She sees it all. Dr. Elizabeth Clay catches up to Dalton in time to see him deliver the coup de grace to an unarmed, helpless man. She watches the man she loves raise his hand, slam it down onto another man’s throat, and tear that throat clean out. She sees him kick the man’s corpse into the water. She runs into the water, drags the body back on shore, examines his wound. She is desperate not to have seen what she has seen—to believe that somehow this man (with whom she must have some acquaintance given her one-time closeness to his master, Brad Wesley) survived what her man did to him. But it is not to be.
And standing there, watching her, seeing her see him, is that man, Dalton. When the camera first shows him after tracing Doc’s triage for some time, he is hunched over, staring at the red wet mess of his right hand. He looks wretched, like a wretch, shocked and shame-faced and horrified to have been seen like this.His posture is that of a Gollum, but written all over his face is the “Don’t look at me” plea of Frank Cotton from Hellraiser or Frank Booth from Blue Velvet. He has the mien of a masturbator who’s been caught at the end of the act by his devoutly Catholic mother and is preparing himself for punishment. There’s something very palpably rooted in sexual shame and compulsion in the way Swayze plays this moment. This is not a side of himself he has ever wanted any women to see, but when the time came, he simply could not help himself.
Tags: dalton, dr. elizabeth clay, road house, the beach fight