Here lies Brad Wesley.
Some thoughts:
- “Look how they massacred my boy.”
- The way the ruins of the coffee table frame his body, like a portrait in a picture frame, reminds me of his exchange with Dalton over the picture of his grandfather: “Looks like an important man.” “He was an asshole.” The apple doesn’t die far from the tree.
- I don’t think we’ve adequately discussed how willfully bizarre it is to have this little living-room set right in the middle of dozens, possibly hundreds, of stuffed and mounted animals killed on safari. Can you imagine coming over to Wesley’s house for, I don’t know, a Christmas party or a football game, and he invites you to sit amid the carcasses and make merry with him? “I see you’ve found my trophy room. The only thing that’s missing…is your ass…on my sofa! Have a seat, make yourself at home. You want anything? Have a bloody mary? Some breakfast? At least let me get you some coffee. Oh, that? That’s a water buffalo I shot to death. Milk and sugar? You take it black?”
- The good news is that the blood should come right off of that naugahyde.
- Next to Wesley’s right leg you can see one of the magazines he had on his coffee table before he was shot four times and sent flying through it. I can’t stop thinking about it. Did he while away an afternoon flipping through it earlier that week, not knowing it would one day soon rest beneath his corpse? Or was it just for show, or for company? Do you think Brad Wesley was much of a reader?
- Ben Gazzara was a hell of a sport, getting wired with that many squibs. If they’d gone off all at once he’d have exploded like a smashed watermelon.
- The question of Brad Wesley’s will was not one I’d entertained until this very moment. With most of his close associates, including his sister-son Pat McGurn and his bastard son (never officially acknowledged or legitimated) Jimmy Reno, dead, who would his worldly belongings and fortune go to? Could his “Jasper Improvement Society” protection racket now become a legit fund for civic development?
- His battered girlfriend Denise deserves the money, that much I can say. In my mind I’ve written a happy ending for her where she tricked the old bastard into signing a document leaving everything to her without reading it over, like she said it was a release form for her Jazzercise class or something, and she gets to take over his mansion and his money and his interest in the 7-Eleven and live happily ever after. The dead animals would be the first things to go.
- Goodbye, Brad Wesley. You were a truly demented person and a one-in-a-million movie villain. I’ll miss you, and I hope they have JC Penneys in hell.
Tags: ben gazzara, brad wesley, road house