“Dalton, Red’s place is on fire!” Once more unto the beach, dear Jack, once more; or put the fire out with our Jasper booze. When Brad Wesley’s minions—presumably Jimmy, the go-to guy for arson—sets Red Webster’s auto parts store ablaze, who but Jack would be the man to bring Dalton the bad news? He bursts through the packed Double Deuce crowd with the kind of speed that would make a man his size an absolute phenomenon in today’s pro wrestling world, where agile big men are star attractions. He grasps the severity of the situation. He understands that Dalton is the man to be told, intuiting on some level that Dalton is involved in the conflict that caused the conflagration. Even now he follows the Three Simple Rules, allowing his cooler to determine whether to be nice or to not be nice. He’s watching Dalton’s back, and everyone else’s. He is Jack, the heir apparent, the Dalton Dauphin, the Crown Prince of Cooling. All hail.

“You’re a long way from Memphis.”

“Memphis has nothing to do with it.”

“Bullshit. That dog won’t hunt.”

Wade Garrett does not understand why Dalton cannot forgive himself for killing the husband of the woman he was dating in Memphis, and from hunting dogs on down he tries every rhetorical trick in the book to convince Dalton to, as he puts it, “cut it the fuck loose.” He peremptorily dismisses Dalton’s denialism, for starters. He says he’s living in the past. He makes a tongue-in-cheek appeal to Dalton’s schooling and wonders why he isn’t “a little more…philosophical about it.” He cajoles, he rages. He points out the facts—that “that fucking c…that girl never told you she was married”—so emphatically that it takes visible force of will for him not to call the woman involved a cunt in a family restaurant.

Then it all comes down to the way of the warrior, the knight errant, the cooler. “When a man sticks a gun in your face, you got two choices: You can die or you can kill the motherfucker!” The oath springs from his mouth so fast there’s practically a recoil.

Wade Garrett wants his mijo to be happy, with his job, his town, his new c…his new girl. Seeing him conflicted, unhappy even, makes Wade feel awful. His own best friend is being his own worst enemy. What do you do under those circumstances? Is it time to be nice or is it time to not be nice? Wade Garrett chooses both approaches, though the latter wins out in the end, as it so often does.

Right after Wade Garrett establishes that Dr. Elizabeth Clay has a level of intelligence too lofty to support a kiester of such magnificence, he slides back to a full upright and locked position and says to Dalton, “You’ve got your hands full, kid.” In any other movie I might not assume this was a deliberate double entendre, but in any other movie I wouldn’t have heard the phrase “balls big enough to come in a dump truck.” At the very least Wade is speaking both metaphorically and literally about what Dalton’s hands are full of.

So let us assume this is crude wordplay. What does Wade mean by connecting the mind with the body in this fashion? Might not the meaning of the phrase derive from implication rather than connection? Somewhere in the combination of the Doc’s sparkling intelligence and surpassing beauty there lies what we might call her soul, her chi, her life force, the thing that makes her her. More than being outwitted or banged into oblivion, Dalton is at risk of being trampled by the wild horse energy Wade himself has been attempting to gentle all night. In his own macho way he’s saying the whole is greater than the sum of her parts.

“That gal’s got entirely too many brains to have an ass like that.” That would be Wade Garrett speaking, developing the science of the brains/ass ratio before our very eyes, and behind Dr. Elizabeth Clay’s ahem let’s say behind her back. He’s hardly being subtle about it either, tilting his head almost 90 degrees to get a better look at whatever’s swishing around under that loose-fitting floral-print skirt. Just, ogling her right out there in the open, the diner staff and the diner patrons and Dalton can all get a good long look at Wade getting a good long look at the Doc’s impeccable hinder. And I don’t understand why he’s checking her ass out with his head tilted sideways anyway, unless asses work radically differently in Jasper, which we know having seen two of them including Doc’s they do not.

Crude? Yes, but knowing Wade we’re lucky he didn’t say it right to her face. What’s a little good-natured objectification from a guy who’s already shown you his pubic hair? Look, I won’t pretend to understand the Way of Wade Garrett in every particular—the Dalton Path is more my field—but the bottom line (wink so hard my eyelids fuse) is that he is a man who enjoys brains, and ass, and the to him unlikely combination of the two. He’s saying Elizabeth is as good as it gets, and based on that metric it’s a hard point to argue with.

It’s morning, and Dalton, Wade, and Elizabeth are drinking beer and coffee at their second dive of the…night? Because they’ve stayed up drinking till dawn at at least two establishments that we know of, three if you count Dalton and Wade’s initial meeting at the Double Deuce. None of these three dives, it should be noted, are the dive to which Dalton took Doc on their earlier date. Jasper is a town consisting solely of auto dealerships and greasy spoons. I wonder what their Chamber of Commerce meetings are like.

Anyway it’s morning, because seconds after exposing his bush to Elizabeth, Wade insists on going someplace “more romantic” to dance, and everyone likes dancing up and down the aisle at a diner, ordering beers at like 7am amid the breakfast crowd, right?

Wade and Elizabeth do, that’s for goddamn sure. They do a jaunty two-step to George Strait’s “All My Ex’s Live in Texas,” complete with a reedy little singalong of the title phrase from Wade. He spends pretty much the entire time purring at the Doc. No, he won’t be telling her how great a guy Dalton is, he’ll tell her “how I want you for myself” instead. He’ll make fun of his yawning protégé’s staying power: “He’s great comin’ out of the gate, but not much for stamina.” He’ll put his hand in Doc’s golden hair, the other on her back, and they’re real close together now, no room for the Holy Spirit between these two. And in the end they press their hips together, hips being used euphemistically here, as he dips her so low she’s upside down, and they look at Dalton and they laugh, because it’s funny, isn’t it? It’s funny to just really really really clearly want to fuck your best friend’s girlfriend, and funnier still that she clearly wants to fuck you, and funniest of all that neither of you give a fuck that your best friend/boyfriend sees it all. You have to make your own fun in this town.

DOC: Hi.

DALTON: Hey.

ALL THREE: [giddy nervous laughter]

Never before and never since has so much sexual energy been packed into two syllables as in this moment. Dalton, driving with his windshield busted, has told Wade there’s someone he wants him to meet, and assured him he really isn’t in trouble. The moment Wade sees a woman walking toward their car outside the Jasper Community Hospital, he says “I fuckin’ knew it.” Women are trouble, the evidence is carved into his body. But it’s the kind of trouble ol’ Wade doesn’t mind getting himself into. The way he looks at Dr. Elizabeth Clay—and the way she looks at him, and at Dalton, and the way Dalton looks at them looking at each other, and the way all three of them laugh as if sharing some delicious and delightful unspoken secret—sure makes it seem like he wants to literally get himself into this particular trouble. And he’s not alone: There are more volumes of smut in Doc’s “Hi” and in Dalton’s responsorial “Hey” than in the Vatican’s Black Library.

What I’m trying to say here is that just as Kevin Tighe’s performance at the start of the film leaves you with zero doubt he’s the villain of the piece, however quickly the film disabuses you of that notion, the performances of Kelly Lynch, Sam Elliott, and Patrick Swayze in this scene leave no doubt in your mind whatsoever that there’s an MMF threesome in the offing and that they’re all as pleased as punch and as randy as goats about it. I triple dog dare you to watch this scene and gainsay me. It can’t be done. The sexual tension in the air is so thick you could get together with your girlfriend and your best friend and fuck it.

I kid, I kid the goons, and why not—they’re constantly getting their asses kicked. But look at our man Mountain here. Mountain knows that he and his comrades-in-arms have been sent to the Double Deuce with a very specific mission: Stop any and all liquor shipments. Mountain does not abandon this mission the moment Dalton throws hands. No, Mountain picks up a case of Tia Maria, throws it to the ground, turns, picks up a second case of Tia Maria, and throws it to the ground. Then and only then, after Dalton has rung the bells of Morgan and Tinker and O’Connor singlehandedly, does he turn his attention to Dalton.

Granted, once you’ve see what happens to him when he does attack Dalton—he lifts him clean off the ground in a bear hug, only to have his face bashed in by a pair of reverse headbutts—you’ll start wondering if maybe there wasn’t a third case of Tia Maria that wanted smashing. And if you pay close attention you’ll notice that by decking Morgan right into the back of the truck, toppling pretty much every remaining case of booze it contains, Dalton himself did more damage to the shipment than Mountain. But I’d consider that last bit a loss leader. Better to lose a few bottles in the process of leveling men who’d present a constant threat than to spare them but also spare the saboteurs. To flip that logic around, perhaps Mountain should have worried about the cooler first and the wine coolers second.

Be that as it may. Brad Wesley so rarely gets his money’s worth out of his “boys,” not that this dissuades him from sending the same clowns out to get got over and over again. This is Mountain’s one and only mission, and I think he acquits himself admirably, to a point. A good goon is hard to find, and he would have been a good goon, if it had been somebody there to beat the shit out of him and his buddies every minute of his life.

Look at this beautiful shot of Wade Garrett and Dalton, embracing after a long separation. The late afternoon light gleaming off Wade’s silver hair and hugging the sculpted contours of Dalton’s grinning face. Smiles as wide as the day is long. Each with one approving hand on the other’s shoulders, their other hands clasped in merry meeting.

From the looks of them you’d never know they just beat four men unconscious.

But that is the Dalton Path, that is the Way of Wade Garrett, that is the tao of all coolers. The Time to Not Be Nice passed when their last enemy collapsed to the ground in a bloody heap. The Time to Be Nice has come, and they welcome this as readily and naturally as they responded to an attack with superior force of their own.

A crowd of Double Deuce employees has gathered at this point, to gaze in wide-eyed wonder on these two knights errant, these sworn swords, and on those they cut down. To walk the Dalton Path, a gray ribbon that runs to either horizon, the lines on the road alternating streaks of white and red.

Irony is a valuable weapon in the arsenal of any cooler. Take Dalton, for example. When Tinker, O’Connor, Mountain, and Morgan roll up and force the liquor delivery guy to stop wheeling out crates of booze—”This bar is closed for business!” booms the Bleeder, proud to pick a fight he can win for once—Dalton hits them with all the faux-graciousness he can muster. “Can I buy you guys a drink?” he asks, expecting the answer no. Morgan, who has clearly been spoiling for a tantrum ever since Dalton gave him the boot, responds by petulantly smashing a bottle on the ground. “Guess not,” Dalton replies, and the fight is joined.

Both Morgan’s toddler destructiveness and the savagery of Dalton’s initial fusillade against his assailants—he makes mincemeat out of all of them until Morgan smashes a bottle against his head rather than the ground—go to show how much energy and emotion can be hidden under the veil of wordplay. The fig leaf of sarcasm allows a man to interact with other men despite the fact that they will soon attempt to beat one another unconscious with their bare hands, wound each other with shattering glass, and generally wreak havoc on one another’s bodies until one side or the other is unable to do any further damage. “Can I buy you guys a drink?” is one last sardonic attempt to conceal violence beneath civilization’s veneer, but the eternal struggle between cooler and goon cannot be contained forever.

Wade Garrett is not the only miscreant to grace the dirt lot of the Double Deuce with his presence on this fateful day. Right behind him apparently—I wonder if they were stopped behind him at a stoplight at some point, not realizing what was to come—is a pickup truck full of Brad Wesleyans. There’s O’Connor and Tinker of course, who I guess haven’t gotten their asses kicked recently enough and need that sweet chin music. There’s Mountain, the gigantically tall guy last seen cavorting poolside at Wesley’s mansion; he’ll accomplish approximately that much in the fight that ensues.

Finally, there’s Morgan, the inveterate hothead tough guy played by wrestling god Terry Funk, returning to the Double Deuce for the first time since he collected his severance and was told to consider barber college and pronounced Dalton “a dead man.” (He too was last seen cavorting poolside, with his pants around his ankles no less, but he acquits himself a bit better than his towering counterpart.) You’ll recall him scoffing at the idea that Dalton has “balls big enough to come in a dump truck”; I don’t know if irony is the right word for him being a goon big enough to come in a pickup truck, but there’s something there. I dunno, we’ll workshop it.

Anyway the highlight of the moment isn’t the hero shot of all four goons rolling deep towards Dalton as he stands at the service entrance, supervising the delivery of liquor from a distributor he apparently convinced to run Wesley’s blockade. It’s Dalton’s reaction to said goons.

No confident smile this time. No squaring up, either. He looks at them through sun-squinted eyes, his shoulders rise as he inhales deeply, and then he just…sighs, silently. If you ran his body language through Google Translate you’d get Welp, here we go again, I guess.

It’s the most noncommittal thing he does in the whole film, which otherwise invests his every word and deed with energy and purpose. All his energy and purpose is directed elsewhere at the moment—at Doc, his lover, whose scent probably lingers on his body, and at Wade Garrett, his mentor, whom he called to take care of this whole liquor-blockade thing. These clowns? He’ll fight them, sure, but only because they leave him no choice. He’d just as soon they turn around and drive away. There’s only one way this is gonna end, and until then it’s just workaday drudgery. Sigh. Okay, fellas, whose face do I break first.

Gossip is a cruel mistress. Here’s Dalton, jauntily strutting into the Double Deuce for another night’s work at what has become the ideal bar. He knows his pal Wade Garrett is on the way (though of that day and hour knoweth no man). He’s just had a night of romance with Dr. Elizabeth Clay. Here he thinks he’s just sitting down for the usual chit-chat with Cody. But Cody keeps his ears to the ground in addition to those white-hot blues licks, and he feels obligated to inform his friend that Brad Wesley had a thing for the Doc once upon a time too.

Here’s how he puts it: “As I hear it, she left town and he went nuts. Heh. Small town, huh, Dalton? ‘Course, that’s just the word.” Hitchcock himself couldn’t have conceived of a crueler and more confounding open ending than that final sentence. Now instead of clearing things up for his pal, Cody has muddied them further. How can he discover for certain what the truth is?

Well, by asking Elizabeth directly, that’s how. Knowing Dalton, that’s something he’s unlikely to do. He keeps himself buttoned up, allowing others in when necessary and desirable, keeping other problems at arms’ length unless and until they make themselves impossible to ignore. A man like that would go right on ignoring his girlfriend’s failed marriage to his nemesis unless pushed—pushed, perhaps, by a friend who phrases his revelation of this information in a deliberately ambiguous way, so as to force his buddy’s hand and force him to address uncomfortable truths rather than letting them fester. A good friend, in other words.

Fortunately for Dalton, Wesley almost immediately starts attempting to kill all of his friends and associates, so the motion is tabled. There’ll be time enough for rehashing the past after a bunch of old men shoot Brad Wesley to death.

(previously)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dalton: “Yeah, that’s what they say.”

“You already know that?”

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

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

“Where are you gonna go from here?”

“I don’t know.”

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

“I don’t think so.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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