“I see you’ve found my trophy room, Dalton,” Brad Wesley cries into the darkness. “The only thing that’s missing…is your ass.”
There is much to consider here, much to ponder, much to weigh to a nicety in the scales of our wisdom. First there is the trophy room itself, a genuinely obscene spectacle of severed heads and often entire animals, stuffed and mounted for the amusement of the man who murdered them. Put more simply, that’s a buffalo, that’s multiple bears, that’s a whole-ass giraffe in there. Brad Wesley shot and killed a giraffe, then had it shipped back home from safari and loaded, perhaps by the very goons whose corpses now join it, into his basement-level rumpus room. Dalton’s entrance into this forbidden chamber offers him one last and true glimpse of Brad Wesley’s mind. This is what the contents of the man’s brain look like: victims, always victims, always made to suffer and die, added to his personal collection of victories over those weaker, or worse armed, than himself.
Second there is Brad Wesley’s choice of words. The “trophy room” bit is easy enough to parse, as we’ve seen: Brad Wesley collects the dead bodies of his vanquished foes as keepsakes. But “the only thing that’s missing—” dot dot dot “—is your ass”? That is a giraffe of a different color.
Brad Wesley would hardly be the first man, or even like the fifth man, to sexualize his violent intentions toward Dalton by mentioning his body in such a way. (Arguably Jimmy would still be alive, and Dalton dead, had Jimmy refrained from the whole “I used to fuck guys like you in prison” thing and just snapped Dalton’s neck or whatever.) But there’s not even a double-entendre involved here in the sense that Brad Wesley is literally saying he’d like to have Dalton’s ass stuffed and mounted.
Not that way, no, of course he can’t possibly mean that way, not Brad Wesley. It’s just a figure of speech. The look of glee on his face when he says it, eyes widening, mouth stretching into a broad smile despite having witnessed the slaughter of his entire entourage? Just spoiling for a fight, no doubt. A few minutes later when he tries to impale and then beat Dalton with a spear? Mere coincidence that this was the only weapon to hand, I’m sure, nothing more to it than that.
But these are the stakes as we move toward the climactic confrontation, the final battle, The End of the Story. Brad Wesley wants to complete his trophy collection by stuffing and mounting Dalton’s ass. He said so himself. Wrestle with that.
Tags: brad wesley, dalton, fight scenes, i see you've found my trophy room dalton, road house, the only thing that's missing...is your ass