“So, it’s come at last. At last, it’s come. The day I knew would come at last has come, at last.”

—“A Mother Doesn’t Matter Anymore,” Bye Bye Birdie

The most infamous line in Road House was not in the script. That much we can agree on. Marshall Teague, the actor who says it, claims it was improvised and given the seal of approval by on-set super-producer Joel Silver. Rowdy Herrington, the director, says it was Silver’s invention. Whoever the author, their work is not present in the basic-cable cut of the film, for obvious reasons. Few pleasures have I known greater than watching Road House in the company of men who considered themselves Road House superfans but who had never seen the uncut R-rated original article, only to arrive at this line. It’s a moment the phrases “Holy shit!” and “What the fuck?” were made for.

Why is that? Because it’s the moment when the band-aid gets ripped off, the pustule is pierced and drained, and the sexualized violence toward and involving Dalton is finally made manifest. No more talk about taking Dalton, no more innuendo about how we thought he’d be bigger, no more homosocial power-dynamic establishment with words like “son” or “boy” or “mijo“—this is just Dalton’s would-be nemesis stating outright that in other circumstances, fights like this ended with him raping the bested combatant.

Yet despite its awful—I was gonna say implications, but it’s not implying anything, is it? It’s coming right out and saying the awful thing. Yet despite that, the line does not short-circuit our enjoyment of the film, or even of just this fight scene, the way you might expect it to. In part that’s because our society does not take prison rape seriously and never has. In part it’s because Jimmy is about to get his in a way that’s even more spectacular and gruesome than the line itself. And in part it’s because Road House is a cavalcade of outrageousness from the start. Every yokel and goon who gets punched in the face, every gratuitous ass and boob shot, every ridiculous line reading by some weird old crank, every arrhythmic scene in which Brad Wesley does twelve contradictory things, every explosion, every monster truck, every mention of the concept of famous bouncers—all of it prepares us to weather virtually any storm to come our way. “I used to fuck guys like you in prison?” Okay, sure. What else ya got?

Midway through their fight on the beach, Jimmy wallops Dalton in the side with a hunk of…I want to say driftwood? It could be a fallen branch from one of the nearby trees, too. Either way I commend his astute use of innate environmental advantages in his fight. That’s the root of all good fight scenes, as I’ve said for many years now—they distinguish themselves from one another by making use of the physical space around them and the objects that inhabit that space. It’s a bit disappointing that at no point does anyone throw sand in the other person’s eyes to momentarily blind them, but be that as it may. It’s also unclear how Jimmy can muster enough force to break an item hard enough to injure Dalton’s ribs a less than one-foot swing, but we’ll ignore that as well. Jimmy’s presence of mind is what’s on display here. And when Jimmy gets his leg tangled up in a tree, Dalton will pay him back in kind, reversing the fortunes of the fight and leading to his overall victory. Watch the wood.

Relatively early on in the proceedings, Dalton flashes a grin at Jimmy while they square up after a flurry of blows and counters. Is he…enjoying this? Yes, at the moment anyway, and for several reasons. First, he’s just told Doc that he’s only good at one thing: He never loses. Of course he’s glad to be doing the one thing he’s good at.

Second, consider Jimmy’s rhetoric. He opens their battle banter with “Prepare to die.” Dalton knows he’s in a life-or-death struggle, for himself anyway—I don’t believe he has any plans to kill Jimmy at this stage—and with that in mind Dalton is pleased to have weathered Jimmy’s initial murderous assault with roughly the same alacrity as he’s fended off countless others. He’s doing well, and he knows it.

Third, and again springboarding off Jimmy’s declared intent to kill, Dalton knows that being as good as he is is pissing Jimmy off. He can read the frustration all over Jimmy’s face, and thanks to Marshall Teague’s enormously expressive mug, so can we. There’s some delight to be taken there, as any number of the smug smiles he’s shot at the Tinkers of the world indicate.

But we have another face to look at here, don’t we. Jimmy is not just annoyed, or even pissed—he’s furious. He decided to kill Dalton the moment Dalton knocked him off his motorbike, and he’s doubling down on that decision.

When Dalton realizes this, when Dalton decides it’s really kill or be killed, Dalton will smile no longer.

We’re several exchanges of kicks, strikes, and wrestling holds deep into Dalton and Jimmy’s vicious fight at a small beach on the shore of the mysterious body of water separating Emmett’s ranch from Wesley’s mansion when Dalton takes to the skies once again. He winds up delivering a knee to Jimmy’s midsection, which takes his opponent down. This gives Dalton his first chance to really lay a beating on the guy, albeit briefly as they’re very evenly matched.

But in a film with approximately half a hundred fight scenes, what we’re watching Dalton do stands out. Balletic leaps through the air were not part of his arsenal at any point inside or outside the Double Deuce, which is where all of his fights had been contained until now. So in part we’re seeing him respond to the environment, which has no walls or ceiling or furniture for him to navigate—just the branches of the trees. Small wonder Dalton’s offense becomes a more soaring thing, a thing of beauty.

But one other point worth considering is his motive for the fight. Dalton is off the clock right now, after all. And he’s not defending liquor shipments, or simply performing his routine job of keeping riffraff out of the bar where he works. He’s just seen his friend Emmett nearly get blown to bits by a cackling ghoul in head-to-toe denim. He wants revenge.

Seen in that light, this dance-like formation is how Dalton expresses his rage, his bloodlust, his thirst for retribution. Could there be anything more Dalton than giving voice to his basest instincts in the most beautiful way possible? Dig deeper and deeper into Dalton’s psychophysicality and you’ll find the place where the heavens meet the earth.

JIMMY: Prepare to die!

DALTON: You are such an asshole.

Noël Coward it isn’t. Peter Parker it isn’t. Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Running Man it isn’t. Jimmy makes an explicit threat, and Dalton dodges the threat component completely—no “not today,” no “prepare to think again,” nothing directly tied to Jimmy’s words. Just, “You are such an asshole,” a statement he could have accurately made about Jimmy at any point during their relationship, not predicated on being informed he should prepare to die at Jimmy’s hands.

Not for the last time in the two-minute fight that follows, Dalton’s mid-battle quip is essentially a non sequitur. He hasn’t come to banter—bantering just gets on his nerves. He won’t reply to the banter, but he’ll assert his feelings about the banterer, merely using the banter as a logical starting point. It’s a fascinating series of choices for someone engaged in a life-or-death struggle, like if Luke Skywalker had responded to the Emperor’s taunts by saying “You are one ugly motherfucker.”

“Prepare to die!” “You are such an asshole.” Say it loud and there’s music playing, say it soft and it’s almost like praying.

Decking a man off the back of a moving motorbike is no mean feat. You have to run full-tilt, first of all, as close to motorbike speed as the human body allows, just to get in the door as it were. You need to properly angle your body and the leap it makes so that you’re aimed in the right direction rather than just jumping blindly. You have to lead the bike so that you’re not jumping at air where the bike once was. You have to not lead the bike too much so that you’re not gonna land on the dirt a few feet in front as the bike runs you over. You have to count on your quarry being so preoccupied by his own glee over the wanton destruction he’s wrought that he doesn’t notice the man in sweatpants barreling towards him. It helps to be shirtless and glistening with sweat, too. (I mean, I assume. Aerodynamics and all that.) You need your arms and legs at full extension, buying you time in midflight to readjust and aim appropriately, to say nothing of the asethetics. And you have to be animated with a blinding thirst for vengeance against a man who dressed up in head-to-toe denim in order to blow up the house of the weird old man who rents you an extravagant loft apartment for a hundred bucks a month, a nominal fee intended to keep the local Presbyterians at bay. You put it all together and you have Dalton, running at breakneck speed, then soaring through the air in order to crash into a man on a moving motor vehicle and then, after the crash, to kick his ass and tear his throat out. Poetry in motion. No, wait: Philosophy in motion.

Dalton’s compassion is cloaked at this stage in the film by his rage, but it’s still there, animating his actions. To a fault, perhaps. After he pulls Emmett from his burning house, which then explodes a second time, Emmet tells him “I’d be fine if you’d get off of me.” And what does Dalton do immediately? Rest his head on the old man’s chest. He does this not out of spite or a desire to increase the man’s suffering, of course—he’s just overcome with relief that his friend is well enough to crack wise. Dalton even smiles for a second, despite it all.

When you write about Road House you have to take all of it on board or it doesn’t work. You have to treat every weird filigree of the film like a deliberate choice. You have to treat the characters as the gestalt of their actions. This is why Dalton engenders such love: About two minutes before he rips a man’s throat out in anger, he presses his forehead against the chest of his landlord, just to be closer to a man he’s glad is alive. He makes time to be nice, and bless him for that.

It’s a layup, I realize, to take your old-man-with-a-big-white-beard character and put him in red long johns for pajamas. Because it makes him look even more like Santa Claus, see? But in a way I fear that this deep in the weeds with Road House we’ve lost sight of some of its simple pleasures: butts, boobs, dudes getting punched in the face, people getting thrown through tables, explosions, a monster truck, a town full of nothing but codgers and yokels. Can we not add “Emmett dresses up like Santa Claus when he goes to sleep” to the list? Can we not savor the site of Dalton and Dr. Elizabeth Clay rescuing St. Nick from a fiery inferno? Can we not enjoy the fact that after being bodily removed from a building in the process of exploding like the Hindenburg, Emmett’s only concession to Dalton’s query about his health is to quip “I’d be fine if you’d get off of me”? You can’t keep this right jolly old elf down, try as you might. The same is true of Road House. There’s always something marvelously dumb just around the corner, if you’re willing to look.

Jimmy Reno has exactly four minutes to live when he sets off the initial explosion in Emmett’s home. Four minutes to the second. What an emotional journey that must be for him. The tension and thrill of being a sneak in the night. The firebug awe of the detonation. The bonus, unlooked for, of the secondary explosion, even bigger than the first. Stopping his getaway motorbike to laugh uproariously at Dalton, Doc, and Emmett, reveling in their powerlessness compared to his fiery prowess. The sudden shock of being knocked off his bike by a flying man. The determination to kill this man. The back and forth of their battle. The pain of incurring blows and the satisfaction of inflicting them. The sadistic delight of reminiscing about his time as a prison rapist. The moment when it all changes and he realizes he’s in trouble, deep trouble. The desperate decision to pull a gun and settle things for good and all. The rushed in-the-moment thinking that occurs when you feel you’re at immediate risk of death. The pain in his throat. Oblivion. From lighting up the night with his malice to floating face-down dead in a river, in the time it takes the Beatles to do the “na na na nanana na” part of “Hey Jude.” Take a sad song and make it wetter.

Emmett’s house explodes twice: first from the explosive set by Brad Wesley’s lieutenant and bastard son (WE WILL NOT BE ACCEPTING QUESTIONS AT THIS TIME) Jimmy, and second, presumably, when the house’s oil tank or moonshine distillery or meth lab or something catches fire and goes boom. It’s a comically large explosion even by the standards set by Red Webster’s Auto Parts, which of course was a larger building and filled with natural accelerants. In the image above you can see Dalton, Doc, and Emmett fleeing as the explosion reaches its height; that should give you so me sense of the preposterous scale of the thing.

Sometimes when I play Minecraft with my children I’ll build an entire structure out of TNT blocks, just so it’ll blow up bigger when I light it on fire. It’s easy to wonder if Emmett did the same with his sad little house, waiting for the day when his sins, whatever they are, came due for repayment.

Shirtlessly smoking
His surgeon, she’s standing nearby
Awaiting a word
Gasping at glimpses
Of bottomless buttocks
He runs, wishing he could fly
Only to leap when the house blows sky-high

Wordlessly watching
He waits by the window
For Wesley
That’s the JC Penney guy
Anxious for Emmett and arson explosions
He worries
Did Wade wish him goodbye? Or call him mijo?

They are one cooler
They are two alone
They are three together
They are for the road house

Bound from the barn loft
And bounce by the hay bales to rescue
Your beardy landlord first
Dalton is diving
He’s down to defend from the danger
Maybe rip out throats
And choke them with their blood

They are one cooler
They are two alone
They are three together
They are for the road house

This is Dalton when he has nothing to do but fume. His muscles are taut, arms crossed fussily across his abdomen. His head juts forward, neck straining, jaw tight as he vents his frustration and rage. There’s nothing else for him to do right now—just vent, impotently, at his girlfriend. His body is like one huge knot.

This is Dalton in action. His landlord Emmett’s house has just exploded and he’s leaping to the rescue from his second-story window. But he moves not like someone who needs to brace himself for a fall, but gracefully, soaring rather than falling. His arms are wide, his legs angled just so, his hair flowing in the breeze. Faced with a physical problem, he moves toward a solution like a dancer hitting his marks. This is Dalton as he is meant to be. His body responds to the call of duty just as much as his mind.

“I’ve always wanted to try you. I think I can take you.” That’s what the Knife Nerd said to Dalton in the very first scene of the film, when Dalton breaks up a fight at the club he worked at back in New York. The sexualization of combat was already clear in the man’s choice of words, a language of dominance and submission that glistens and gleams each time it’s used. It happens again and again. “Your ass is mine, boy,” Jimmy tells Dalton when Wesley calls off their fight in the Double Deuce, just for example. And a few seconds from where we now stand it will accelerate to explicitly sexual speeds.

Dalton inadvertently sets the dominoes in motion. “I know exactly who Brad Wesley is,” he snaps at Dr. Elizabeth Clay after she warns him he has no idea what Brad Wesley is capable of. “I’ve seen his kind many times. He keeps taking, and taking, until somebody takes him.” Dalton believes he’s man to do this—to take Brad Wesley, and thus best him. There’s a weird lacuna in the phrasing that invites questions: takes him…where, exactly? takes him down? takes him on? takes him in? You almost can’t help but sub in the sexual connotation of the phrase, since we’re offered so little by way of an alternative. This shirtless mass of muscle and sinew and fine feathered hair wants to take his enemy. You connect the dots.

Dr. Elizabeth Clay is not taking Dalton’s shit. That’s the throughline for nearly every word she says during this scene. On Brad Wesley: “You don’t know him.” On the inability of the people of Jasper to stand up to Brad Wesley: a sarcastic “But you can stop him.” On Dalton’s assertion that he never loses: “But what are you gonna win?” She continues: “Who’s this for, anyway? Are you doing it for them?” She answers her own question: “I don’t think so.” She pulls off this rhetorical trick again for the coup de grace: “You think you’re gonna save these people from Wesley?” At the top of her lungs, her voice shredding, her face a grimacing mask of fury: “WELL WHO’S GONNA SAVE THEM FROM YOU?”

BOOM.

At that precise moment, the building visible through the window behind her blows up. It’s the most fortuitously timed act of arson in the annals of Jasper, Missouri, I’d have to imagine. The bomb Jimmy the goon used to blow up the house of Emmett the old man is like an inflammable exclamation mark at the end of the Doc’s rant. It’s as if the ideas she’s bringing up are too dangerous even to give voice to. The world ruptures around them in gouts of flame. She’s a pyrokinetic Cassandra with one message to deliver: In the contest of Dalton vs. Brad Wesley, the only winner is the conqueror worm.

“Brad Wesley picked me,” Dalton tells Dr. Elizabeth Clay, “and when he did, he fucked up. I’m only good at one thing, Doc: I never lose.” The thing to pay attention to here is that Dalton has rarely, if ever, sounded like more of a loser than he does right here and now. His tone of voice is clipped, nasal, truculent. His body language and facial expressions are those of a man who, contrary to what he’s saying, feels he has an enormous amount to prove, and is trying to bluster his way into confidence that he can do so. He’s also, it should be said, being a huge dickhead to the one that he loves and who loves him. She’s there simply to ask him not to put himself in a life-threatening contest of wills with her insane ex-husband, and he’s taken this as an opportunity to whip out his dick and measure it in front of her.

Something’s got to give.

Dalton is dripping with sweat when Wade Garrett visits to confront him. Dalton is perfectly dry when Dr. Elizabeth Clay visits to confront him a few hours later. This raises questions, considering that he’s wearing (or not wearing) the exact same thing in both scenes. Does his hair naturally revert to a feathered mullet pompadour when dry? Did he let his body air-dry naturally? Did he shower, and then put back on the same pants? Where does he shower, anyway? There’s no bathroom visible in his barn loft. Does he hose himself off in the nude for bathing purposes, and use some unseen outhouse for his bathroom needs generally?

Whatever the case, his dried, blown-out appearance in the second scene is belied by his demeanor. He’s no more in control here than he was when he was gushing sweat from every pore while yelling at his mentor. True, he doesn’t try to punch Doc in the face full-force, or at all, but he’s just as petulant and broken-sounding as he was with Wade. The situation with Wesley, the admonishments from Wade and Elizabeth, the plight of Red and Strodenmire—it’s all too much regardless of whether he’s toweled himself off. You can cleanse the boy of his flopsweat, but you can’t cleanse the boy of his flopsweat, you know what I mean?

One of the reasons it’s easy to tell that Dalton isn’t holding a cigarette at the start of his confrontation with Dr. Elizabeth Clay, despite the appearance of one in his hand by the end of it, is the positioning of his arms. They’re crossed above his stomach, and stay that way as he turns toward her, ranting and raving about how he’s seen the likes of Brad Wesley many, many times. I can’t say that I’ve seen the likes of Dalton many, many times, at least insofar as I’ve never argued with a shirtless man who walks around with his arms crossed like he’s in a straitjacket. It looks very, very weird, especially when combined with his petulant tone of voice and jut-jawed, neck-straining body language.

But Dalton is in a straightjacket, isn’t he? One of his own making. He refuses to quit the town because of his feelings for the Doc and his anger towards Brad Wesley. But he also refuses to listen to the Doc, who’s telling him to forget his anger towards Brad Wesley and just get the hell out of there. He’s staying behind for the sake of someone who wants him to leave. His motives are crisscrossed, just like his arms.

While Dalton is busy ranting and raving, smoke starts wafting up from below the frame. Dalton’s got passion in his pants and he ain’t afraid to show it, but though you’d be forgiven for thinking that’s the source of the smoke, I’m afraid the truth is more prosaic: a continuity error sees him smoking a cigarette toward the end of the conversation but not at the beginning. At no point does he move anyplace where he could conceivably have picked up an (already lit) cigarette after appearing at the window without one in his hand—trust me, I’ve looked. That said, isn’t it marvelous that at some point during the filming they thought what this scene needed was for Dalton to be shirtless, sulky, and smoking? The trifecta, if you will? Given what’s about to occur—without spoiling it, Dalton will soon find he has pressing business elsewhere, without the time to extinguish a cigarette on the way to attending it—the “give him a cigarette” decision could well have led to him accidentally burning down his barn. But by god we want our hero to be a tough guy, and tough guys smoke. Shirtless. In their dancing pants. While they whine. While their girlfriends yell at them. In their (highly flammable) barn loft apartment.

Childish, petulant, angry, sulky, and frightened, Dalton is no longer himself—or is it that he’s become too much himself? Either way, gone are the minimalist barbs that undid verbal sparring partners like Morgan and Horny Steve earlier in the film, “opinions vary,” “is she?”, and so on. When he detects Dr. Elizabeth Clay’s presence in his apartment, apparently his cooler-sense tells him that this time she’s not there to unzip her pants and get junk-on-junk without kissing first. Rather, she’s there to tell him to put a stop to the blood feud with her ex-husband Brad Wesley by getting the hell out of Dodge. What is his preemptive-strike quip this time around? “Little late for a house call, don’t you think?” Because she’s a doctor, get it? Not his best work.

But listen to his delivery and there’s more emotion and meaning in the line than you might realize. When he says “don’t you think” he emphasizes think, hitting the terminal -nk like a light slap to the face. It’s his way of displaying his neck frill and saying to the Doc what he said to Wade Garret: “Leave me alone.” He doesn’t particularly care what she thinks.

Frankenstein’s monster must always turn on his creator, and with one punch directed at Wade Garrett’s face, Dalton renders himself monstrous. Look: You can see his fear of what he’s becoming all over his face. It’s not just that he tried to strike his mentor down, though one can only imagine what he would have felt and done had he succeeded. It’s that the violence within himself, the violence he has kept at bay for years by obeying the Three Simple Rules and walking the Dalton Path, the violence he lets out only when it’s time to not be nice, the violence that has haunted him since Memphis—that violence is besting him, growing beyond his control. The dam sprang a leak and it is only through good fortune and Wade Garrett’s own skill that he was able to plug it back up before drowning. Will others be so lucky?

Dalton thinks—Dalton knows, I suspect—that the answer is no. This is why, when he gainsays Frank Tilghman’s assertion that Brad Wesley is afraid of him, he’s only telling half the story. Dalton is afraid of Brad Wesley because Brad Wesley is not afraid of him—because without that fear Wesley is free to act in such a way as to bring out the side of Dalton that Dalton is afraid of. It’s that side of him that scares him worse than anything.

Perhaps he can see himself mirrored in Wade Garrett’s eyes in this moment. Perhaps he sees what is happening to him as clearly as we do. The horror, the horror of knowing what you’re capable of, and feeling powerless to stop it.