202. I Sold My Soul to Rock ‘N’ Roll
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.
201. Chez Dalton
“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.
200. The sex scene from Road House
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.
199. The new marshal in town
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.
198. Dig a hole
“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.
“Too Old to Die Young” thoughts, Season One, Episode Ten: “The World”
The mesmeric qualities of Refn’s filmmaking make taking in all of this cacophonous and terrifying information a leisurely, sensual matter. The sparse dialogue and the long stretches of silence surrounding it make the monologues outlining the fascist mindset stand out like towering obelisks of ideology. The performances of the five leading actors are masterful in their vagueness, blank screens against which we can project our own hopes, fears, and lusts. The result is a show for our time. It is perhaps the show of our time.
I reviewed the season finale of Too Old to Die Young for Decider. (I’m gonna be playing some catch-up on old links, so these descriptions are gonna be pretty no-nonsense. But this was a hell of a show, I’ll say that!)
“Too Old to Die Young” thoughts, Season One, Episode Nine: “The Empress”
Titled “The Empress,” presumably in reference to Yaritza though quite possibly in reference to Diana—and it seems like a lot will be riding on the answer to this riddle in the finale—the penultimate episode of Nicholas Winding Refn and Ed Brubaker’s masterpiece of surrealist noir is less an advancement of the plot than an escalation, or the promise of one to come.
I reviewed episode nine of Too Old to Die Young for Decider.
197. Whatever happened to predictability
What you’re seeing here is the look on Dalton’s face just after he staggers out of the smoky Double Deuce and finds Dr. Elizabeth Clay waiting for him, and the look on Dr. Elizabeth Clay’s face as she looks back at him while leaning back against her car one frame later. I don’t think you need to be an expert analyst of body language or facial expressions or human mating rituals to figure out what’s going on here, and what will be going on shortly hereafter. The Doc is about to get lucky, and Dalton feels lucky about it. That’s predictable enough: They’re both right, as it happens. But how it happens—ah, friends and neighbors, there’s the rub. (The rub against a rock wall, specifically.) It will be absurd, romantic, laughable, red hot, impersonal, extremely personal, erotic, uncomfortable, uncomfortably erotic, erotically uncomfortable, giddy, bold, slightly impractical, intensely physical, eminently watchable. It will be, in short, the Road House of sex scenes. It could be nothing else.
“Too Old to Die Young” thoughts, Season One, Episode Eight: “The Hanged Man”
Aside from Fargo Season Three and David Thewlis’s hideously acquisitive character V.M. Varga, Too Old to Die Young is the only show I personally have seen that responds to the Trump era with appropriate and unvarnished disgust and fury. In the person of Martin’s openly fascist colleagues on the Homicide squad (sample quotes from this episode: “DEMOCRACY’S MY BITCH! FAKE NEWS! JESUS!”) and Janey’s perverted billionaire father, this show identifies the enemy, hones in on the twin poles of their reactionary politics—a belief in the virtue of violence against the unclean and a belief that the vulnerable exist to be exploited, abused, and discarded, both of them privileges of the select—and creates narrative situations that alternately expose them for the monstrous cretins they are and punish them appropriately.
I reviewed episode eight of Too Old to Die Young for Decider.
196. Hotbox
At the end of a long, close to perfect night, the Double Deuce is smokin’. Literally. After the evening represented by the “Roadhouse Blues” scene winds to a close, Dalton stumbles through the big red double doors of the Double Deuce in a cloud of smoke. He rubs his eyes, as if they’re dry and irritated. He breathes out a plume of smoke himself. “Cigarettes and exhaustion” is surely what director Rowdy Herrington and company were going for; “Raindrop, drop top, smokin’ on cookie in the hotbox” is what many a viewer receives. If you’d slapped some designer sunglasses on him, replaced his shapeless beige sport jacket with a fur coat, and shot this in slow motion it’d look like an old Snoop Dogg video. That image and vibe is certainly preferable to the alternative, which is that to get rid of the smell of cigarettes he’d probably need a Silkwood shower. But he’s not one to get rid of the fragrances of nature, to use Emmett’s memorable phrase, and in Dalton’s world the constant presence of lit ciggies is as natural as it gets. More than once we see him light up without even bothering to put a shirt on first. The man has his priorities. And you know what they say about where there’s smoke.
195. Roadhouse Blues
The Doors are good. They’re a good band, I’m sorry. Break On Through, Light My Fire, Touch Me, L.A. Woman, People Are Strange, Alabama Song, The End, Riders on the Storm, Love Me Two Times, Hello I Love You, Roadhouse Blues—guess what, that’s a good band! That’s more bangers in four years than Eric Clapton has across all of his projects in a decades-long career combined (for the record: Layla, Bell Bottom Blues, White Room, Tales of Brave Ulysses, Crossroads, Sunshine of Your Love, I Feel Free, Badge, While My Guitar Gently Weeps, Cocaine, and most of those were written by people not Eric Clapton), and I’m not even digging particularly deep. It’s not a Creedence Clearwater Revival’s contemporaneous California run of absolutely miraculous hitmaking, but it’s up there. The insistence that the Doors are a gigantic joke, a dorm-room poster posing as a band, a faux-poetic wet fart—it’s childish, tbh. It’s jejune. It’s “except rap and country,” it’s “Ringo was a bad drummer,” it’s a YouTube comment complaining that today’s music just can’t compare. It’s so, so freeing to leave it behind and fucking bellow YOU KNOW THAT IT WOULD BE UNTRUE! in that final verse as you sing along in the car or just shred BREAK ON THROUGH TO THE OTHER SIDE! at karaoke or whatever. Godfathers of goth along with the Velvet Underground as well. If the Doors were good enough for David Bowie, who loved them, they’re good enough for you too. We have Kiss and Bon Jovi and the Eagles (excepting the song Hotel California and the solo stuff) to kick around. Leave Mr. Mojo Risin’ alone!
I say all that to say this: The Jeff Healey Band really kill it on “Roadhouse Blues.” It’s the most natural fit possible for the movie (duh), for Healey’s more high-energy Stevie Ray Vaughn thing, and for a solo so hot you can all but smell smoke rising from the guitar he holds on his lap. It also loses the scat-singing portion of the song, which is probably one of the reasons you hate the Doors if you hate the Doors. They do it well enough that you could actually conceive of a full nightclub dancing to “Roadhouse Blues” by the Jeff Healey Band, and I mean dancing their asses off, or their gaucho hats, whichever comes first, which they do. LET IT ROLL, BABY, ROLL! LET IT ROLL….ALL NIGHT LONG!
194. Gaucho
I’ve paid close attention to the “Roadhouse Blues” scene because it’s the Road House Universe’s ideal state. It comes right after the centerpiece scene, in which Dalton switches from being nice to not being nice, from treating it as a job to treating it as something personal. It features “Roadhouse Blues” by the Doors, essentially the film’s title track. Dalton spends practically the entire scene smiling, indicating all is right with him. There are no fights, no arguments, no interlopers. The whiskey’s running low, but it’s not running out, and Dalton’s going to take care of it with that phonecall of his. Frank Tilghman’s actions bear special scrutiny, as discussed, but that only emphasizes the scene’s importance. After all, even he admits he has the place just the way he wants it. Everything going on here is important.
So what’s with all the gaucho hats?
Not one, not two, but three separate revelers are wearing wide, flat-brimmed black hats as they dance and carouse. The young lady in green is easy enough to miss until the woman in maroon and the gentleman in the bolo tie leap out of the screen at you as the camera whirls around them while they dance and you’re like “wait—are these…different people dressed like Zorro?” The answer is yes, they are. (Technically Zorro wears a Cordovan sombrero, which is of a different provenance and region than the gaucho hat, but the two have blended together over time in the public imagination so I’m using the terms interchangeably. I hope you’ll pardon this slight license. Clarity trumps strict accuracy sometimes, that’s just how it works. It’s a job. It’s nothing personal.)
Why are three different people wearing black gaucho hats, though? Is this a cue that Dalton is a Zorro-esque figure, wealthy due to the proceeds of his in-demand cooling services yet still a man of the people, going outside the law to defend them from the depredations of bandits and landowners? I think that’s possible. I think it’s also possible that the costume department had a lot of these because someone was like “It’s kind of like a Western” but cowboy hats were decided against and this was the compromise. I think it’s possible that the hats were considered on-trend, as a little research indicates Yves Saint Laurent was incorporating them into his line at the time. I think it’s also possible that there’s no rhyme or reason to it whatsoever, and that a crucial tone-setting scene in the film Road House just so happens to have three people wearing black gaucho hats right in front of the camera. Bodacious cowboys such as themselves will always be welcome here, high in the Jasperdome.
‘Road House’ on Netflix: A Guide to the Greatest Bad Movie of All Time
Since I first saw the movie with a bunch of drunk, high, hooting and hollering friends over a decade ago, I’ve watched it dozens of times with dozens of people. I never get tired of the bone-crunching action, the sweaty neo-western sex appeal, the cockamamie dialogue (“Are you gonna fight, dickless?” “I sure ain’t gonna show you my dick!”), the peculiar performances, and the overall vibe that anything can happen at any moment. I always find new things I never noticed, or old things I never fully appreciated.
In other words, this great bad movie functions, in a lot of ways, like a great great movie. I’ll never stop watching it. Now, thanks to its presence on that big red streaming service, you never have to stop watching it either.
Road House is on Netflix now, so I wrote a guide to its wonders for Decider.
193. Why won’t they deliver
Dalton may be all smiles, but Frank Tilghman has frustration to burn. Whiskey’s running low, you see, and oh how steamed he is about that. “I finally get this place just the way I want it and now we’re running out of booze,” he spits, with a sardonic half-laugh for emphasis at the end. “I’ve called every supplier I know,” he continues. “Why won’t they deliver.”
Expected a question mark at the end there, didn’t you? Yes, one would, wouldn’t one. But in that standard Road House flourish, the question is delivered as a statement. Yet something’s off here. This isn’t Doc or Dalton or Wesley supplying an answer they believe they already know—that Dalton feels entitled to collect money for beating people up, that Doc thinks Dalton’s life is too ugly to be a part of, that both Wesley and Dalton know he committed a crime not acted in self defense when he killed a man. Frank’s affect in every respect but the lack of a rising tone of voice indicates that he has no clue why people are refusing to sell him liquor anymore. It’s just a little thing that he phrases it as if he knows, right?
Well, Dalton knows the answer, that’s for sure. “Wesley,” he says authoritatively, before grabbing the phone and making a call we will later be able to deduce was to his mentor Wade Garett for help. It’s interesting, though, to watch Tilghman’s face here. When Dalton answers his “question,” he doesn’t react at all. No surprise, no “I knew it,” no “Jesus, he’ll stoop to anything,” no “goddamn that bastard”—flat. He just takes it right in stride.
Almost. His question is a non-question, yeah, and his response to the answer is nonexistent. But when Dalton turns toward the phone, look at Frank’s eyes. Follow them as he gives Dalton a quick once-over. It’s not like he hasn’t seen Dalton before, and as much of a pleasure as it is to look at the guy it seems like Tilghman’s mind should be on other things right now. Things like the matter of the liquor blockade of his bar, the culprit behind which Dalton has just named and against whom he now appears to be placing a call for aid.
Unless that is what’s on his mind when he looks Dalton up and down while the cooler isn’t looking. But why would that be? Why would Tilghman size Dalton up while thinking about Brad Wesley’s role in the Double Deuce’s plight? Why would he want to get a good look at the man who just informed him Wesley is responsible? Why would he sneak an analytic glance at the man he’s effectively placed in charge of battling Brad Wesley for control of the town, after feeding that man the information required to initiate the next round of hostilities? Why would he want to get a very close read on Dalton’s affect, his body language, the clues he might give as to how deeply he’s thought this matter through? Why did he not react with surprise when Dalton told him what he’d figured out? Why did he supply the question as if he already knew the answer himself? What is the specific concern regarding Dalton, and Wesley, and his own relationship with both men, that leads Frank Tilghman to act so suspiciously?
192. ‘Whiskey’s Running Low’: The Tragedy of Keith David in ‘Road House’
The man in the red shirt is Keith David. You may remember him from his roles in John Carpenter’s The Thing and They Live, two of the best science fiction and horror films ever made. In each he plays the main foil to the protagonists—rough-hewn salt-of-the-earth working-class white-guy types, with tough-as-nails attitudes and impressive heads of brown hair, who find themselves unexpectedly drawn into conflict with forces larger than themselves. Road House, you’ll note, stars Patrick Swayze as a rough-hewn salt-of-the-earth working-class white-guy type, with a tough-as-nails attitude and an impressive head of brown hair, who finds himself unexpectedly drawn into conflict with a force larger than himself.
Naturally, in Road House, Keith David plays a bartender whose sole line of dialogue is “Whiskey’s running low.”
That’s not quite all there is to the role. His name, uttered by both Tilghman and Dalton in this scene, is Ernie, and getting named is an honor precious few supporting characters in this film enjoy. He’s mentioned by name more than all the other bouncers and bartenders and waitresses still employed by the Double Deuce at this point in the film combined, save for Carrie Ann, who says her own name and gets it yelled at her by Pat McGurn. Everyone else? Bupkis.
What’s more, he’s listed with a surname in the closing credits. This too is more than can be said for virtually anyone in the movie. Jimmy, for example, went by “Jimmy Reno” during filming—you can find interview clips with Patrick Swayze in which he calls that character by name, it comes up frequently in interviews with actor Marshall Teague, and it’s in the IMDb listing—but is merely “Jimmy” in every official respect. Dalton himself only gets a mononym unless you inspect his medical file.
Most strikingly, Keith David appears in the opening credits. He’s billed fifth, after only Patrick Swayze, Ben Gazzara, Kelly Lynch, and Kevin Tighe, and just before Kathleen Wilhoite. The actors who play Emmett, Red, and Denise all get lumped together in a single triple chyron, which is fair enough. Sam Elliott gets a “And SAM ELLIOTT” to conclude the cast listing, which is appropriate. Jeff Healey slides in later on via an “Featured Music Performance by The Jeff Healey Band” slug. Other characters you think might reasonably get listed up front—Jimmy, Tinker, O’Connor, Ketchum, Morgan, Pat, Jack—aren’t there at all. Ernie’s fellow bartender, who’s there since the beginning, is entirely uncredited.
If you’ve watched David deftly dance between antagonist, supporting character, and stealth protagonist in The Thing, or if you’ve watched his world-building alley fight with “Rowdy” Roddy Piper in They Live, you probably have some questions about all this. God knows I do.
As best I can ascertain, partially from half-remembered poorly sourced comments in various Road House posts across the internet, and partially based on my own conjecture, is that Ernie Bass was originally a much more prominent character, the bulk of whose storyline wound up on the cutting room floor. I suspect he was a famous bartender, whom Dalton brought in to elevate the Double Deuce’s standing further still—surrounding himself with a surrogate family of old friends which also included Cody, his bandmates, and Wade Garrett. While the material was cut for time, contractual obligations kept David in the picture and in the credits.
A questionable decision, to be sure. Were David cast in a fighting role he’d be an invaluable asset to the film, and even as simply a gnomic presence dispensing basso profundo wisdom behind the bar he’d be a huge get. Instead? He hands Dalton a coffee with a nod of acknowledgement. He tells Tilghman “Whiskey’s running low.” He hands Dalton a phone. He looks at Wade Garrett. He looks at Wade and Dalton together. Exit Ernie Bass, pursued by an editor.
191. Pain don’t hurt revisited
When I first addressed “pain don’t hurt” I did so from the perspective of Dr. Elizabeth Clay. She’s in the process of mending a knife wound in the side of a man who has to be the single oddest person she’s ever treated, and he drops that on her? Once you’ve seen the whole movie, once you know what we know about her—her reaction to Dalton’s violent job, her feelings for him as a person she cares about and is more afraid for than afraid of, her past relationship with Brad Wesley for whom the opposite is true—you know that line probably knocked her on her ass a bit. Enough to get her to accept his offer of a date for coffee, anyway.
But look at him! Look at the shit-eating grin on the face of James Dalton after he tells a trauma surgeon or whatever she is that pain don’t hurt. Actually, scratch that, just look at the grin, the smile, the smiling eyes too. Patrick Swayze, the god, at work, showing you just how smitten he is with this woman already. I’ve seen lovers in real life look at each other when the other isn’t watching, and that’s what it looks like. Goofy, glad, unguarded. It’s moments like these when you take off your metaphorical shirt and expose your figurative wound and think “I trust this person to care for this” and just smile at how lucky you are to have found them.
It changes how we read Dalton’s self-evident self-satisfaction when he says his three-word maxim, doesn’t it? Because he’s proud of the line, and he’s even prouder of the lifetime of experience in word thought and deed that led him to draw that conclusion, but he’s proudest of having said it to this fascinating woman.
I’m not saying he’s like a little boy trying to please Mama or a puppy gazing with love at his master. I don’t think Dalton feels subordinate to her in that way any more than he feels subordinate to anyone else save Wade Garrett. (Man, that’s an essay waiting to happen.) I’m saying he’s pleased to show her the best of himself, in every respect: his perfect body, his sharpened mind, and his mastery over both of them. He’s happy to impress her. He’s happy to be impressive. Judging from his face I don’t think he’s ever been happier to be impressive. He’s finally found someone worth impressing.
“Too Old to Die Young” thoughts, Season One, Episode Seven: “The Magician”
So, we have fascist, racist law enforcement officers who prey on children. We have a grotesque billionaire who declares, publicly and repeatedly, that he’s sexually attracted to his own daughter. And we have a tremendous explosion of horrific violence.
I dunno. Think there’s a connection to be made there? Think there’s a topical subtext to Too Old to Die Young‘s vicious, vacuous killers and their flimsy yet fanatical justifications for murder? Think there’s something about Janey’s dad that trumps his role in the story—something that connects him to the real world, and invites thoughts of not just punishment but retribution? Think there’s more going on here than just what shows up on the screen?
I reviewed episode seven of Too Old to Die Young for Decider.
190. Soundtrack
The thing you need to know about Road House: The Original Motion Picture Soundtrack is that it’s not what you think, or perhaps even hope, it is. It’s not a wall-to-wall collection of all of the Jeff Healey Band’s performances from the film. Four of their songs make the cut, but one (“I’m Tore Down”) is only minimally memorable from the movie, and several of the big showstoppers (“Travellin’ Band,” “White Room,” “Knock on Wood (feat. Kathleen Wilhoite)” are nowhere to be found. There’s no snippets of the High Hollywood action-movie score by Michael Kamen, the late great film composer who counted the original Die Hard trilogy and Metallica’s orchestral album S&M among his achievements. “These Arms of Mine” by Otis Redding? That’s in there, thankfully. Alabama’s “(There’s A) Fire in the Night”? No joy.
What you get is a mixture. There’s those four Jeff Healey tracks, including “Roadhouse Blues” and “Hoochie-Coochie Man” from the Denise striptease and Bob Dylan’s self-plagiaristic “When the Night Comes Falling From the Sky.” Otis is on there. Most of the songs are covers—Dylan, the Doors, Willie Dixon, Willie Nile, Maria McKee by way of Feargal Sharkey, Fats Domino. There are at least four songs on here, including two performed (and one co-written) by Patrick Swayze himself, that I don’t think are in the actual movie at all.
You could complain about that, were you so inclined. Me, I’m happy to hear Patrick Swayze’s surprisingly high breathy singing voice over massive ’80s production tricks (giant drums, “ay-oh ay-oh” backing vocals, little glittery synth fills). And anyone who played Prince’s Batman album and Madonna’s Dick Tracy tie-in I’m Breathless as often as I did in middle school knows this much is true:
189. All Smiles No Blues
A partial list of things Dalton smiles at during the “Roadhouse Blues” scene in Road House:
- The parking lot
- The crowd waiting in line to get in
- The guy counting attendance
- Jack the bouncer
- The crowd to his left
- The crowd to his right
- The Jeff Healey Band
- The pool table area
- The dining area
- The crowd at the bar
- Ernie the bartender
- His coffee
- The crowd on the dancefloor
- Frank Tilghman
- The prospect of taking care of Frank Tilghman’s problems
And the night is still young for him, too! By the time it’s over he’ll also have smiled at Dr. Elizabeth Clay in his parking lot, Dr. Elizabeth Clay in his apartment, Dr. Elizabeth Clay in her car which he’s driving, Otis Redding on the radio, Dr. Elizabeth Clay on his erect penis, and Dr. Elizabeth Clay nude on his roof. (Otis seems like the odd man out there until you consider his vital role in that particular progression.) None of these smiles are sardonic or wry. None are directed at stop signs torn from the ground and speared through his car windows, or at people who have or soon will have tried to stab him to death. These are genuine smiles of happiness, from a man who finds himself surrounded with the best things in life: happy crowds, good drinks, admiring proteges, soul music (blue- and brown-eyed varieties), Kevin Tighe, open-roofed motor vehicles, public nudity, the welcoming sex organs of a beautiful woman with a doctorate degree. The Dalton Path leads to a far green country.