“How’d this happen?” Dr. Elizabeth Clay asks Dalton comma James while observing the yawning knife wound in his side. “Natural causes,” he responds, staring at her. “Looks like a knife wound,” she says skeptically, after fingering the skin around the gash; not the first doubter to touch a man’s wound. “Like I said,” he replies, handing her his medical files. (“Saves time,” you’ll recall.)
But I want you to take a good look at this shot. Look at Dalton, naked from the waist up, seated obediently as a woman touches him where he is most vulnerable. Look at the top of the head of Dr. Clay (that’s how she introduces herself, all business, appropriately), her face approaching waist level, looking intently at the liminal place where his body is extruding its vital fluid into the outside world. Look at his eyes as he looks down at her, as hungry and urgent as those of a well-trained but young and rambunctious dog eyeing a Milk-Bone.
Dr. Clay has yet to so much as meet Dalton’s gaze, intent as she is on triage. When she does finally see him, really see him, it’s through the protective panes of her enormous, almost vaudevillian eyeglasses. But Dalton has no such prophylactic barrier in place. He sees her, really sees her, right away. By this I mean he sees her ideal self: a healer, a caregiver, a person who mends bodies rather than breaking them.
“Nice place—they send a lot of business my way,” she jokes when they discuss his place of employment. “I’m hoping to change that,” he replies, with the pride of a Cub Scout telling his den mother he plans to win the Pinewood Derby. Right away he intuits that to get right with this remarkable woman he must recast himself as a healer as well, a healer of an ecosystem rather than an individual.
“All by yourself?” she responds, smiling, with the gently ribbing condescension a parent might use on a child she’s unsure will pick up on the tonal cues when that child announces his intention to rid their town of crime while tucking a towel into the back of his shirt as a cape. She sees him now, looks right into his eyes through those gigantic glasses, and finds him mildly risible, which he is.
What she’s really doing, it becomes apparent in subsequent scenes, is attempting to tuck her obvious physical attraction to this exceptionally physically attractive man back into his medical file where it belongs—a mere physical factoid, bodily trivia, like his nine staples, thirty-one broken bones, two bullet wounds, nine puncture wounds, and four stainless steel screws. And best of luck to her with that.
Yeah, natural causes are at work here, alright. Natural indeed.
Tags: dalton, dr. elizabeth clay, road house