“Work ain’t work when you’re having fun.” By Jimmy’s own definition, then, his bit of late-night = espionage outside the Double Deuce, where he and Ketchum catch Dalton and the Doc meeting up, isn’t work. The two men are having an absolute blast discovering that their boss Brad Wesley’s ex-wife is dating his new-in-town nemesis.

“Uh-oh…” says Ketchum wryly as they take it all in.

Jimmy chuckles, rears his head back slightly, and says “Dig a hole.”

The two men then chortle and guffaw at the prospect that one or more of the people they’re spying on will be slain and buried in an unmarked grave for the crime of being an item. It’s all in the way you tell it, I guess.

It’s a noteworthy moment for several reasons. First, it’s one of the few chances we have to see goons goon it up all on their own: no one to intimidate, no one to suck up to, just two peers enjoying their job together. We’ve seen how different Dalton feels under similar circumstances, chatting with old friends like Cody and Wade Garrett. We’ll see a bit more of it among the goons near the end of the film, when Pat, Morgan, and Tinker take a few moments to discuss a young woman of their acquaintance, before Dalton assaults the mansion they’re guarding and murders most of them. The same principle applies here. Left to their own devices, out from under the watchful eyes of either Dalton or Wesley, they’re good-time Charlies. In actor Marshall Teague’s full-throated rumble, “Dig a hole” may as well be “Laissez les bon temps rouler.”

Second, we get a glimpse of how they see their own boss through this instinctual, jocular reaction to what they’re observing. They don’t say “Uh-oh, I wonder what the boss is gonna say,” or even “Uh-oh, the boss is gonna be pissed.” They jump straight to “Uh-oh, it’s murderin’ time.” When they see Brad Wesley’s ex with another man, they just assume that someone’s gonna die for it, presumably at their hands or the hands of their fellow goons. It’s just how things are done here in Jasper. This off-hand wise-aleck remark reveals as much about life under Brad Wesley as Karpis tossing Red Webster’s store or the whiskey getting cut off at the Double Deuce. More, perhaps.

Third, see the eyelines in that image above? Jimmy and Ketchum are looking downwards from the front seat of their vehicle to spy on Dalton and the Doc. That’s because their vehicle is a monster truck.

Admittedly, such a vehicle presents certain advantages on a reconnaissance mission, providing mobile high ground from which to observe the surroundings. On the other hand, and see if you follow me here, they drove a fucking monster truck to a stakeout. 

They’re in the same goddamn parking lot, no less! It’s not like they could be inconspicuous if they wanted to, but they’re not even trying to hide it.

Why do neither Dalton nor Elizabeth notice the professional killers staring at them and yukking it up while perched some ten feet in the air in a comically massive motor vehicle? Maybe all that smoke blurred Dalton’s vision. Maybe his cooler-sense fails him when he’s horned up. Maybe there are enough monster trucks tooling around the streets of Jasper that Dalton would have no reason to believe this is the one driven by the guy who tried to kick him to death. Maybe—and again, stay with me here—it’s an extremely goofy movie. It’s a matter of opinion, I suppose, and you know what they say about opinions. Just remember, “Dig a hole” is not an opinion. As far as Jimmy’s concerned, it’s a spoiler.

Dalton is in a Western whether he wants it or not. That’s the message sent to him by Dr. Elizabeth Clay, who greets him as they meet up for a late-night rendezvous by saying “I hear you’re the new marshal in town.” “You heard wrong,” he response perfunctorily; he’s said “Opinions vary” with more force. I think that after the decision to not be nice to Brad Wesley, to treat it as personal rather than a job with Brad Wesley, Dalton is still struggling with that decision. The enormity of it pains him, as life changes forced upon us by circumstance often do. He can live with threats, obviously; that’s the nature of his job. But the meaning of the threats, the rationale behind them, his culpability in soliciting them by doing what he’s doing regarding Wesley—all of that is new, and hard to swallow. As late as their post-coital pillow talk several minutes or hours or whatever later he’s still talking about moving on, getting out of Jasper, finding a new adventure. He’s talking about it to Elizabeth, no less, whom he’s just bedded down (or rather bedded up). She’s the one who asks then, just like she’s the one who brings up the idea that he’s a lawman taming the Wild West, thwarting outlaws and bandits one barfight at a time, now. She additionally notes that his body will give out early at the rate he’s going through injuries, inflicted and sustained. She recognizes the tension at work in Dalton: His instinctual pursuit of justice and order and his determination to be a man bound by no law or order stand at odds. She, like he, is content to fuck away the difference for the time being. It’s amazing, the balm that a little pleasure can be in a life that’s fundamentally unsustainable.

It looks uncomfortable, like it would strain his back and abrade hers. It looks lackadaisical, like two grown adults couldn’t be bothered doffing the oceans of loose-fitting fabric in which they’re garbed before starting. It sounds awkward, since the verbal foreplay in which the participants engage consists solely of the woman discussing her ex-husband and her uncle. It sounds incongruous, with all of the above soundtracked by the platonic-ideal lust and soul and yearning of Otis Redding’s “These Arms of Mine.” It feels abrupt, as their hands move to each other’s belt buckle and underwear before their lips meet, when a kiss has only been teased. It feels brazen, as she takes him inside herself/he puts himself inside her after the briefest gesture in a kiss’s direction. It’s intimate, this decision to make love while deliberately eschewing certain forms of intimacy as if superfluous to the intimacy already established. It’s silly, so much so that first she and then he laugh in the middle of it from the sheer sexy ridiculousness of it all. It’s hot, watching this process unfold from zero, seeing two beautiful people get horny, knowing what’s happening to his body and to her body as a result, watching them do what bodies in those conditions are designed to do. It’s right there in front of us, the camera bringing us up close against their faces, their hips, their hair, their hands, his undulating body, her grasping legs. It’s Patrick Swayze and Kelly Lynch having sex standing up against a wall made of huge rocks. It’s the sex scene from Road House. It stands alone.

“It’s quiet,” Dalton says. “The horses let me know if anybody comes around.”

“I love it,” Elizabeth replies, her smile and voice as warm and sincere as if she had just gotten her first glimpse of her new dream home, which she has.

She doesn’t know that yet, of course, but why wouldn’t she fall in love with Dalton’s barn loft apartment. She met up with him earlier that night with the expectation of having sex with him provided nothing goes egregiously wrong, and so far so good. She’s into this guy. And this apartment could not be more this guy if he’d designed it himself.

Think of it this way. Dalton lives in a structure created to house the comforts that animals require. The closest neighbors are horses. The room is open to the outside world, allowing him free egress. It’s a place for a domesticated but still half-wild thoroughbred animal to rest, relax, and refuel before charging back out into the world unimpeded. This is Dalton’s stable, and the barn door is perpetually wide open. This horse can get loose anytime he wants. In the meantime, of course, he’s available for rides.

Or rather, Dalton and Dr. Elizabeth Clay do not sell their collective soul to rock ‘n’ roll. As Dalton flips on the radio to find some mood music, they get as far as one complete recitation of the titular phrase from the song by German heavy metal band Bullet before wrinkling their noses, nodding “no,” and changing the channel. It’s 1989, and a quick listen of that high, multi-tracked vocal chorus reads “hair metal.” It reads inauthenticity, pretty boys, heshers, idiots, poseurs, L.A.—you could just as well say “40-year-old adolescents, felons, power drinkers, and trustees of modern chemistry.”

My pop-cultural awareness began in 1988, when my grandmother got me Appetite for Destruction for Easter. It blossomed fully, to the point where I consider it the dawn of my life as a thinking consumer of popular culture, the very summer Road House came out, in the form of Tim Burton’s Batman. In between there somewhere, I started watching MTV. As such I can assure you that didn’t need to have Nirvana in the zeitgeist to figure that there was something suspect about hair metal at the time. You didn’t even turn your nose up at metal entirely. Metallica were gigantic already, thanks to the video for “One.” Living Colour and Faith No More had absolutely massive alternative-inflected hits with “Cult of Personality” and “Epic,” emphasizing groove rather than shimmy and slink. And though no one appreciates this now, Guns n’ Roses’ oppositional relationship to the poodle-haired likes of Poison, Slaughter, Winger, and their close personal enemies Mötley Crüe genuinely made Axl Rose the John the Baptist to Kurt Cobain’s Jesus Christ. It was that distinct.

Of course I doubt any of this would be relevant to Dalton and Doc. When we first hop into his Benz as he departs the parking garage back in New York (the “what do I look like, a valet?” scene), the station on the radio is 102.7. That’s WNEW, New York’s storied home for classic rock. You weren’t getting anything flashier than “Rebel Rebel” or Thin Lizzy on that. As we see from his friendship with Cody, roots rock—white blues, blue-eyed soul, and most likely the original African-American article as well—are Dalton’s specialty. Sure enough, the moment he stumbles across the opening “These…arms…of…miiiiiiiiine” from Otis Redding’s torch song of the same name, Dalton does not touch that dial.

The interesting thing here is that Bullet are not hair metal, not really. Here, have a look and a listen:

Mustaches? In my hair metal act? Not bloody likely. This is just straight-up party metal, its fast-paced rockin’ boogie part of a transitional sound that combined the increased punk-inspired ripped-denim sneer of the genre as displayed by New Wave Of British Heavy Metal bands with the sweaty good-time glam of Slade, the New York Dolls, Thin Lizzy to a certain extent, and the like. This was a popular move at the time—ask Quiet Riot or Twisted Sister, to say nothing of the Brits themselves—and there’s no reason Germans couldn’t do it too. (One look at the album cover will have you thinking of Spinal Tap’s faster-paced parodies, like “Tonight I’m Gonna Rock You Tonight”; that movie also came out in 1984.)

But Road House needed something that signified all that bad shit I listed above, and whether because it was cheaper or because music supervisor and future Interscope head/Beats by Dre billionaire Jimmy Iovine didn’t want to alienate his Sunset Strip contacts, Bullet got the nod. And insofar as the song sounds like the soundtrack to a barfight, perhaps it wasn’t such a bad choice. Dalton just does to the song what he’d do to its physical equivalent: end it quick.

So here’s the game Dalton lays down in the run-up to sexual intercourse with Dr. Elizabeth Clay. He speaks first.

<switches on “These Arms of Mine” by Otis Redding>

<takes off jacket while stalking Doc backwards around the room>

“So I saw your picture in Red Webster’s place.”

“He’s my uncle.”

“Nice old guy.”

“He raised me after my parents died. It’s why I came back here. Now we take care of each other.”

“So how come you never got married?”

“I did.”

“What happened?”

“Didn’t work.”

“Why?”

“Guess I picked the wrong guy.”

The next thing you know, and I mean the next thing you know, both Dalton and Dr. Elizabeth Clay have exposed their genitals to one another.

You think I’m fucking around here? Watch the damn sex scene. He puts on the song, he starts backing her up around the room while taking off his jacket, he brings up an old man, she talks about how he raised her after the death of her parents and how she moved back to town to take care of him, he asks her why she never got married, she says she did but it didn’t work out, and bam, they whip out each other’s junk before they so much as kiss.

Excepting actual real-world atrocities I think you’d be hard pressed to find topics of conversation less erotic than what Dalton goes with while he’s clearly mustering up an erection he intends to insert into his willing partner. “Why does a crusty old fart have your picture on his wall” and “Why are you a spinster.” Guaranteed panty-droppers, huh?

But let’s not discount her replies. “My parents died when I was just a kid” and “I have elder-care responsibilities” and “I’m divorced,” says the woman who showed up at his work and went back to his place with the express intention of banging him. That’ll get a fella’s engine revving!

People focus on the Otis Redding, the accessing each other’s engorged genitals without kissing first, and the stand-up sex against a wall made of large rocks. It’s hard to blame them for that. And it’s not as if their body language and facial expressions track with what they’re saying in any way, so if you’re focused on that, which, look at them, why wouldn’t you be, then it’s understandable that you’d miss the chatter. But foreplay conversation that could fell a tree and reduce a swamp to a dust bowl should be included in any connoisseur’s discussion of the sex scene from Road House. After they say what they say it’s a miracle of the Dalton Path that they’re able to have sex at all.

By now they have put on the mood music, talked their weird talk, stalked or been stalked anxiously around the room. They have looked into each other’s eyes. He has touched her face, her hair. He has unbuttoned her blouse, exposed her breasts. He has rested his forehead against hers. She has put her hands on his shoulders, his chest. But no kiss, no, not yet. Just the promise of one, the suggestion of one, a feint in the direction of one. Lips a fraction of an inch apart, passing like ships in the night that will soon reroute and collide, though not before other vessels well to their south come together first.

A friend—one of the friends with whom I first saw Road House, now that I think of it—once told me back in my comics-critic days that I was effectively three critics in one. There was, he said, the guy who loves horror, the guy who cares a lot about properly staged action sequences, and (the briefest abashed pause here, if I recall correctly) the horndog. This felt pretty fair to me at the time. Add long takes to the mix and you’ve pretty much nailed my interests as a critic of film and television as well. Which is why it may surprise you (and him!) to learn that until two days ago, I had no idea that Kelly Lynch got her tits out during the sex scene from Road House.

Afterwards? Sure. I mean, they’re pretty hard to miss. As is her butt, and Patrick Swayze’s butt before it, and Sam Elliott’s pubic bush after it, and the topless dancers, and Denise’s strip tease, and Horny Steve and His Regular Saturday Night Thing, and (if we’re simply counting sexy bodies prominently displayed, not nudity specifically) Swayze’s glistening torso, and even Well-Endowed Wife’s pair of attitudes. This is not a film that wants to hide its horniness as a general rule.

But here’s how I know this is an effective sex scene: For a decade and a half I never gave Doc’s breasts so much as a glance. I was riveted by her face, limned by the moonlight; by Dalton’s face, gazing into hers; by her hands, exploring Dalton’s muscular chest through his, uh, beige sweater vest over white t-shirt combo; by his hands, covering hers, guiding hers, lowering them downward. It wasn’t until my partner pointed them out that I noticed them at all, and even then I wasn’t sure I’d caught what she’d said until I reviewed the footage.

But the sex scene from Road House casts a weird spell that way. Until three days ago, I believed that the initial penetration occurred before the pair kissed. The abruptness and intensity of the coupling and the tension of that near-miss kiss simply overwrote my memory of the real thing, which is that they prepare themselves for penetration before kissing but actually do exchange a short hard kiss before going through with it.

Go ahead, try to come up with another sex scene you can think of where its suggestive power outstrips its reality on screen this completely. It’s hard, right?

You wanna know how I could miss straight-up nudity during the sex scene from Road House? Watch those hands, oh honey watch those hands, and tell me the rest of the sex scene is even necessary. Hands are underrated in sex scenes. In context, they are effectively sex organs, but you’re allowed to show them in action. They’re sensory intake mechanisms. They soothe and caress, grasp and squeeze and hold. They’re our guide to the bodies of the participants as they uncover, expose, explore, clasp, connect. They’re beautiful in themselves, too—angles that tense and release, curves that stiffen and contract, skin that shows age and use, little microcosms of the sexual body. They’re doing nearly all the work in this scene even before Dalton uses his hands to lift Elizabeth up and bring her close. They’re the stars of the show. There’s a reason Patrick Swayze’s most famous sex scene of all, with Demi Moore in Ghost, revolves around pottery, an activity and art form actualized through the hands. And of course it’s not the first time his hands have worked clay.

The setup of the sex scene from Road House is both unique and appropriate. Making a stand is what Dalton does, after all: against the forty-year old adolescents, felons, power drinkers, and trustees of modern chemistry; against Brad Wesley and the goons with whom he runs this town; against bouncing without rules; against shirts. Extending this policy to sex simply demonstrates the consistency of the Dalton Path. When you’re a cooler, there’s no such thing as time off.

For Doc, the scenario is a bit different. She is a healer by trade, a woman who ensures her patients are able to stand on their own two feet. Here, she is the patient. Their pre-sex chat about her family and her failed marriage is her giving her personal history the professional who’s there to treat her. After that she literally puts herself in his hands, allowing him to operate as he sees fit.

The whole scene can be viewed as a reversal of the time he came to her, wound open, and she sealed that wound. Here, they open themselves to each other. The operating theater is standing room only.

Critiquing the facial expressions a person makes during sex is…well, it’s like critiquing the facial expressions a person makes during a sneeze. How you react to what’s happening to your body is largely involuntary, and at any rate unselfconciousness is a valuable trait for sex since it’s easier to get where you want to go if you’re not fretting about the right way to get there. But hey, this is acting, right? So I don’t feel as churlish as I otherwise would to draw a distinction between these two Dr. Elizabeth Clay sex-face moments.

The pout, I find funny. It’s like “Ooh, this is sexy, I’m sexy, he’s sexy, this feels sexy, look at me being sexy.” Imagine Dalton doing it—he’d look even goofier than he does when he’s got his getting-down-to-business face on while stalking her around the room like a literal sex panther waiting to strike. I don’t fault her for it! Sometimes people sincerely feel this way during sex, and make “sexy” faces to show both themselves and their partner that what’s going on is hot stuff. It’s not like she’s wrong if that’s what she’s doing. It’s just a little pose-y, a little Whitesnake video-y, a little Playboy Channel-y. In those respects it’s of its time.

The laugh, though? Hooo boy. That’s the good shit right there. If you’re laughing out of sheer delight during sex, something has gone very very right for you, that’s one thing. The other thing is that this allows us to perceive the Doc, and Dalton too once he starts grinning in response, as being in on the joke. She knows it’s kind of ridiculous to go to a dude’s barnpartment, look at your psychotic ex-husband’s mansion across the way, talk about your uncle raising you and your parents dying and your marriage collapsing, go for a guy’s junk before so much as kissing, get hoisted in the air to mount him while he stands up, get slammed up against the wall, and get slammed up agains the wall. Ya gotta laugh, folks!

So she does, and the moment is beautifully, erotically unselfconscious. It opens up the path to the scene’s climax (though not the participants’), in which Dalton holds her up and shuffles them both over to the bed with his pants half-down and a licensed medical practitioner around his waist, a move they both know is equal parts silly and cool. It’s an echo, in its way, of the way Carrie Ann gazes with slackjawed lust upon Dalton’s behind. That was her private moment; this is a moment Elizabeth is experiencing with Dalton, and it’s so much fun she’s got to share it with him. She can’t help it. It just bubbles up inside her, until release.

It was the best of bars, it was the worst of bars, it was the age of being nice, it was the age of not being nice, it was the epoch of balls big enough to come in a dump truck, it was the epoch of opinions varying, it was the season of Wade, it was the season of Wesley, it was the auto dealership of hope, it was the separate and unrelated auto dealership of despair, we had Wagon Days before us, we had Wagon Days underneath us, we were all going direct to Jasper, we were all going direct the other way.

Dalton and Dr. Elizabeth Clay are on an awkward pillow-talk hot streak, and they’re not about to let the temporary cessation of their lovemaking put that fire out. When the Doc stirs an unspecified amount of time after what I can only assume were simultaneous and earth-shaking climaxes (Dalton’s jimmy runs deep, so deep, so deep, put her ass to sleep) she finds herself alone in bed and finds Dalton sitting nude on the rooftop of the barn just outside his window. Wielding the bedsheet as an ersatz open-in-the-back hospital gown, she comes to join him, sitting down on a beautifully constructed rug that is now going to require some spot cleaning.

What do they talk about, these two lovebirds? Doc speaks first, and Dalton follows, and on it goes.

Doc: “You’re gonna have a lot of pain when you grow older. You could be crippled if you don’t slow down.”

Dalton: “Yeah, that’s what they say.”

“You already know that?”

“No, I just said ‘That’s what they say.'”

<pause for shared laughter and mild horseplay in the form of a loving face-mush>

“Where are you gonna go from here?”

“I don’t know.”

“You could stay, Dalton. If you wanted to.”

“I don’t think so.”

Then they fuck again, her on top this time, because if you thought chatting about the uncle who cared for you after your parents died when you were a kid and the collapse of your marriage to the insane guy across the way was arousing, I’ll see that bet and raise you “you are going to suffer horribly” and “I don’t like you enough to not skip town.”

Strange as it sounds, though, isn’t the ol’ Eros/Thanatos two-step the oldest dance in the world? If you can’t talk about your gravest regrets and fears, up to and including mortality, before you have sex, an activity designed to wipe rational thought clean, then when can you talk about them?

Never underestimate your opponent, Dalton once said. Expect the unexpected. I don’t know about “opponent,” but the sexual liaison between Dalton and his opposite number the Doc contains a whole lot of stuff I don’t think anyone saw coming.

Dr. Elizabeth Clay isn’t the only person who registers the significance of the location of Dalton’s apartment on this fateful night. Across the water, her ex-husband Brad Wesley watches intently, liquor at the ready, as Doc slithers out from under her makeshift sheet-robe and mounts Dalton for a second bout of lovemaking. He rocks back and forth in his rocking chair, stops—perhaps to avoid any unpleasant mimesis of the movements of the people upon whom he’s spying—and reaches for a cigar, because even a broken Freud gives the right time twice a day.

The question that interests me here isn’t why Brad Wesley is watching his nemesis fuck his ex-wife, but when he started watching. Unless he snuck out onto his balcony or lanai or whatever it is in a big hurry after the Doc looked across the water and saw his house before she and Dalton did their standup routine, it’s doubtful he caught round one. This means Wesley started peeping at some point between then and now, a time period during which Dalton was awake and alone and bare-ass naked on the roof while Elizabeth slept the sleep of the peacefully post-coital in Dalton’s bed. It means he was watching Dalton all by himself.

This tracks with Wesley’s dialogue in the remainder of the film, for what it’s worth. At no point during his many interactions with Dalton during the rest of the movie does he bring up the man’s relationship with Elizabeth, not even at times when it would be natural to do so—when he playfully upbraids Dalton for “taking all my boys” following the cooler’s murder spree through Wesley’s goon army. “Hell, you took my girl, too”—easiest thing in the world to say, but he doesn’t say it.

The closest he comes to admitting any jealousy whatsoever is when he tells Elizabeth how much he hates to see her wind up with a no-account drifter like Dalton. As I’ve written before, this isn’t the “if I can’t have you no one can” speech you’d expect at all. It’s not hard to imagine Wesley wishing he could have her again, but that’s just it: You have to imagine him wishing it. The focus is on Dalton, and whether or not he’s a worthy successor to Wesley in Elizabeth’s love life.

Which brings us back to Peeping Brad here. By now he’s gotten himself quite an eyeful of Dalton—Does he find the man lacking as a lover and thus unworthy of Elizabeth’s love? Or is it the opposite? Is Dalton so toned and hung and prodigiously talented in the sack that Wesley worries his ex has been dickmatized by someone with little else going for him? Or is this masochism—a case of Wesley rubbing his own face in the happiness of his former lover and his current arch-enemy because some part of him is addicted to misery?

Then there’s this tantalizing possibility: The Elizabeth stuff is a smokescreen for sexualized resentment of and desire for Dalton himself. In this reading, when Wesley tells Dalton that the only thing missing from his trophy room is his ass, Wesley really wishes he could get Dalton’s ass stuffed and mounted the old-fashioned way. To be honest Wesley strikes me as a drearily heterosexual figure, double-entendre action-movie homoeroticism notwithstanding. But this leaves open the possibility of simple envy, of Wesley covetously devouring Dalton’s body and beauty with his eyes.

Wesley spying on Dalton and Doc having sex on the roof of a barn is a crime of opportunity, that much seems certain. But it is difficult to say with any certainty at all why Wesley seized the opportunity. Grab a cigar and ponder this imponderable with me.

In the scene that follows Brad Wesley’s R-Rated Rear Window Spectacular, Dalton helps his landlord Emmett lug some farm equipment out of his pickup truck. During the course of this conversation Emmett asks if Dalton had a woman over and then asks where she went when Dalton confirms her initial presence. This implies that he became aware of that presence the night before, which means that at least two weird old men enjoyed the pleasure of her and Dalton’s company so to speak. He tells Dalton “If you’re smart, you’d pitch your tent,” a statement ostensibly about romantic commitment but jesus christ what am I made of stone, he said “pitch your tent.” Finally he does that Emmett thing where he ends the scene with a quippy aphorism followed by a hard cut, in this case assuring Dalton that even if he isn’t that smart, “You never know, son—maybe she’ll be smart enough for the both of you.” Add another fake Dalton dad to the pile of men who call him “boy” or “son.” I wonder if he gives him The Talk afterwards.

All of this has so dominated my consciousness during prior viewings of Road House that it was not until about five minutes ago that I noticed there’s another Emmett line in this scene. After Dalton says yes, he did have a woman up there with him, Emmett raises his eyes to the sky and says “Don’t give me no lip, Lord.”

Emmett’s view of organized religion is already well documented. Here we’re offered a glimpse of his feelings on the Man Upstairs himself, and wouldn’t you know it, He’s a land-Lord. There’s some stuff a fella has got to get away with, and for the sake of all involved parties it’d be best if YHWH just keeps His feelings on the matter to Himself. Victimless crimes like nailing a beautiful woman who graduated don’t affect the rent getting paid on time, metaphorically speaking. Accept Jesus as your personal savior by the first of every month and then tell the Big Guy to butt out.

Ernie straightening up behind the bar. Carrie Ann lighting a cigarette. Hank sipping his coffee. Whatsername the German schoolgirl–looking waitress wiping down a table. And Dalton, smoke in his mouth, fresh from a day working out and helping Emmett and a night of love with Dr. Elizabeth Clay, doffing his jacket as he arrives for a night’s work, greeted with a “Hey, doll!” and a “There he is!” from his admiring underlings. This is the Double Deuce as it was always meant to be: safe, familial, professional, with a lot of matching reds.

But it is not yet the Double Deuce at its absolute finest. That will require the arrival of another cooler, older, slyer, more powerful, subtle and not quick to anger. It will require us, at long last, to walk the Way of Wade Garrett. Between now and then Dalton will receive very bad news and a very bad beating. It is as if the universe itself cries out, “Not yet, Dalton. Not yet.”

(previously)

Collins: Perhaps we’ll never know the why of the throat rip. [Editor’s note: Herrington “got the idea for Jimmy’s death from a story he’d heard back in college about a martial artist tearing out an enemy’s trachea,” according to the Ringer.] It does recur throughout the film as something [Swayze] is struggling with. It’s a lapse on his part. Ripping people’s throats out is something he has to move past in his life.

And who hasn’t felt that way? All of us have been ripping people’s throats out in our own way, and we all deal with it in our own way.

Amazingly, AMAZINGLY, I am quoted as an expert in Quinn Myers’s oral history of the throat-ripping scene from Road House for Mel Magazine. Like, it’s me and then it’s Mike Nelson. Do I reference A Hard Day’s Night and America’s Next Top Model in a single quote? You bet I do. But that’s beside the point—this is a tremendously informative look at what went into making that whole incredible fight scene, featuring actor Marshall Teague, the stunt coordinators/fight choreographers, and the Foley artist, as well as me and Mike freaking Nelson.