“So, it’s come at last. At last, it’s come. The day I knew would come at last has come, at last.”
—“A Mother Doesn’t Matter Anymore,” Bye Bye Birdie
The most infamous line in Road House was not in the script. That much we can agree on. Marshall Teague, the actor who says it, claims it was improvised and given the seal of approval by on-set super-producer Joel Silver. Rowdy Herrington, the director, says it was Silver’s invention. Whoever the author, their work is not present in the basic-cable cut of the film, for obvious reasons. Few pleasures have I known greater than watching Road House in the company of men who considered themselves Road House superfans but who had never seen the uncut R-rated original article, only to arrive at this line. It’s a moment the phrases “Holy shit!” and “What the fuck?” were made for.
Why is that? Because it’s the moment when the band-aid gets ripped off, the pustule is pierced and drained, and the sexualized violence toward and involving Dalton is finally made manifest. No more talk about taking Dalton, no more innuendo about how we thought he’d be bigger, no more homosocial power-dynamic establishment with words like “son” or “boy” or “mijo“—this is just Dalton’s would-be nemesis stating outright that in other circumstances, fights like this ended with him raping the bested combatant.
Yet despite its awful—I was gonna say implications, but it’s not implying anything, is it? It’s coming right out and saying the awful thing. Yet despite that, the line does not short-circuit our enjoyment of the film, or even of just this fight scene, the way you might expect it to. In part that’s because our society does not take prison rape seriously and never has. In part it’s because Jimmy is about to get his in a way that’s even more spectacular and gruesome than the line itself. And in part it’s because Road House is a cavalcade of outrageousness from the start. Every yokel and goon who gets punched in the face, every gratuitous ass and boob shot, every ridiculous line reading by some weird old crank, every arrhythmic scene in which Brad Wesley does twelve contradictory things, every explosion, every monster truck, every mention of the concept of famous bouncers—all of it prepares us to weather virtually any storm to come our way. “I used to fuck guys like you in prison?” Okay, sure. What else ya got?
Tags: dalton, I used to fuck guys like you in prison, jimmy, road house