Dalton and Elizabeth’s first kiss is as much a kiss of acceptance as of romance. Their awkward, oddly hostile first date concluded, they have returned to the parking lot of the Double Deuce so Dalton can pick up his car to drive it back to Emmett’s ranch. They find its tires flattened and its window impaled with an uprooted stop sign. Doc, quick-witted as ever, quips “Your fan club?”
“They are devoted,” Dalton chuckles.
“You live some kind of life, Dalton.” This is delivered as a summation of the night’s conversation. Whether he’s ever been bested, ever been put down, ever wondered why, ever thought about the morality of accepting money to beat people, ever considered whether or not his nice guy act works—in seeing that ruined car Elizabeth appears to realize that these questions are moot. Dalton is a man willing to martyr himself so the kinds of people who’ll fuck up some guy’s car just for doing his job don’t get to do it to other people more vulnerable, less capable of fighting back. She heeds the stop sign, in other words, and lays her doubts to rest, for now anyway.
Dalton doesn’t know this yet. He sees his ruined car and sees, well, a ruined car. Now that part of his life has been displayed to the Doc, along with his battered body. It isn’t a pretty picture. (Not even his perfect physique is necessarily that impressive to someone who’s stapled it shut.)
“Too ugly for you,” he says. In classic Road House fashion this is a statement, not a question. He’s offering an answer of his own.
Then comes the happy surprise, the eucatastrophe, from the mouth of the Doc: “I didn’t say that.”
The kiss that follows (after some awkward seatbelt fumbling) is soft, nearly chaste, one sustained contact with the lips and then a release. It’s a benediction. So much is said with this one kiss that when the time comes for Dalton and Elizabeth to make love, neither feels the need to kiss again until the act has been consummated. To the extent that a kiss is the physical expression of intimacy, what can be more intimate than “I understand”?
Tags: dalton, dr. elizabeth clay, road house, the double deuce