But Carrie Ann, the drinking man’s Cassandra, also knows well that the only person who can truly save Dalton is himself. A warning out of professional courtesy, a gesture of solidarity with a new friend, an excuse to go over to the hottest guy in town’s place—it’s probably all three of these things. But in reality what he’s saying is “I can’t help being what I am,” as a stoic positive; she’s saying it too, but as a cheerily black-comic negative. Worst of all, it’s a direct challenge to the Rules. All that talk about expecting the unexpected, remembering it’s a job, it’s nothing personal, be nice until it’s time to not be nice, watch my back and each others’, and so on…earns him death threats “everywhere I go”? Okay dude, her twinkling eyes and cocked head seem to say, it’s your funeral. We’d expect no less of a dead man.
Tags: carrie ann, dalton, dead man, kathleen wilhoite, patrick swayze, road house, staff, the double deuce