038. The Laughing Man

February 7th, 2019

The men who look at Dalton are not the only Road House characters who model behavior for their audience. Nor are the women. To understand this movie, one must understand the Laughing Man.

An anomalously odd, almost Lynchian presence in a film that’s otherwise much more straight-down-the-middle in its abject stupidity, the Laughing Man is an avatar for the audience in that the events of the film transmogrify him from observer to participant.

A member of the rogues gallery that greets Dalton upon his arrival at the Double Deuce, he is at first content to simply watch the opening barfight unfold, giggling and guffawing and going slightly crosseyed like a cartoon woodpecker all the while. As a matter of fact, he is at second content to do so, and at third, and presumably ad infinitum. In an another world, perhaps one in which Wes Bradley successfully wooed the first Dillard’s to Casper, Wyoming, this hyena-man is still standing by the bar, laughing like a Joker henchman at everything that has since unfolded. The fool on the hill sees the goons going down.

But that is not the world we inhabit.

In this world, the ageless waitress who appears to have started working at the Double Deuce after quitting her job at Norma Jennings’s Double R lobs a bottle through the air, intending to hit some other asshole but clocking this harmless nimrod right between the eyes instead. He goes down with the kind of exaggerated overselling you see from pro-wrestling mid-carders, or from anthropomorphic animals around whose heads birds chirp in a saturnine orbit after someone hits them with a rolling pin.

The waitress looks upon her works and despairs. But should we? No! The Laughing Man is concussed so that we might continue. He shows us that no matter how much we might wish to laugh at this movie, it will draw us in until we have no choice but to laugh with it, or suffer for our refusal. You are in the Jasper of the mind now. Laugh and the world laughs with you!

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037. Denise & Carrie Ann

February 6th, 2019

I was a theater kid in high school, and yes, I am glad you were sitting down. As the president of the Drama Club, the only coed activity my all-boys Catholic high school had to offer, I usually had better things to do than nitpick blocking, from learning my own steps to realizing how unforgiving for teenage boys pleated dress pants can be. But I did have one pet peeve I remember to this day.

Pretty much every musical in the high-school repertoire has around three or four major characters who—whether because they’re too old, too young, don’t sing, don’t dance, aren’t residents of the town/actors in the company/members of the Conrad Birdie fanclub, or any number of other factors—don’t take part in the big dance numbers, or aren’t active in the events of a particular show case scene. However, they are often at least present at those times, typically clustered in little groups around the perimeter. What would always bug me was when two characters who’d never spoken to each other before in the show, and for whom because of narrative economy it would be a big deal for them to speak to each other, like worthy of a song and dance of their own, wound up standing next to each other, stage-whispering about Professor Harold Hill’s latest chicanery or whatever.

I think about that when I watch Denise, Brad Wesley’s kept woman, and Carrie Ann, the Double Deuce’s coolest employee, team up during the first big fight. They cower together to shelter from the action. They root and heckle and holler as a unit. They wrap protective arms around one another when the going gets tough. Denise cheers Carrie Ann on when she starts slugging one of the participants. She actually hands her a bottle to use as a weapon!

Do these characters have anything in common? Do they have any mutual friends? Do they ever speak to each other…I was gonna say again, but really the phrase I’m looking for is at all? Do they even come within five feet of one another? If you’ve read thirty-six essays about Road House and counting you’re no doubt familiar enough with the film’s approach to continuity to answer those questions. But there’s a gigantic fight scene going on, and they’ve gotta stand somewhere, and the director is probably too busy telling gigantic men which tables to fall through, so a few perfunctory “stand over there”s are all they got, and they improvised. If it helps, imagine they’re the juniors playing Mayor Shinn and Mrs. Paroo, silently emoting together while forgetting to cheat toward the audience during “Shipoopi.”

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036. Bleeder

February 5th, 2019

I want to tell you a story of a man and his bleeder.

The man is Brad Wesley—sportsman, outdoorsman, liquor distributor, civic leader, JC Penney franchisee. The bleeder is O’Connor, the goon upon whom Brad Welsey’s disfavor falls, to his great misfortune.

The scene in which Wesley beats O’Connor, ostensibly for failing to defeat his newfound enemy Dalton and restore his nephew Pat McGurn to his position as bartender at the Double Deuce but for the stated reason that O’Connor bleeds too much (?????????), is a fanmaker. It’s up there with the first deck-clearing barfight, the realization that Dalton visits four separate salesmen of cars and/or car parts, the Giving of the Rules, Doc’s Dress from an Italian Restaurant, “pain don’t hurt,” you name it. It’s even more of a fanmaker if you are, as you should be when you watch Road House, fucked up. It whipsaws back and forth from one emotion to its diametric opposite so fast and so often that it makes you feel fucked up whether you are or not. Only the lag time in comprehension caused by chemical intoxication comes close to replicating the Bleeder Scene’s otherwise inimitable psychological Gravitron.

We’re going to take it frame by frame.

The goons roll up to Brad Wesley’s mansion. Among them are Pat McGurn, Tinker, and O’Connor, the three men defeated by Dalton and his bouncers at the Double Deuce the previous night. Ketchum and Karpis, who are never referred to by name in the film, arrive separately in the monster truck.

Wesley and his right-hand man Jimmy exit his mansion to greet their visitors. Wesley is holding a half-smoked cigar. Jimmy puts on his shades. Wesley sighs with exasperation. Wordlessly and shamefacedly, Pat skulks past them into the mansion himself.

Wesley smiles sardonically.

[Tone: disapproving irony]

WESLEY: Did I explain it wrong? Is that it?

O’CONNOR: No boss, you didn’t.

[Tone: pity for Pat, with a hint of condescension]

WESLEY: Pat’s got a weak constitution. You boys know that. That’s why he’s working as a bartender.

[Tone: righteous familial fealty]

He’s my only sister’s son. And if he doesn’t have me, who’s he got?

[Tone: just the facts about the job]

And If I’m not there, you’re there.

Wesley affectionately grabs Jimmy by the back of the neck.

[Tone: mixed admiration for his favorite son and regret for his own lack of perspicacity]

Shoulda let you go, Jimmy.

Wesley begins circling the assembled goons.

[Tone: Disappointed schoolmarm]

Well, one of you boys owes me an apology. Now I’ll leave it up to you to decide which one of you wants to say “I’m sorry.”

TINKER (contritely removing trucker hat): ’m sorry, boss.

O’CONNOR: I’m sorry, boss.

[Tone: forgiving father figure]

WESLEY: I believe you, Tinker.

[Tone: mounting suspicion]

But you, O’Connor, somehow I don’t believe you.

[Tone: assistant manager who really doesn’t want to have to report this to corporate]

Now you better try it again, because if there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s a man who’s untruthful.

O’CONNOR: I’m sorry, boss.

[Tone: fast-burning anger]

WESLEY: And if there’s one thing that disgusts me, it’s a man who can’t admit when he’s wrong.

O’CONNOR: I swear to God, boss, I’m sorry.

[Tone: pure hate]

WESLEY: You disgust me, O’Connor. You wanna know why you disgust me?

O’CONNOR: No, why, boss?

Wesley punches O’Connor in the face, causing his nose to bleed. O’Connor feels the blood and looks at his boss, confused.

[Tone: cheerful scientific observation]

WESLEY: ’Cuz you’re a bleeder. You bleed too much.

[Tone: the kind of contempt that ends with kneeing someone in the balls]

You are a messy bleeder.

Wesley knees O’Connor in the balls. O’Connor doubles over.

[Tone: pure disappointment]

You’re weak.

[Tone: prepping for a Quod Erat Demonstrandum]

You got no endurance for pain.

On “pain,”  Wesley slams his fist down onto the back of O’Connor’s head, knocking him to the ground.

Wesley looks at the other goons, who are all smiling happily at the unfolding events, with “what did I tell you” grin that rapidly fades. He pats the crumpled O’Connor on the back.

[Tone: stern but ultimately kind tough-love football coach]

Now come on. Get up.

[Tone: ER doctor on a double shift talking to a drunk patient who cut his forehead after walking into a lamppost]

Yeah you’ll be fine. Come on.

O’Connor tries to stand and falls even flatter. Wesley looks around at his goons.

[Tone: “Do I have to do everything around here?”–style fed-up fury]

Well help him up!

Ketchum and Jimmy lift the dazed O’Connor to his feet.

[Tone: enough with the pity party]

You’re gonna be fine.

Wesley smiles benevolently. He puts his hand on O’Connor’s shoulder.

[Tone: “I’m not just your boss. I consider us a family.”]

And you know why? Because I like you.

O’Connor smiles, glad to be forgiven. Wesley socks O’Connor right in the jaw, knocking him out cold. Wesley addresses his goons as he turns to go back inside.

[Tone: scraping cat turds off his shoe]

Get this piece of shit coward outta here.

The Bleeder Speech contains every feeling possible to express in its idiom. It is the White Album of ‘80s action-movie bad guy speeches. Brad Wesley is the Fab Four (and Eric Clapton on “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”), and the Bleeder is his muse—the Beach Boys, Bob Dylan, John Lennon’s mom, Paul McCartney’s dog, Yoko Ono, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Ringo Starr quitting and fleeing to a boat in Sardinia for a few weeks, and the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi all rolled into one, wrapped in a short-sleeved dress shirt, and beaten up in a driveway with a monster truck parked in it.

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035. Shithead

February 4th, 2019

I don’t think I’m spoiling anything for you when I say things do not go well for O’Connor, as a rule. The Brad Wesley goon most likely to be mistaken for a once-promising Celtics prospect who suffered a career-ending injury and now owns a chain of Honda dealerships throughout the Greater Boston area, O’Connor gets his ass definitively kicked by Dalton and his fellow bouncers within minutes of our meeting him. He gets it kicked again by Brad Wesley, basically for the crime of getting it kicked in the first place, though the proximate cause is his pronounced tendency to bleed from ass-kickings, a condition Wesley is not helping. He gets it kicked again by Dalton and Wade Garrett later in the movie, gets it kicked right into the trash, I’m not even kidding, he ends up in a dumpster. And in the end Dalton murders him off-screen. Thus always to bleeders.

But this towering yahoo sure makes an impression when he first shows up on screen thanks to four simple words: “Hey, shut up, shithead.”

Does he say this to Frank Tilghman, who’s office he’s crashed in order to force him to re-hire Wesley’s sister-son Pat McGurn? Does he say it to Dalton, who shows up and tries to put a stop to it all? Does he even say it to Pat himself, a guy who needs his Rich Uncle Pennybags to make people be nice to him? No. He says it to Tinker, the sweatiest goon, cutting off Tinker’s attempt to engage in biting repartee with Dalton.

PAT: You don’t get it, do you?

DALTON: Why don’t you explain it to me.

TINKER: I’ll explain it to you—

O’CONNOR: Hey, shut up, shithead.

Mere transcription doesn’t do O’Connor’s delivery justice, though. For one thing, it necessitates the use of commas, which are not audible in actor Michael Rider’s Juilliard-educated bass voice at all. The whole thing comes out in a single exhalation, heyshutupshithead, like one self-contained sound of rebuke is all Tinker merits. O’Connor looks and sounds bored with even having to go through that much effort before he so much as finishes the sentence.

“Utter contempt” is too generous to describe what’s going on here. The fact that O’Connor sounds like White Barry White makes it all the more brutal, more hilariously unnecessarily mean. This is the verbal equivalent of missing the trash with the thrown remnants of a half-eaten egg salad sandwich and just leaving it there as you walk away. It’s the voice of God doing Pusha T’s “EEYUGGH” ad lib, at you. Never before or since have two nouns combined to elicit a prescribed response more effectively.

 

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034. Thru the Eyes of Tilghman

February 3rd, 2019

It goes ill with the Double Deuce. Frank Tilghman colorfully describes it to Dalton upon their first meeting as “the kind of place where they sweep up the eyeballs after closing,” and other than the lack of actual traumatic globe avulsions nothing we witness when we arrive contradicts this. It’s a hellhole. The bartender is a nepotism hire who robs the joint blind. The band gets pelted with bottles when they take five in order to urinate. The chief bouncer starts fights. Another bouncer fucks teenage girls in the supply closet. A waitress sells coke in the bathroom (presumably interfering with those customers who wish to snort coke in the bathroom, as is custom in classier establishments). Bottles, glassware, and furniture get smashed as regularly and thoroughly as the customers do. The owner is forced to waste precious man-hours bowdlerizing graffiti.

This much we know—now, anyway. But during the opening sequence, prior to our first visit to the Double Deuce, prior even to Tilghman’s description of the place to Dalton, we don’t know any of this unless we have watched the entire film before. That opening sequence, which depicts Frank Tilghman’s journey through the capacity crowd at the massively popular Bandstand where Dalton works at the time, is one of the reasons Road House rewards repeat viewings: Only people who’ve already witnessed the nightmare that is the pre-Dalton Double Deuce can understand what the hell Tilghman is doing.

In short order, Frank Tilghman marvels at…

  • a handrail
  • a bartender pouring shots
  • a cash register ringing up a sale
  • a waitress carrying a tray of drinks
  • a man lighting a cigarette for an attractively dressed woman
  • a credit-card transaction
  • a man leaving a large cash tip
  • a bar band

Remember, and this is key: Frank Tilghman owns a bar.

If you think I’m kidding about Tilghman “marveling at” these things, watch actor Kevin Tighe’s eyeline as he looks at each of these things in turn, whether within frame or via match cuts to the actions and objects in question. Then look at his face afterwards. He’s impressed. Thoroughly so. He takes it all in so intently that he reads like a villain casing the joint. Granted, he reads like that all the time, but as we’ve established, nothing that happens during the opening happens by accident.

You wanna know how bad things have gotten at the Double Deuce? Frank Tilghman, who owns a bar, looks at the basic components of literally any bar on earth like the apes look at the monolith in 2001. Forget the eyeballs on the floor. Just follow the eyeballs in Tilghman’s head.

 

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033. Dead man

February 2nd, 2019

When Dalton fires Morgan, the irascible bouncer played by pro wrestling legend Terry Funk, from the Double Deuce because he doesn’t have “the right temperament for the trade,” Morgan reacts as if determined to prove this was the right decision. “You asshole,” he growls. “What am I supposed to do?” “There’s always barber college,” Dalton deadpans in reply. The rest of the staff laugh at Morgan then, openly and for what I’d imagine is the first time. Dalton has defanged him.

Pointing his finger in Dalton’s face, Morgan delivers his farewell prediction: “You’re a dead man.” He nearly smacks his severance check out of Tilghman’s hand as he grabs it, then storms away.

Road House fans—Roadies—enjoy this interaction a great deal. It’s at least partially obvious why: How often do you get to see Patrick Swayze (Dirty Dancing) and Terry Funk (Halloween Havoc ‘89) tread the boards together? But it’s Funk’s innovative line readings that make this a standout scene.

He previews the direction he’s headed when he calls Dalton an asshole, which he pronounces “asshole,” emphasis very much on the second syllable and, one assumes, that particular aspect of the anatomy. Two nouns combined to elicit a prescribed response, right? For Morgan—and he’s not the only person in the film to pronounce the word in this way—”hole” is the lead noun, not “ass.” In his eyes, Dalton is less the cheeks than the evacuating void between.

Still, this might have escaped notice were it not for the coup de grace: not “You’re a dead man,” as every other person in the history of the English language has pronounced it, but “You’re a dead man.” Here, the rationale is a bit harder to parse. Surely no matter what spin you put on this, dead is the most important, and insulting, aspect of the phrase, right? Dalton already knows he’s a man. Dead is the newsworthy part. And in making himself the bearer of this bad news, Morgan is issuing a threat. (This is all obvious, I know, but we’re being methodical.)

So why emphasize “man”? Not to praise Dalton, that’s for sure, despite the rubric established by asshole. He’s putting man front and center in the Shakespearean, “What a piece of work is” way. If we think of Dalton as a man, a human, we imagine all that entails: his infancy, childhood, adolescence, young adulthood; his need to breathe, eat, drink, sleep, excrete; his social and biological drives to form community and find a mate; his hopes and fears and lusts; his prodigious skill and significant renown as a bouncer-philosopher; his future in all its possibility and inevitability. One pissed-off ex-coworker later and this could all be gone, a man reduced to meat and thence to nothing at all. In his own dimwitted way, from a brain that processes only rage and schadenfreude, Morgan is driving home what Dalton stands to lose, and what he plans to take away.

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“The Punisher” thoughts, Season Two, Episode Thirteen: “The Whirlwind”

February 2nd, 2019

When was the last time you walked away from a season of a Marvel/Netflix show with basically no complaints? The final bullets of The Punisher Season 2 have flown and I’m just freaking delighted to report that pretty much all of them hit the bullseye. Other than that one episode spent playing for time early in the season, this was…great, just great, just a terrific interpretation of the character of Frank Castle and how to tell stories with him. It avoided all of the usual pitfalls of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s TV end, like doubling up on villains but then not knowing how to balance them, or reaching an obvious endpoint about three-fifths of the way to the finale and then concocting some absurd plot contrivance to keep the story moving. It played to the general strengths of superhero stories, using violence and action to convey outsized emotion and treating the fallout as a metaphor for psychosexual vulnerability. The specifics of the violence and action were brutal, as befits the character. The politics were, in the main, sharp and counterintuitive given the Punisher’s often reactionary fanbase. Every major actor in it was good. Some (Amber Rose Revah, Annette O’Toole, Josh Stewart, Ben Barnes, and especially guest star Deborah Ann Woll) were fascinating. And one, Jon Bernthal, was an all-timer.

I reviewed the season finale of The Punisher Season 2 for Decider.

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032. Sh-Boom

February 1st, 2019

Originally recorded by doo-wop group the Chords, who charted with it in 1954, “Sh-Boom” became part of the pop-culture firmament largely because of a cover version by the Crew Cuts that was also a hit later that year. Both versions are the kind of gleeful pure-dee nonsense that make doo-wop such a fun genre to pronounce, let alone listen to. While Chords’ rendition has a jaunty swing to it, the Crew Cuts’ whitebread revamp emphasizes the gliding, carefree, “life could be a dream” side of the song. It sounds like a Sunday drive.

Of course, most people content themselves with driving on the right side of the road, Sunday or any other day, whether they’re listening to “Sh-Boom” or “Yakety Yak” or “Symphony of Destruction” by Megadeth. This is not just because it’s the law, or because it’s much safer not to drive into oncoming traffic. It’s because staying in your lane allows you to chart a long straight course, and a long straight road is the most fun kind to drive. The Germans modeled a whole genre of music after it and everything.

When we see Brad Wesley driving his red convertible (a Ford, possibly ill-gotten from Strodenmire’s ill-fated Ford dealership) with the top down on a bright sunny day, the fact that he’s singing “Sh-Boom” fits. It’s that kind of song. Wesley is also swerving from one side of the road to the other and back, over and over, like a sine wave, like a snake. This, too, fits. He’s that kind of person. But the actual driving process deserves closer examination.

Until Dalton passes by headed in the other direction, nearly getting run off the road in the process, there isn’t another car in sight. Wesley has the road all to himself. He could comfortably cruise along, taking in the air and the scenery. He could floor it if he felt the need for speed. (“He’s go the sheriff and the whole police force in his pocket,” Red Webster tells Dalton later in the film; the line is likely intended to explain why crimefighting in Jasper is entirely the province of bouncers, but it explains a lot of other things too.) This is what normal people who enjoy a nice drive would do.

As anyone who’s whipped around an empty high-school parking lot could tell you, rocking the steering wheel back and forth like Wesley does creates a push-pull swerving sensation that’s much more enjoyable in theory than in practice. If you’re a 17 year old looking for a quick thrill when you’re all out of kratom or whatever, sure knock yourself out. But to drive that way over a significant distance is less fun than just driving straight, not more.

Ben Gazzara sells the nauseating joyride as well as you’d expect from an actor who, prior to Road House, created the role of Brick in Cat in a Hot Tin Roof by Tennessee Williams. And indeed we can take Wesley’s glee as entirely sincere, but not because he’s having fun driving in and of itself. He has gone out of his way to make his drive less physically enjoyable, because the thrill of being a gigantic asshole and recklessly endangering the lives of others more than compensates for the loss.

This is the kind of man Brad Wesley is. He can hey-nonny-ding-dong-alang-alang-alang his way back and forth across every inch of asphalt in Jasper and none can say him nay. That’s worth a crick in the neck.

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“The Punisher” thoughts, Season Two, Episode Twelve: “Collision Course”

February 1st, 2019

Take Officer Frank here, for instance.

PUNISHER 212 OFFICER CASTLE

Has the Blue Lives Matter Flag Punisher Skull found its human avatar at last? Hardly. Frank’s wearing a uniform he stole from a crooked cop who was going to kill him both for money and out of loyalty to a gangster relative. He’s pictured here sometime between resisting arrest and kidnapping a Republican senator whose industrialist parents are covering up the fact that he’s gay by murdering teenagers. I’m not sure this will stop the meatheads from misappropriating the image, but it will mark them as the morons they are, that’s for sure.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of The Punisher Season 2 for Decider.

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“The Punisher” thoughts, Season Two, Episode Eleven: “The Abyss”

January 31st, 2019

The Punisher Season 2 Episode 11 (“The Abyss”) is basically another one of those placeholder episodes. You’ve had a bunch of action, a bunch of violence, and now you’re gonna get an hour of filler before we hit the next stretch of rapids. But unlike the previous dreary episode the season has aired in that vein, this one has Karen Page going for it. Reuniting the Daredevilcostar with her other vigilante platonic-romance partner makes for must-see viewing.

Deborah Ann Woll is so goddamn good in this role at this point. She’s turned Karen into some kind of vulnerability vortex, sucking everyone within a ten foot radius into her maelstrom of pain, care, comfort, and psychosexual entanglement with men who get beat up all the time. Combine that with Jon Bernthal, who’s basically her male equivalent, and…just…man.

punisher 211 FRANK CRYING

Oh man.

punisher 211 KAREN LIP-BITING CRYFACE

Man oh man.

punisher 211 TOUCHING EACH OTHER

I reviewed the eleventh episode of The Punisher Season 2 for Decider.

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“Kingdom” thoughts, Season One, Episode Six

January 31st, 2019

With Kingdom, no one is tuning in tomorrow, same Chang-time, same Chang-channel. Gratification must be delayed until Season 2. And while the show is to be commended for steering the genre away from The Walking Dead‘s reactionary “us against them” politics in favor of a story where the real heroes are those who risk their own safety and comfort to defend the lives of the less fortunate, what are you really gonna get in the second go-round besides a mashup of your favorite genre franchises but with very nice robes. In the end, that’s Kingdom for you. Decent politics and lovely wide shots aside, it never delivers more than the minimum it needs to.

I reviewed the season finale of Kingdom for Decider.

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031. The First Rule

January 31st, 2019

“This is the new Double Deuce,” says Frank Tilghman. We are at the start of an all-hands staff meeting, and Tilghman is pointing to the concept art for the bar’s redesign. But standing nearby is his latest hire, Dalton. It is through Dalton, with Dalton, in Dalton that the new Double Deuce will be achieved. Dalton embodies the new Double Deuce. He is its future.

When Dalton takes over as cooler he becomes more than just the chief bouncer. His role is not to handle a series of discrete incidents, but to institute sweeping reforms that will eliminate such incidents forever. “It’s going to change,” he states—not a threat, not a promise, a fact. His bouncers, too, must change for this to take place. As below, so above.

Bouncing on the Dalton Path is a matter of following “three simple rules.”

This is the first.

1. Never underestimate your opponent. Expect the unexpected.

To the uninitiated, Rule One sounds like it ought to be Rules One and Two. The first part dictates that one cannot take victory for granted no matter the look of the foe, wisdom borne out time and time again throughout the film. Old men prove to be exceptionally capable fighters. Heavy men move at speeds men half their size can’t match. And as the Knife Nerds amply demonstrate, even the most rat-faced and weaselly goons can carry death in their denim. You underestimate these men at your peril. Assume anyone you face in open combat, even the bleeders and the sister-sons, can and will kill you if given the chance.

Expecting the unexpected is a different matter, or so it seems at first glance. Sometimes that means anticipating that a would-be assassin has a boot-mounted knife, or that a business dispute will be settled with a monster truck, certainly. But the unexpected could also be advantageous, could it not?

Not for the purposes of Rule One, no. The combination of these two diktats is not arbitrary. By wedding the latter to the former, Dalton suggests that the unexpected always breaks in favor of your opponent: a bootblade stabbing at a human face, for ever. The bouncer must accept this.

But the inverse is also true. If never underestimating your opponent necessarily and coterminously entails expecting the unexpected, it follows that a rational assessment of your allies deems them perfectly reliable. You don’t need to wonder whether your fellow bouncers can help you. You can bank on it. They will never disadvantage you in unexpected ways like your enemies might. Your comrades will be there and be true. You can expect it. “Watch my back and each others’,” Dalton says near the conclusion of the Giving of the Rules. But with the First Rule, he’s said it already.

It’s a bit of an “If you think this sentence is confusing, change one pig” situation, isn’t it: For bouncers to be perfected, they must follow Dalton’s three simple rules, the first of which takes their preexisting perfection for granted. But simply by turning the First Rule around in their minds the bouncers of the Double Deuce are that much further along the Dalton Path. They begin thinking every enemy with the wary respect you show a large animal or an operating piece of heavy machinery. They envision scenarios that will surprise and shock them, and thus begin to take those surprises and shocks in stride. In so doing they become people who are unsurprising, consistent, dependable, stalwart—each man a hidden blade in the boot that is the bouncer corps, expertly wielded by the cooler’s outstretched leg, working in concert against all the goons that were or are or will be.

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030. “My only sister’s son”

January 30th, 2019

“I name Éomer my sister-son to be my heir.”—Théoden, The Lord of the Rings

“He’s my only sister’s son, and if he doesn’t have me, who’s he got?”—Brad Wesley, Road House

Not even I, a person with the White Tree of Gondor tattooed on my arm who is writing an essay about Road House every day for a year, can come up with much of a connection between the King of Rohan and the Chief Job Creator of Jasper, Missouri beyond the antiquated syntax with which they refer to their nephews, Éomer son of Éomund and Pat McGurn respectively. Wesley isn’t about to name his mustachioed kinsman his successor anytime soon, certainly. “Pat’s got a weak constitution, you boys know that,” he tells his assembled henchmen after two of their number, Tinker and O’Connor, failed to forcibly reinstate Pat in his old gig at the Double Deuce during one of the Knife Nerd incidents. “That’s why he’s working as a bartender.” Poor Pat, not even fit for full-time goonmanship.

Pat isn’t even present to hear this condescension, having slunk shamefacedly into Uncle Brad’s mansion at the first opportunity, allowing his comrades-in-goon to take the heat. Why should he bother sticking around? He knows his place, and it’s not at his uncle’s side. It’s Jimmy, Wesley’s strong right hand and, in my considered opinion, secret bastard son who’s the heir apparent. “I should have let you go, Jimmy,” Wesley says regarding the failed mission, an avuncular (fatherly?) hand on the back of the younger man’s neck. Better for Pat to spare himself the sight.

So no, Wesley’s rhetorical style here doesn’t remind me of Théoden King. Rather, I’m put in mind of another great man.

Jack Lipnick is the head of Capitol Pictures, the studio that hires a certain New York playwright to give a Wallace Beery wrestling picture That Barton Fink Feeling. Like Brad Wesley, he came up the hard way (“I mean, I’m from New York myself. Well, Minsk, if you wanna go all the way back—which we won’t, if you don’t mind, and I ain’t asking”) and rose to prominence and power by exerting control over the local economy, largely by screwing other business owners out of their share (regarding his assistant Lou Breeze: “Used to have shares in the company. Ownership interest. Got bought out in the Twenties. Muscled out, according to some. Hell, according to me”).

The tone Lipnick adopts when speaking about producer Ben Geisler, whom he fires instead of Barton when the latter screws up, sounds familiar. “That man had a heart as big as the all outdoors, and you fucked him!” he says, voice soaring as if with the eagles as he describes the generosity of spirit found in a guy he shitcanned, then cracking like a whip as he drops the f-bomb on the person truly at fault, at least in his eyes.

Though he prefers physical assault to firings, Brad Wesley reacts in similar fashion over his sister-son’s plight, arbitrarily beating his goon O’Connor unconscious for, alternately, being untruthful, unable to admit he was wrong, weak, unable to tolerate pain, cowardly and above all prone to bleeding. O’Connor’s failure regarding Pat may have occasioned the beating, but it isn’t even mentioned during the beating itself as one of Wesley’s half-dozen reasons for inflicting it.

For men like Wesley and Lipnick, people are worth caring about only to the extent that doing so, or pretending to do so, enables them to torment others on their nominal behalf. These men, like their words, are overinflated and empty. The overwrought sentiment intended to conceal the lie reveals it instead.

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“The Punisher” thoughts, Season Two, Episode Ten: “The Dark Hearts of Men”

January 30th, 2019

“The Dark Hearts of Men.” That’s the title of The PunisherSeason 2 Episode 10, and as they say across the pond, it does what it says on the tin. Juxtaposing the usual one-on-one heart-to-heart conversations the show is built on—this time focusing on what really makes Frank Castle and Billy Russo tick—with all-out savagery and depravity, it’s as extreme a statement as the Marvel Cinematic Universe has made to date.

I reviewed the tenth episode of The Punisher Season 2 for Decider.

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“Kingdom” thoughts, Season One, Episode Five

January 30th, 2019

Kingdom is doubling down on its The Lord of the Rings vibe. Does this shot of three heroes running across the fields in pursuit of their quarry look familiar to you, for instance?

kingdom 1x05 THE THREE GUYS RUNNING ACROSS THE FIELD

How about this supreme badass hacking his way through the monstrous hordes arrayed against him?

kingdom 1x05 STABBING AND BEHEADING

Or perhaps the giant column of heavily armored warriors marching toward a fortified location to seal the doom of everyone inside?

kingdom 1x05 ARMY GUYS

And that’s not all! There’s starving peasants, flaming arrows, last-minute rescues by wise men with beards, a kingdom overthrown from within by an evil advisor, a descendant of royalty who’s prepared all his life for one final confrontation with his arch-enemy. If you ever wanted to know what The Two Towers would look like if everyone had better hats, Kingdom has you covered.

There’s no reason to believe this isn’t sincere admiration on the part of the filmmakers, if indeed it’s even deliberate. (I have a hard time believing the beacon-lighting thing that’s appeared in two episodes is the handiwork of people who haven’t watched LotR, but I have the White Tree of Gondor tattooed on my arm, so my mind tends to go there regardless.) But there’s still a whiff of cynicism to the whole thing. Like Stranger Things before it, Kingdom is a mash-up of the world’s most popular entertainment. It’s a layup.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Kingdom Season 1 for Decider.

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029. Knife Nerds

January 29th, 2019

A person watching Road House from a remove of decades could be forgiven for wondering if packs of pointy-faced dorks with switchblades, roaming the land and stabbing bouncers, were the subject of some sort of ginned-up panic along the lines of Satanic nursery schools and wilding superpredators. No fewer than four blade-wielding wieners try to slice up Dalton before the film is even halfway over. Though as a category they are a distant second to brawlers in terms of goon prominence, they bear examination for what their presence tells us about Dalton’s world.

These two nitwits are the first people in the film to get bounced, from the Bandstand, before Tilghman hires Dalton away from the place to come work at the Double Deuce. The fellow on the right sparks a bounceable incident when he attempts to pay for the attentions of a young woman who finds the offer insulting and pins the hundred-dollar bill he offers her to the table with a knife; he knocks over her chair by planting a kick right between her legs and we’re off to the races. Dalton thinks he and his men have cooled things off, but this weaselly goof yanks the knife right back out of the table and takes a slice out of the cooler’s arm the moment his back is turned. He and his friend Farrah Fawcett are taken outside by Dalton and company, thinking they’re about to throw down with the man himself. (“I’ve always wanted to try you,” says the knife nerd to Dalton prior to exiting the premises. “I think I can take you.” This is another essay entirely.) But their date with immortality is cancelled when Dalton just turns around and goes back inside. They hurl invective at him in an effort to rile his temper or shame him into combat, but not even such vicious insults as “dirtball” and “moose-lips,” which are things these two people yell at the top of their lungs at a man they’re trying to intimidate, can change Dalton’s mind. Later, Dalton will caution the staff of the Double Deuce against taking such insults personally, since they’re just “two nouns combined to elicit a prescribed response.” That knowledge is clearly hard-earned.

This beady-eyed Parrothead is the first person Dalton bounces from the Double Deuce, earning him the undying awe of the people there assembled. All he wants to do is watch his girlfriend dance on a table. Such a fan of her gyrations is he that he attempts to murder, with a knife, the bouncer who asks them to cut it out. “Motherfucker” is his preferred binominal, but what he lacks in creativity he makes up for in extremely loud shirts. Dalton breaks a table with his face, and thus the cooler’s head prevails.

Here’s our old friend Pat McGurn, Brad Wesley’s only sister’s son and the Double Deuce’s now-ex bartender. He’s returned with his fellow goons Tinker and O’Connor in tow to muscle Tilghman into rehiring him, lest Wesley shut down liquor distribution to the bar. When Dalton takes mild, even bemused issue with the idea, Pat whips out a monstrosity that looks like something Legolas would pull out of an Uruk-Hai before lobbing it into another one’s forehead. As he attempts to stab Dalton in the fucking face in front of multiple witnesses in a crowded bar that can be observed clearly through the glass window of the office in which the murder attempt is taking place, he calls Dalton “chicken-dick.” In the end it works out no better for him than it did for Store Brand Crockett and White Tubbs or Hawaiian Punch, but I’m pleased to note that he at least came up with the film’s most ridiculous insult.

For the purposes of this essay I almost didn’t count Ketchum, the unnamed and fundamentally anonymous Brad Wesleyan who drives the monster truck and for whom bladed weapons are a specialty, as we will later learn to tragic effect. Though he is an obnoxious prig, he actually seems like someone you’d think twice about getting in a fight with. That ought to—ought to—elevate him out of Knife Nerd territory. On the other hand, his first knife attack involves attempting to high-kick Dalton in the head with a blade embedded in the toe of his cowboy boot, one of the lamest attempted murders in the movie, and it’s not like the competition isn’t stiff. Dalton catches his leg in midair, twists it savagely, and drags the guy out of the bar on his ass, which he proceeds to kick. Ketchum may look tough. He may even be tough. He doesn’t call Dalton “shit-ass” or “poodle-sack” or anything. But watch him dragged out to the curb like so much stonewashed garbage and then deny the Knife Nerd within at your peril.

All of these men use the blade as surrogate bravery. They may talk a good game—alright, they may talk a game. But when push comes to shove, they attempt to stab. They can whip out whatever they want in their attempt to try and take Dalton. But Dalton’s blade is his body, honed to a nicety, and it will wind up inflicting a far more serious gash than any knife before the story is through. A true cooler is worth a hundred such cowards.

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“Kingdom” thoughts, Season One, Episode Four

January 29th, 2019

Goddammit, they’re still killing kids in this thing. And I just…I just don’t think the material quite justifies the extremity.

[…]

I’ve listened to multiple little girls scream in terror about their impending death, and I’ve seen an adorable kid lie dead with an arrow in her back from a government soldier and then get gently laid to rest by the woman she spent about one day viewing as the replacement for the mother she watched eat her sister alive. And for what? A six-episode Netflix zombie thriller? Doesn’t The Walking Dead abuse serious tragedy for cheap sentiment in much the same way? You can count apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic stories that put the suffering of children at the center and deal with it in a worthwhile way on two hands,maybe. Could Kingdom possibly be headed anywhere worth that journey?

I reviewed the fourth episode of Kingdom for Decider.

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028. Lebowski (I): Windshields

January 28th, 2019

Road House is a 1989 film in which a grizzled gray-haired man with a molasses drawl played by Sam Elliott dispenses wisdom to a practitioner of tai chi who finds himself at odds with a rich, sleazy business magnate with a personal goon squad played by Ben Gazzara. The Big Lebowski is a 1998 film about same.

We will be revisiting the Road House/Lebowski Cinematic Universe. Boy, will we! But for now let’s focus on what I like to call The Windshield Shots. In Road House, Wade Garrett has just arrived in Jasper, Missouri to lend a hand to his old running buddy Dalton as the latter wages an increasingly vicious war with Brad Wesley, the film’s Gazzara. After rescuing his ass from a four-on-one beatdown—seriously, they’re just holding him in place and punching him in the gut like he’s a human heavy bag when Wade finally shows up to save the day—Wade goes for a drive in the passenger seat of Dalton’s car, the abuse of which by the angry patrons of the Double Deuce is a running gag, one that runs too far by any reasonable standard in fact. For that reason, riding shotgun puts Wade in an unenviable position.

But look at Wade here. He’s tickled pink! I assume he likes the feel of the wind through his magnificent head of hair, but it’s more than that. We will see, time and time again, how his most dangerous and dirty exploits amuse him, and how the same is true of Dalton’s. Riding through Jasper with a gigantic hole of shattered glass in front of him reassures him that it’s business as usual for his treasured “mijo.” It’s a sign that Dalton’s pissing off all the right people. And since Wade is a firm believer in the cut-and-run strategy when shit gets too heavy, he’s no doubt aware that the car will not long outlive Dalton’s stay in town, however long that may be. “It seems to me you’d be a little more more…philosophical about it,” he says later (much later) that evening, about an entirely different matter. But that hole in the glass, framing his “Aw shit-hell kid, I’m in hog heaven” grin, is already our lens into the Wade Garrett Mindset. He looks at broken things and sees a chance to live a life defined more by parts than the whole they add up to. Moving from one sensation to the next, treating calamity as opportunity, riding the nightlanes, bound only to those who ride with him: That is Wade Garrett. All Dalton can do is grin and bear it. Currently, it is time to be nice.

The Lebowski triarchy is an entirely different matter. Put aside whatever this Windshield Shot does or doesn’t owe to its predecessor. (I certainly believe the Coen Brothers, who after all put Sam Elliott and Ben Gazzara in their movie about a pair of weirdos fending off some rich guys and some goons, had seen Road House, but it’s irrelevant.) Despite sharing the tonsorial sensibilities of Wade Garrett, the Dude, played by Jeff Bridges, is pointedly not enjoying this breezy night drive. There will be no next down for him to head to. His car is not something he can stand to sacrifice. The Dude does not abscond. The Dude abides. He’d prefer to abide with a windshield.

Walter Sobchak occupies the Wade position in the car, but again, the contrast is revealing. No smile for Walter, no “shyush, don’t this beat all” grin. Walter is a man who can never admit that things have not gone according to plan, that every eventuality has not been foreseen and warded against. If at the beginning of the evening he said they would swing by the In-N-Out Burger, then goddammit that’s what they’re doing. If, in the interim, they attempt to brace a teenage boy for money he didn’t steal, vandalize a car he didn’t buy, and antagonize the neighbor who is the real owner of the car until the Dude’s own vehicle winds up getting the worse of it…well, the In-N-Out’s still there, isn’t it? Then he’ll by god buy it and eat it. As he says elsewhere in the film, “I’m staying. I’m finishing my coffee. Enjoying my coffee.” Situation normal, et cetera et cetera. Ironically, only his fellow veteran of American imperialist adventure in East Asia, Brad Wesley, shares this need to control the narrative.

Oh, Donny? Donny’s literally taking a back seat, literally a few steps behind. (Windshield’s out, Dude.) Lacking any physical or intellectual agency, he’s just along for the ride. He has no character in Road House. Unless…unless…

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“The Punisher” thoughts, Season Two, Episode Nine: “Flustercluck”

January 28th, 2019

The storytelling flaws that keep The Punisher from being even better than it is still linger. With the exception of a very strong cold open in which Frank admits to his small circle of friends that “This is always who I was” and says his wife knew and loved him for it, so said friends should just “Let me be what I’m meant to be,” pretty much every conversation happens in the exact same way. Two people stand or sit together, usually after one of them arrives where the other has been waiting. After that there are two options: Either one character demands to know something and the other character tells them, or one character spills their guts and the other character does so in turn. Billy and Dumont, Anderson Schultz and John Pilgrim, Anderson Schultz and his closeted son David, Pilgrim and some guy who knows a crew of hitters, Curtis and Amy, Frank and a bartender who knows Billy’s location, Madani and Billy, Amy and her old friend and future betrayer Sean, Frank and Amy over the phone, Billy and Dumont again, Madani and Dumont after the latter lures the former to her place, Pilgrim (formerly known as “Robbie, apparently) and his old boss in whatever Nazi gang he used to run with, Amy and Frank after she shoots a person for the first time…you get the picture. You can tweak it around the margins a bit—Curtis and Amy are both in the same place when they start their little chat, Dumont and Billy are in bed during one of theirs, at one point Curtis talks to multiple veterans instead of just one—but virtually every human interaction on this show could be staged like My Dinner with Andre.

I reviewed the ninth episode of The Punisher Season 2 for Decider.

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“Kingdom” thoughts, Season One, Episode Three

January 28th, 2019

A few seasons into the run of Mad Men it was briefly voguish to speculate that one of Don and Betty Draper’s children would die. (People also thought that about Megan Draper, and Roger Sterling, and Don himself I believe. They also thought Don Draper was legendary airplane-heist perfect-crime architect D.B. Cooper. TV criticism gets weird sometimes.) I can never find the quote when I’m looking for it, but creator Matthew Weiner said something in response that has stuck with me for years. He said he’d never kill off a child on Mad Men, because any show in which children die must, in the moral-imperative sense, become a show about children dying. Anything less, he argued, is not commensurate with the life-remaking magnitude of such an event on the survivors. To do it for shock value, or for an individual story arc in a show that remains about, like, advertising or working in an office or whatever, is insufficient justification.

Weiner, it should be said, has not always taken his own advice on ethical issues, but on this one at least he practiced what he preached. In the episode of The Romanoffs that came closest to centering on such an event, in which an American couple had to decide whether to adopt a promised Russian infant who turned out to have severe developmental disabilities or abandon her to the orphanage system, was about the momentousness of that choice, and the cruelty of a world that makes such choices possible. To the extent that series ranging from Breaking Bad to Game of Thrones have involved the murder or attempted murder of children, the specter of those crimes informs everything that comes afterward. They are meant to demonstrate the inhumanity against which such stories warn us.

Whatever noises Kingdom makes about the evils of the aristocracy or the cruelty of the class system—and in this episode it makes plenty—are seasoning, not the main ingredient. The rich and powerful villains are so feckless and cowardly as to serve primarily as comic relief; their maltreatment of the poor is sledgehammer-subtle. What Kingdom really is is a show in which zombies eat people and people behead zombies with swords while wearing cool costumes, because these things are exciting and fun to watch.

You know what’s not exciting and fun to watch? You know what’s the kind of thing your period-action-horror-fantasy swashbuckler shouldn’t do unless it plans to dig way, way deeper into the subject that it clearly has any intention whatsoever of digging? Putting a terrified little girl on camera and having scream “Mommy, what is wrong with you? You’re scaring me! Stop it!” before her mother eats her alive.

I reviewed the third episode of Kingdom for Decider.

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