“Gypsy is excited to start over with Nick in Wisconsin, but their new life doesn’t match the happily ever after she imagined and her anxiety worsens as past transgressions begin to catch up with them.” That’s the descriptive text that accompanies this week’s episode of The Act, and it’s… well, that’s definitely one way to describe it. “Their new life doesn’t match the happily ever after she imagined” is a technically accurate summary of the half-day they spent in Big Bend before getting arrested. “Her anxiety worsens as past transgressions begin to catch up with them” captures the letter of Gypsy and Nick hiding in a closet as a heavily armed SWAT team surrounds the house, if not quite the spirit. Let’s just say I admire the blurb’s commitment to understatement and leave it at that, shall we?
“The Act” thoughts, Season One, Episode Seven: “Bonnie and Clyde”
113. Signs
Dalton goes to a laundromat to make his phone calls. There’s no phone in his luxury barn, we know this from Emmett’s anti-sales pitch when he rents the place. Either he doesn’t have opening privileges for the Double Deuce or he wasn’t in that part of Jasper (the Auto Parts/Boat Sales/Hellhole district) when he needed to make the call. Either way, here he is, inside this beautiful laundromat that I’m almost positive you couldn’t find somewhere in California in 1989 or thereabouts, reaching out and touching his mentor Wade Garrett. He’s wondering if Wade’s heard anything about a guy named Brad Wesley, because (I’m inferring) any man who’d make trouble for a cooler stands a decent chance of having been watchlisted by veteran cooler agents across the country. Wade comes up empty, though using his cooler-sense he asks Dalton if he’s gotten into any kind of trouble. “Nothing I’m not used to,” he says, before adding with a chuckle “but it’s amazing what you can get used to, isn’t it?” Wade banters back, they say their goodbyes, that’s that.
But look what happens after Dalton says Brad Wesley is nothing he’s not used to.
Suddenly a sign appears where none had been before. The sign lists the cost of using one of the laundromat’s large machines: NINE QUARTERS. I never noticed this until just this afternoon.
So here’s the situation. You can choose to believe this is just the kind of harmless, almost invisible continuity goof that happens in nearly every movie.
Or you can take it as a sign [pause for reader recognition of the awesome implications of the connections being drawn here] that for dismissing Brad Wesley, a price must be paid.
Search your cooler-sense. You know what is true.
Game of Thrones’ John Bradley on Death, Regret, and Sam Tarly’s Place at the Big Table
In the middle of it all, Sam delivers a speech about death and mortality in which he argues that death is a form of forgetting, and that without remembering who we are and what we’ve done we may as well not even be human.
It’s an interesting time to bring that matter up. We’re in the final season of what’s been a notoriously very violent show, a show that’s killed off a lot of characters — a lot of characters that had so much life in them before they died. One of the effective and brilliant things about Game of Thrones is that the characters are alive right until the second they die. Death is just around the corner for everybody. If you took a death like Oberyn Martell, it so looked like he was going to succeed — then death came round the corner [and] sucker punched him, and nobody could have predicted that. That’s what life’s like. You’re never far away from being completely gone.
Sam touches on the idea that you’re around on the earth for 72 years and then you’re gone forever. If you think of the entirety of time, you’re alive and having an impact and living and breathing for such a small portion of that, and for the rest of the time you just don’t exist at all. So it’s all about leaving a mark and leaving something for future generations to remember you by.
You could think that we take the idea of life and death very lightly. Hundreds of people get killed. People have gotten killed ever since the very first moments of the very first episode. You can think the show has quite a casual attitude about death because of that. But in school, I was taught quite a depressing lesson. I think I was only about 12. The teacher drew a line on the board, and he said, “This line represents your life. The only thing you don’t know is where on the line you are at the moment.”
When you think about it in those terms, you think, Wow, life is actually precious in Game of Thrones. When Sam says something like that, about the true meaning of death and being gone and what life means, it makes you reevaluate the show’s attitude toward death all along. You think of the Robbs and the Catelyns and the Neds and the Oberyns and all these characters you’ve loved who have died, and you think, Ohhh, I see their deaths in a slightly different light now. They’re gone. Who knows which of these characters standing around that table are going to be gone next week?
When it comes to raising kids and dying and saying good-bye to people and all of these things, you just want to not have any regrets. Sam’s trying to do whatever he can to do right by the people he loves, and not become an old man looking back and thinking, Ah, I really fucked up there. I could have done everything differently. Why didn’t I think of this? Why didn’t I spend more time with this person? Why wasn’t I braver? Why wasn’t I willing to fight for them? To see yourself as an old man, looking back on what you’re doing now and not approving, is a painful thing. Looking forward to your older self in the moment and thinking, I’m going to eliminate any regrets that I might see in the future … I think that’s what life’s about.
I interviewed John Bradley about Game of Thrones for Vulture. He made me tear up!
112: I Thought You’d Be Bigger Vol. 3: Doc
Dalton and Dr. Elizabeth Clay’s meet cute is a very sexy scene, if you ask me, which by reading this blog you have in effect done. A lot goes into making it sexy, too. You start with Patrick Swayze and Kelly Lynch, two extremely attractive human beings. From there you step to the difference in their sexiness: Swayze’s Dalton, shirtless, exposed, vulnerable yet also tough in his willingness to be vulnerable, to be exposed, to be shirtless; Lynch’s Doc, whose intense French braid, enormous glasses, and shapeless white coat emphasize rather than obscure her beauty, as if you’d put glasses and a lab coat and a wig from a Halloween store on the Venus de Milo. There’s the intimacy of the scene too, of the act of a woman touching and healing a man wounded by physical contact with other men, sublimated eroticism piled on sublimated eroticism like they’re fucking. There’s the BDSM angle in the form of the Pain Don’t Hurt koan and the power-exchange positioning of their bodies and faces. Maude Lebowski might suggest that Dalton’s wound is highly vaginal. I for one have pulled off that lapsed-Catholic trick of eroticizing blasphemy, so if you remember where Christ was wounded you’ve got that going for you as well.
But the sexiest thing about it is Elizabeth’s voice when she pauses on her way out of the exam room, turns, and says “You know…for that line of work I thought you’d be bigger,” and Dalton’s utterly guileless smile and laugh before he responds with a self-effacing “Gee, I’ve never heard that before.” Man oh man are these two into each other! You can hear it! Elizabeth’s voice is so soft, almost tremulous with the curiosity that caused her to stop and turn back towards her patient. (She’s like Lot’s wife if Lot’s wife dodged the salt thing and got to go back to town and fuck.) Dalton is delighted to hear this fascinating woman, his intellectual and physical peer, say something he’s heard a million times before—it means he can contextualize her as a part of his life now, even if things don’t work out, and for the moment that’s good enough for him. Do we ever see Dalton close his eyes with pleasure like he does here, at any other point in the movie? Not that I can think of. Do we ever hear anyone say “I thought you’d be bigger” with such directness and wonder—not some weird power-trip come-on, not bants between the lads, but just a person sizing up another person they’re attracted to, in that person’s presence? No way. Woof, man, these two are hot for each other, and it leaks out of them and into their voices as they say goodbye. They know they’ll be saying hello again soon.
Why ‘A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms’ Means So Much to Game of Thrones Book Readers
It started when Jaime Lannister stood and said, almost to himself, “Any knight can make a knight.” In that moment the butterflies started whirring around my stomach, my throat drew tight, my eyes started swelling. It concluded when Jaime bid his captor turned peer turned hero Brienne of Tarth to arise, “a knight of the Seven Kingdoms.” That’s when I started bawling like a damn baby — big, ugly, snotty honking sobs of compassion and joy. By the time Tormund started applauding and Tyrion started toasting and Brienne started smiling — Brienne! Of Tarth! Smiling! — I lost it completely. Judging from reactions to “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms,” Sunday’s fantastic episode of Game of Thrones, I was far from alone.
But it wasn’t just the inherent meaning of the scene for two of the series’ best characters — misfit woman warrior, Brienne, and her unlikely friend and recovering scumbag, Jaime Lannister — that got me.
Did it mean a lot to see Jaime finally make good on the knightly vows he’d spent most of his life using as a shield to cover for his atrocious behavior? Yes. Did it mean even more to see Brienne — who’s been searching for a place in a society that has no room for her, growing embittered even as she clings to a code most actual knights barely pay lip service to — receive the acceptance she’d earned a million times over? Of course.
But it was the dialogue that truly drove the momentousness of the scene home to me, because it was dialogue I recognized as a reader of George R.R. Martin’s Westeros saga. At a time when the show is operating on its own, “Any knight can make a knight” and “a knight of the Seven Kingdoms” are key phrases from the source material, in this case, a series of prequel novellas commonly known as the Tales of Dunk & Egg. Collected in a volume called A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms— a title shared by the episode itself — they’re Martin’s most sustained look at what knighthood means, both as a way of life and in the hearts of those who wish to adopt it. Hearing those phrases on the show this deep into its run has a talismanic effect for book readers that couldn’t be achieved any other way.
“Billions” thoughts, Season Four, Episode Six: “Maximum Recreational Depth”
It’s funny that “Billions” has moved Chuck and Wendy’s sadomasochism to the forefront of the story. Even though a depiction of that aspect of their relationship opened the entire series, I don’t think I ever appreciated what an effective analogy it is for the behavior of, well, pretty much everyone on the show. No one here seems fulfilled unless they’re giving or taking a beating.
I reviewed this week’s episode of Billions for the New York Times.
“Game of Thrones” thoughts, Season Eight, Episode Two: “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms”
Tonight’s episode — “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” — is GoT at its best. In a way, it makes good on the promise of last week’s season premiere, which tended toward the cheery, wish-fulfillment side of this calm-before-the-storm section of the story. Yes, there’s even less action this week than last, and no screaming burning zombie children either. But writer Bryan Cogman and director David Nutter, both of them series veterans, dig into the show’s rich library of character relationships, find the heartwrenching stuff at the center of each and put it on display time and time again.
I reviewed this week’s episode of Game of Thrones for Rolling Stone.
111. He Is Risen
1 And when the sabbath was past, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome, had bought sweet spices, that they might come and anoint him.
2 And very early in the morning the first day of the week, they came unto the sepulchre at the rising of the sun.
3 And they said among themselves, Who shall roll us away the stone from the door of the sepulchre?
4 And when they looked, they saw that the stone was rolled away: for it was very great.
5 And entering into the sepulchre, they saw a young man sitting on the right side, clothed in a long white garment; and they were affrighted.
6 And he saith unto them, Be not affrighted: Ye seek Jesus of Nazareth, which was crucified: he is risen; he is not here: behold the place where they laid him.
7 But go your way, tell his disciples and Peter that he goeth before you into Galilee: there shall ye see him, as he said unto you.
8 And they went out quickly, and fled from the sepulchre; for they trembled and were amazed: neither said they any thing to any man; for they were afraid.
9 Now when Jesus was risen early the first day of the week, he appeared first to Mary Magdalene, out of whom he had cast seven devils.
10 And she went and told them that had been with him, as they mourned and wept.
11 And they, when they had heard that he was alive, and had been seen of her, believed not.
—Mark 16:1-11 (KJV)
Well, there’s no joke—I just think I’m looking at a dead man, though.
—Carrie Ann, Road House
110. Wound
But one of the soldiers with a spear pierced his side, and forthwith came there out blood and water. (John 19:34)
There is a nicely-vulgar joke about Christ: the night before he was arrested and crucified, his followers started to worry – Christ was still a virgin, wouldn’t it be nice to have him experience a little bit of pleasure before he will die? So they asked Mary Magdalene to go to the tent where Christ was resting and seduce him; Mary said she will do it gladly and went in, but five minutes after, she run out screaming, terrified and furious. The followers asked her what went wrong, and she explained: “I slowly undressed, spread my legs and showed to Christ my pussy; he looked at it, said ‘What a terrible wound! It should be healed!’ and gently put his palm on it…” So beware of people too intent on healing other people’s wounds – what if one enjoys one’s wound? (Slavoj Žižek, Event)
Pain don’t hurt. (Dalton, Road House)
109. We’re not so different, you and I
“What he says, goes.” “It’s my way or the highway.” “It’ll get worse before it gets better.” Few action-movie cliches go unuttered in Road House, along with several no action movie has ever used before or since. (“I sure ain’t gonna show you my dick.”) Remarkably, however, we never get a good “We’re not so different, you and I” out of Brad Wesley. There are moments when it seems he’s coming close—Mike Nelson notes this during the climax in his excellent solo RiffTrax on the movie, the first of three or four he and the other MST3K vets have recorded—and the Doc draws the parallel herself when things get really hairy, but the villain whose specialties are taunting Dalton and opening JC Penneys never goes there.
Given Rowdy Herrington’s direction, perhaps actually coming out and saying it would be gilding the lily. No, no one says “We’re not so different, you and I.” But in scene after scene both Dalton and especially Wesley react to annoyances and misfortunes with the exact same way. They cock their head to the side, shake it in “get a load of this” disbelief, and half-smile “ya just gotta laugh”–style. Dalton does it when he emerges from the Double Deuce after his first night of work and discovers his car has four flat tires, a broken antenna, and a shattered windshield (Nelson, in his RiffTrax again: “I have hours of backbreaking labor ahead of me. It’s actually pretty funny!”); Wesley does it the very next day when he spots Dalton practicing tai chi. You get variations on it for matters as minor (no pun intended) as Dalton finding Steve in flagrante with a young lady in the back room, and as grave as Wesley walking through his mansion and discovering the dead bodies of all his henchmen. Wade Garrett and Elizabeth may not do the head-shake thing but they spend the entirety of their three-person date with Dalton grinning at each other in that same can-you-believe-it way.
It can hardly be said that Ben Gazzara and Patrick Swayze have similar acting styles or training, so I can only assume this was Harrington’s go-to instruction, like George Lucas’s infamous “faster, more intense” on the set of Star Wars. But like so many of the film’s other foibles this winds up feeling both endearing and unique. Vandalism, tai chi, dead bodies, people fucking during their 15 minutes—Road House‘s reaction to each is “grin and bear it,” and there’s no other film with quite so untroubled an outlook on the totality of human experience. As Red Webster put it, “That’s life. Who can explain it.”
108. Dead man revisited
“You’re a dead man,” Morgan tells Dalton when he gets fired. Carrie Ann, Morgan’s now-former coworker, may not share his idiosyncracies regarding where to place the emphasis when speaking, but she does share his sentiment.
The morning after Dalton’s momentous first night in the Double Deuce’s employ, Carrie Ann heads over to his luxury barn to feed him breakfast and, lucky for her, see his bare ass and reenact that gif of Ariel the Little Mermaid leaning on a rock as a huge gush of water erupts around her as a result.
But she brings business to go along with her culinary and visual pleasure. Firing Pat McGurn, one of the Double Deuce’s bartenders, is something Dalton should not have done, she tells him. As a mostly mute (but for grunting and an admittedly sincere-sounding “thank you”) Dalton sits down with a lit cigarette in his mouth and no shirt on his torso, disgustedly tossing aside the bacon and egg sandwich or whatever it is she brought him and moving in on the coffee, Carrie Ann starts cracking up while saying “Oh my god.”
“What is the joke,” Dalton asks, sounding like a cop on a TV show who just got a call at 3:30am saying there’s been another homicide down at the docks.
“Well, there’s no joke,” Carrie Ann says. “I just think I’m looking at a dead man, though.”
“Seems everywhere I go I hear that same joke,” Dalton mutters, shaking his head.
“Yeah? Well, something tells me you bring it on yourself,” Carrie Ann says saucily, nibbling on her breakfast in eating the popcorn/sipping the tea mode.
The variation in affect between the two actor makes it tempting to write this scene off as a minor bit of light-comedy character building. Dalton, who is hung over from a long night reading A River Runs Through It, is gruff and world-weary, too tough to worry and too tired to care. This is just how he lives his life: an endless cycle of naked wake-ups, shirtless stretching, cigarette-flavored coffee for breakfast, some tai chi or perhaps hitting the heavy bag for a workout, grabbing an unstructured jacket, heading to work to get stabbed by various men in the course of kicking their asses, repairing the damage done to his car by those men on their way off the premises, driving back to his luxury bachelor pad right next to the horse pen, taking off his shirt, reading a book, spying on Brad Wesley’s in-ground pool orgy, and finally doffing his jeans and hitting the sack. If during the course of those events people pronounce him a dead man, it’s a job, it’s nothing personal. And Carrie Ann is just the platonic female foil, the funny best friend, who’s able to poke holes in his machismo but not actually call his narrative into question or anything of that threatening nature.
But Carrie Ann, the drinking man’s Cassandra, also knows well that the only person who can truly save Dalton is himself. A warning out of professional courtesy, a gesture of solidarity with a new friend, an excuse to go over to the hottest guy in town’s place—it’s probably all three of these things. But in reality what he’s saying is “I can’t help being what I am,” as a stoic positive; she’s saying it too, but as a cheerily black-comic negative. Worst of all, it’s a direct challenge to the Rules. All that talk about expecting the unexpected, remembering it’s a job, it’s nothing personal, be nice until it’s time to not be nice, watch my back and each others’, and so on…earns him death threats “everywhere I go”? Okay dude, her twinkling eyes and cocked head seem to say, it’s your funeral. We’d expect no less of a dead man.
107. Dalton’s back
Broad-shouldered, slim-waisted, corded with muscle, Dalton’s back is a perfect thing, an inverted arrowhead of sex. The sun glistens and gleams from every sweat-soaked ridge and cleft. At times you’d swear it’s a source of light itself. The camera orbits Dalton throughout his riverside tai chi routine and his whole body, or at least the upper half which is mostly what you see, is a marvel of course. But his back looks like it was manufactured, by the company who designed the clockwork opening credits for Game of Thrones maybe, or the people who adapted H.R. Giger’s artwork into sculptures for his house. During his waterside tai chi routine both Emmett, his friend, and Wesley, his enemy, stop what they’re doing and just…stare. It’s impossible to blame them. Or us. Dalton’s character is built on the sense that his many aspects—fighter, lover, road warrior, philosopher, rich famous guy, aw shucks everyman, killing machine, pacifist, beer-drinker, binge-reader, master, apprentice—all work in concert to make the man. Road House too, when appreciated properly, is less a film than an ecosystem: hyperefficient factory-made late-’80s star vehicle, barely competent incoherent MST3K fodder, rock-solid action flick, more obvious than usual homoerotica, smarter than it looks, dumber than it realizes, a Ben Gazzara film, a Terry Funk film. When you watch Dalton’s flawless, godlike arms and traps and shoulderblades flex and contract in harmony, you’re watching the character and the movie in metonymy. You’re watching a real physical thing, Patrick Swayze’s beautiful beautiful body, do what Patrick Swayze’s character and Patrick Swayze’s movie are also doing. As below, so above.
“The Act” thoughts, Season One, Episode Six: “A Whole New World”
When the murder happens, it happens fast. It happens offscreen. It happens without even the presence of the camera within the house where it takes place — we’re trapped outside and they’re trapped inside, and then it’s done. This week’s episode of The Act behaves a lot like I imagine Gypsy Blanchard and Nicholas Godejohn behaved the night they murdered Gypsy’s mother Dee Dee: like they just wanted to get it over with as quickly as possible and move on with their lives.
106. Sightings
Flipping through my copy of Road House today, waiting for inspiration to strike, I came across one of my favorite goofy moments in the movie: Brad Wesley stopping his ATV, which he’d been driving around he lawn of his mansion or something I guess, in order to watch and gently scoff at Dalton doing tai chi across the river. The combination of factors at work here—a shirtless and glistening Patrick Swayze performing tai chi on the Missouri farm where he lives during his stint as making six figures at a local shithole as part of his career as a famous bouncer, a deranged JC Penney enthusiast finding this interesting enough to park his Big Wheels and watch but ultimately come away unimpressed, as if he’d expected better form, or a dryer torso—is irreplicable in any other film.
But something hit me about Dalton, as seen from Wesley’s point of view in this moment. Something that I have seen in another film, albeit not a feature. Something that comes close to capturing our sense, and perhaps Wesley’s sense too, that when we look at Dalton we’re seeing something that defies comfortable categorization. Something wild, mysterious, dangerous, untamed, and all but extinct.
The Horror of Game of Thrones Goes Way Beyond Jump Scares
But the worst thing about the army of the dead and each of its individual members isn’t what they do, or who they do it to, or what they do with them afterwards — it’s that they’re able to do anything at all. They exist, and by existing they issue one huge collective FUCK YOU to all that the living characters’ hope for the future and all they hold sacred from their pasts. Whoever you used to be before the White Walkers get to you and kill you is gone when they bring you back. Your existence is cruelly prolonged, but you’re as mindless and dangerous as a sword in their hands.
This is easily the most ineffable aspect of GOT horror, and it requires a certain Potter Stewart “I know it when I see it” mind-set to grasp. But again, think of Ned Umber, this adorable kid who started the episode by awkwardly attempting to be as polite as possible to the very intimidating ladies and lords in charge of Winterfell. That he deserved better than to be murdered and nailed to the wall is obvious. Yet when he opens his eyes and starts flailing and screaming, and when he keeps screeching as he’s slowly burned back to death, you get the sense that something really awful is happening here, something worse than just a standard crypto-fascist Walking Dead zombie kill.
When I watched this scene, I didn’t reach for zombie movies or shows for a point of comparison at all. Instead I thought of the passage from The Lord of the Rings that explains that orcs and trolls were created as a “mockery” of Elves and Ents, races that were generally wise, kind, thoughtful, and caring of the world around them. Morgoth, the original Dark Lord of Middle-earth, saw them and decided to show his enemies exactly what he thought their innate freedom and nobility was worth: a bunch of hideous ravenous sadistic idiots who thrive in darkness and eat people alive.
I thought too of how Bram Stoker and Stephen King describe vampires in Dracula and Salem’s Lot respectively. It’s not just that they’re mean-spirited, bloodthirsty, and possessed of dangerous powers. It’s that they’re wrong, somehow, in a way the humans who encounter them feel in their guts. They’re not just scared of the vampires; they’re disgusted by them. They find them somehow lascivious and obscene in their persistence after death. In both books, the protagonists seem to want to destroy their undead enemies not just to be safe from them, but to be rid of them — to avoid ever having to look at their fanged faces or hear their sepulchral and somehow bogus voices again.
I wrote about Game of Thrones and horror on the occasion of the Season Eight premiere for Vulture.
105. Fate
One hundred essays into a year-long Road House writing project, I feel about the film’s attempts to coin catchphrases and aphorisms exactly the way I felt when I’d written no essays at all: yikes. I mean, Does a hobbyhorse have a wooden dick, folks. Balls big enough to come in a dump truck. The writers have a relationship with the English language only slightly less estranged than their relationship to male sex organs.
But they can’t all be losers.
Just after the dump truck incident, a grumpy Morgan (there is no other kind of course) stomps over to Cody, whom he knows has a preexisting relationship with their mysterious new colleague. “This Dalton character,” he grumbles, “what’s his story?”
“His story is, you fuck with him and he’ll seal your fate,” Cody replies.
Now that’s how it’s done.
It’s a marvelous exchange insofar as it’s a rare moment when two characters have a conversation during which Dalton is neither a participant nor present. These are few and far between in this film, to the point where they stand out like sore thumbs each and every time. Off the top of my head, there’s this conversation, there’s Brad Wesley beating up the bleeder, Wesley and Jimmy talking to Red briefly after Dalton departs his store, and Jimmy and Ketchum spying on Dalton and Elizabeth from afar. Unless you count Wade Garrett breaking up shenanigans at a strip joint prior to receiving a call from Dalton, or Wade Garrett asking for Dalton’s whereabouts when he arrives at the Double Deuce, or Wesley’s goons making small talk prior to Dalton’s final assault on the Wesley compound, or Steve and Agnes doing their regular Saturday night thing before Dalton pops in and fires him—all of them scenes that exist so that Dalton can join them in progress—that is it. This is Dalton’s world, and what a treat to see other people live in it.
And who are the people in question this time around? Blind white blues musician Jeff Healey and hardcore wrestling legend Terry Funk. For Road House fanatics this is like the De Niro/Pacino diner scene in Heat.
But don’t think it’s just some goofy novelty act. (I didn’t say “Don’t think it’s some goofy novelty act,” mind you, I said “Don’t think it’s just some goofy novelty act.) Throughout this project I’ve been impressed by what the…let’s say non-traditional actors bring to the table. The naturalism Terry Funk brings to his role as an enormous man who gets paid to get angry and beat the shit out of people with tables is obvious. But spare a thought for Jeff Healey, too, who sounds like exactly what he is supposed to be: a guitar player chatting with dudes in bars. It works when he’s serving as a welcoming presence for Dalton, the one character he neither needs to intimidate nor impress, and it works when he drops the “hey man lemme put this here guitar down and buy you a beer” schtick and describes his friend like he’s the fucking Shogun Assassin.
Because that’s the message of “you fuck with him and he’ll seal your fate,” isn’t it. He won’t just kick your ass, or kill you, or make you wish you were never born or blah blah blah. Like a Norn with a mullet, he’s got the thread of your life in his hands, and if you step to him you’re going to find out exactly where that thread ends.
There’s another implication here that must be considered: Fate is predestined. Cody’s description of Dalton, then, is of one who will mete out the appropriate and appointed sanction to those who cross him, no more and no less. Perhaps it will be your fate to disappear from the movie a third of the way through and never return, like Karpis. Perhaps it will be your fate to pass out from terror when a stuffed polar bear is dropped on you and then emerge reborn, your sins forgiven, like Tinker. Perhaps it will be your fate to be murdered offscreen while wearing moonboots, like Morgan. Whatever the case, Dalton is not making the news, he’s simply delivering it to your doorstep.
It’s precisely the right description for the Dalton Path. Remember Rule Three, Verse Four: “It’s a job. It’s nothing personal.” What can be more impersonal than fate? And who better to do the job of sealing it?
104. I Thought You’d Be Bigger Vol. 2: Cody
For a recurring joke, “I thought you’d be bigger” gets deployed with a pretty broad affect range. The first person we hear say this to Dalton is Frank Tilghman, whose delivery is difficult to characterize in any way but sexual. The second is Cody, lead singer of the Jeff Healey Band in the Road House Universe, and his delivery could not be further removed from his and Dalton’s mutual employer.
Dalton arrives at the Double Deuce, takes in the scenery, and discovers that the bar band are old friends. He sneaks up on the lead singer with the help of his identical and yet somehow not related bandmates, with a theatrical finger-to-the-lips Marian-Madam-Librarian “shhhh” gesture he shares with each. He hands Cody a towel to mop up the accumulated sweat and projectile beer on his face, for which Cody thanks him. “You play pretty good for a blind white boy,” Dalton says, beaming. Recognition dawns in Cody’s face. “Yeah, and I thought you’d be bigger,” he jokes, and the two embrace, laughing.
I’m gonna level with you: I love this moment. Why? Because it’s one of the only times in the film where Dalton is completely at ease. He’s been reunited with an old friend, a peer, not someone he has to impress, not someone he has to instruct, not someone who mentored him, not someone he needs to mentor. They know each other well, but as colleagues rather than sensei and student. They pass feverish gossip about old times and current times: “Man, this toilet is worse than the one we worked back in Dayton,” Cody says. He also mentions that he and “the boys” heard Dalton was headed to Jasper, presumably from Tilghman, although word among barfolk travels far and fast of course. Dalton therefore does not need to dazzle Cody, nor earn his respect. Cody’s been sitting on his barstool on stage, guitar in his lap, waiting to welcome Dalton with open arms. Anyone would be happy to step into that situation.
But most important of all is that this exchange is just that: an exchange. Dalton ribs Cody in a way he is, presumably, accustomed to being ribbed—that his chosen genre and evident skill are anomalous given his race and disability. Cody thinks this is funny to hear, which indicates he’s heard it a million times before. He uses “I thought you’d be bigger” as a riposte, indicating that these two have shared late-night “You know what people say to me all the time and totally drives me nuts?” conversations over Miller Genuine Draft when the patrons of that toilet in Dayton have long since retired for the evening.
The point I’m trying to make is this: While Tilghman’s “I thought you’d be bigger” is off-putting and invasive, Cody’s is familiar, friendly, and inviting. Eat your heart out, Snake Plissken and “I heard you were dead.” Patrick Swayze and Jeff Healey just took you to catchphrase school.
“Game of Thrones” thoughts, Season Eight, Episode One: “Winterfell”
Winter is here, and it’s taking us deeper into the world of Game of Thrones than ever before … in the opening credits, anyway. For its final season, HBO’s era-defining fantasy saga has given the famous clockwork map that accompanies Ramin Djawadi’s unmistakable opening theme a complete makeover. Instead of simply gliding over the various lands and castles of Westeros, the title sequence now takes us inside them — from Winterfell’s crypt to the Red Keep’s throne room.
The premiere that accompanies the new credits, however, is content with surface-level pleasures. Rousing, crowd-pleasing and often very funny (how many GoT episodes can you say that about?), the kickoff for the show’s eighth and final season brings long-estranged characters together at an unprecedented pace, like it’s checking off items on a shopping list for a fan-service speed run. It’s great fun. But is it, you know, great?
I reviewed the season premiere of Game of Thrones for Rolling Stone. Please note that these review descriptions will remain brief while I play linkblogging catch-up, so you’ll have to read the reviews to know more!
“Billions” thoughts, Season Four, Episode Five: “A Proper Sendoff”
This week on “Billions,” revenge is the order of the day. All right, fine: Every week on “Billions,” revenge is the order of the day.
I reviewed this week’s episode of Billions for the New York Times.
103. Dump truck
This much, at least, is not in dispute: When Dalton’s first night at the Double Deuce is winding to a close, Morgan, who is skeptical about the man’s physical prowess, tells him the following.
“You know, I heard you had balls big enough to come in a dump truck, but uh…you don’t look like much to me.”
“Opinions vary,” Dalton replies, and Morgan is temporarily bested.
But while that may settle the issue for the involved parties, we are left with unanswered questions. To wit: When Morgan says he’s heard Dalton’s balls are big enough to come in a dump truck, does he mean A) a dump truck is required to carry them on account of their large physical size, or B) a dump truck is required to receive Dalton’s ejaculate load due to the copious amounts of semen his big balls produce? “Come” as in “arrive,” or “come” as in “cum” as in “ahh skeet skeet motherfucker”? As Dalton himself might say, opinions vary.
Below you’ll find the best cases I can make for and against the two competing interpretations.
Morgan means “come” as in “travel”
PRO:
- Saying someone has “big balls” is a way of saying they’re unusually gutsy or tough, traditional characteristics, one would think, of a famous bouncer
- Dump trucks are known for carrying things placed in them and can accommodate substantial size and weight, making for a strong metaphor
CON:
- Placing his gargantuan sack in a dump truck would leave the rest of Dalton’s body at something of a loss were the truck to go anywhere, the Double Deuce’s parking lot for example
- Dump trucks typically transport dirt, rubble, or refuse, none of which describe Dalton’s testicles
Morgan means “cum” as in “bust a nut”
PRO:
- The measure of a man’s balls could in theory be taken by the size of the receptacle required to contain a full emission of his seminal fluid; from this we can infer that were the bed of a dump truck required to catch all of Dalton’s ropes in their entirety, his yarbles must needs be very big indeed
- Simply weighing or determining the circumference of Dalton’s ballbag implies passivity on his part, while the thought of Dalton milking, or causing a third party to milk, his dick into the back of a construction vehicle demonstrates the activity and agency becoming of a bouncer
CON:
- Dump trucks are not recommended vehicles of liquid waste; absent a watertight truck bed Dalton’s jism could seep through the seams and on to the road surface below, causing a potential traffic hazard and thus negating the central idea of the metaphor as a means to convey his professional clout and skill
- The size of Dalton’s cock, which due to the nature of the orgasmic process would play an indispensable part in the process of cumming into a dump but not in the process of simply transporting Dalton’s huevos in one, goes conspicuously unremarked upon
CONCLUSION:
Occam’s razor suggests Morgan means he’s heard that Dalton’s balls are so big he would not be surprised to see them being carried by a dump truck, not squeezed like lemons into one. However, the imagistic approach of the latter interpretation has much to recommend it as a hypothetical alternative.