“You’re a bouncer.”

“Mmhm. Double Deuce.”

“Nice place. They send a lot of business my way.”

“I’m hoping to change that.”

“All by yourself?”

We get our first closeup of Dr. Elizabeth Clay on that last line of dialogue—”All by yourself?” Her smile at that moment is kind, but it’s the kindness of a skeptic trying to be polite with their skepticism. The Doc doesn’t believe Dalton will clean up the Double Deuce all by himself, though not because of anything Dalton has or has not done. She doesn’t believe anything worth doing can be done by oneself.

Think of the several times she tries to take Dalton down a peg. She does it when he talks about his job during their first date: “Somebody has to do it….Might as well be you.” Her doubt drips off every word, and while she’s quick with a rhetorical napkin, she can’t control all the spillage. What makes Dalton so special? In this regard, nothing that she can see.

Think of when she confronts Dalton about his escalating war with Wesley. “You don’t know him,” she warns Dalton; the implication is that he needs the knowledge she can impart. It has to be a team effort or it’s doomed to failure. Think of how she continues: “Who’s this for, anyway? Are you doing it for them? I don’t think so. You think you’re gonna save these people from Wesley? Well who’s gonna save them from you?” She shrieks that last line, because it gets to the heart of the issue here: Dalton’s messianism has no currency in her world. A doctor is always part of a team, and no doctor saves a life singlehandedly. Again, what makes Dalton so special? In this regard, still nothing.

This is what will make Dr. Elizabeth Clay the ideal mate for James Dalton as their lives continue after the closing credits roll. She will temper his idealism with pragmatism, leaven his savior complex with the value of teamwork, of solidarity between the likeminded, of delegation and deliberation.

The beauty of it is that unlike Brad Wesley, Dalton is a person capable of listening and learning. Certainly Doc is attracted to fixer-uppers or she’d never have married Wesley in the first place, though given their age difference there were obviously other dynamics at work. (Elizabeth is an orphan, for instance, and as Wesley’s boys can attest he’s a dark father figure.) And Dalton is a learner, a seeker. His degree from NYU shows he’s searching for answers, and despite having boiled down his knowledge into three simple rules there’s nothing to suggest he’s not open to learning more. Indeed, it’s precisely when he gets his back up and refuses to listen to Doc that things start going poorly for him. We’re meant to see that as anomalous; the real Dalton, however much pressure he puts on himself to “never lose,” listens.

And what does Dalton offer the doctor, besides a beautiful smile, remarkable hair, a bod that won’t quit, and a teaching opportunity? The chance to step outside herself and experience a side of life she’d kept at arms’ length. The Double Deuce sent a lot of business her way? Well, why not learn why? What drives a man to commit to bodily stopping trouble? What kind of mind expands that remit to an entire town? She can learn at her leisure even while tempering Dalton’s hard edges, while he does the same for her.

It’s a beautiful relationship when you really look at it. Two people, so different in so many ways, but a lock and a key are very different too. It’s the difference that makes it work.

I’m saying this in a voice that approximates that of Ash, the android—artificial person, excuse me—in Ridley Scott’s Alien when he says of the titular creature “I admire its purity”: I admire Road House‘s fecundity. Road House is a film deeply committed to giving and being more—more than you expect, more than it needs to be. It exists to run over the Ford dealerships of your mind with a monster truck, one in which it has balls big enough to come.

I can think of few clearer demonstrations of this than the way the film chooses to leave us with its protagonists, Dalton and Doc. How best to convey, as the film must, that they bridge their differences (perhaps with the corpse of Brad Wesley) and live happily ever after? Our friend Rowdy Herrington could have shown them dancing together at the Double Deuce, a choice that would have been all the easier to make given that the credits roll over, you guessed it, people dancing at the Double Deuce. That’s where Cody’s performing “When the Night Comes Falling from the Sky,” after all; couldn’t James and Elizabeth rock out into the sunset with him?

Ah, but they do! Our final image of our hero and his lover does indeed show them accompanied by Cody and his guitar. Only they’re not at the Double Deuce, they’re by the water outside of Emmet’s place. And Cody’s sitting on the grass, not on stage.

And they’re bare-ass naked.

Road House ends the story of Dalton by showing him skinny dipping with Dr. Elizabeth Clay. In fact it shows him running across the grass toward the water, cheeks to the wind, then doing a splendid high dive right into the water, at which point he and the good doctor make out, and make out enthusiastically. Like, you can imagine what’s going on beneath the surface of the water, that’s how enthusiastically. They’re young(ish) and in love and hanging out naked with their friend the blind white blues guitarist, and all is right with the world.

Always there is another trick up Road House‘s sleeve, always there is some new wonder to marvel at. This time it happens to be the main characters swimming around with their junk out with Jeff Healey in the background, and this time it happens to be the final chapter in the saga of Dalton, the best damn cooler in the business (as of that one morning when Brad Wesley flipped his coin and it came up tails). After all that death, after all those blows to the head, after determining whether a hobbyhorse has a wooden dick, after the three simple rules—love, wet and wriggling and real.

use, c

It’s hard to describe the cocktail of conflicting emotions Dr. Elizabeth Clay must be experiencing in this moment—the moment when her uncle, Red Webster, shoots her ex-husband, Brad Wesley, to save the life of her boyfriend, James Dalton. Just re-read that sentence and imagine yourself in your shoes. Here’s the kindly old man who raised you, and whom you moved back to Jasper after leaving the place so you could take care of him in his old age. He’s got a gun, and he’s just used it to shoot the man who—this is conjecture, but justified conjecture—you used to love, until you saw his ugly side. I’d imagine, given what we see of his treatment of Denise, that physical abuse was involved, since I doubt Denise was his first victim and since it would explain why the Doc skipped town instead of merely divorcing him. This man, with whom you once envisioned your future, has used your appearance on the scene to pull a gun with which he intends to shoot your current love interest. Only he’s not quite your current love interest at the moment, is he? The night before you watched him murder a man, tearing his throat out with his bare hands. Earlier today he tried to physically drag you out of town with him before you broke free and told him you had no intention of going anywhere with him. You’ve arrived just in time to watch him decide not to repeat this act, this time tearing the throat out of your ex-husband. Maybe you felt relief in that moment, but only briefly. Brad ruined it by pulling that gun, and Uncle Red ruined it by firing his. Three of the most important men in your life, locked in a dance of death.

And of course, it’s not over yet, no matter what Brad said. Three more men will put bullets in his body before he finally collapses through a glass table and dies. They include your boyfriend’s nominal boss—the reason this feud started—and his nominal landlord—who provided him with the place where you and he first made love. They also include a Ford dealer whose dealership you watched Brad Wesley demolish. Afterwards you and he had a talk, during which you attempted to appeal to the better angels of his nature, to no avail. The last thing he said to you was a threat against your boyfriend, right there near the rubble of Strodenmire Ford. The last thing he’ll ever say to you was that threat against your boyfriend, thanks in part to Strodenmire, who is participating in Brad’s murder before your very eyes.

And you abhor violence, don’t forget that. You’ve mocked Dalton’s tough-guy posturing to his face, on your first date no less. You broke up with him, kind of, because of the murder he committed last night. So you’re watching your own worst nightmare play out, again, involving men you’ve cared deeply about.

If you were Dr. Elizabeth Clay, could you ever recover?

Oh Brad, when will you learn. In the time it takes for Wesley to grab his fallen gun and turn it on Dalton while Dalton is distracted by Dr. Elizabeth Clay’s arrival, Doc has the chance to scream “No!” and Wesley himself gilds the lily by shouting “It’s over!” Which it is, but not in the way he intends.

It’s over because Red Webster, Dr. Elizabeth Clay’s uncle, has mortally wounded her ex-husband in order to save her (ex?-)boyfriend. That’s one more thing Wesley allows to happen because he’s too busy bantering to pull the goddamn trigger. It’s one thing to be chatty when you’re roughing up one of your own hapless employees; O’Connor isn’t going to put up a fight while you call him a messy bleeder, and none of your other goons is going to come to his aid.

But Dalton is a different story—a story of kindness, of friendship, of being the best damn cooler in the business. He’s made friends in this town. And though perhaps Brad Wesley can be forgiven for not expecting five of them to suddenly materialize in his basement, four of them carrying shooting irons, why take a chance?

The first of several unexpected visitors to the Wesley estate this fine morning—second if you count Dalton, but the goons were clearly expecting him—is Dr. Elizabeth Clay. This raises some questions. How did she know to come here? Did she know what she would find? Was she directed here by some staff member at the Double Deuce who put two and two together vis a vis the corpse on the bar? If so, why didn’t any of them come with her? Did Jack and Hank and Younger have better things to do? Were they just not on duty yet? Or did word spread through the town grapevine? How would that work, given that Dalton’s assault on the compound takes six minutes from start to finish? Did she arrive with the four village elders who will, a few seconds from this moment, murder Brad Wesley with shotguns? If so, why do they all enter the room from different directions? And how did they find out what was going on at the mansion? Was there a disturbance in the old-coot Force? Back to Doc for a second, what has she come to do? Stop Dalton? Stop Wesley? Stop them both? Did she blow right past the four dead bodies on the ground floor of the house, or did she stop to attempt triage and treatment before realizing she was too late? What is she feeling right here, right now, at this moment? Is she glad Dalton decided not to rip Wesley’s throat out, a decision he makes just before she arrives and thus without the need for her opprobrium to convince him? Is she worried Brad will take advantage of this lull in the action? Is she concerned, at all, for herself? If so, which man is she worried about? “You’re gonna save these people? Well who’s gonna save them from you?” Remember that? Remember her telling Dalton where to shove it when he attempted to convince her to leave town with him, earlier this very morning? What changed? What does Dalton feel when he sees her? Relief? Guilt? Gratitude? Shame? Vindication? And Wesley, what about him? Is he solely concerned with exploiting how Dalton has let down his guard? Does he wonder if Elizabeth came there to save him? Would he care if she did? Does he harbor hopes of a reunion once Dalton is out of the way? What are we to take from the fact that he only looks at Dalton in this moment, not at Elizabeth? Does he have his eyes on the prize, or is the real prize the one person he can’t bring himself to look at?

When Dalton bursts into the hospital room where the Doc is working in order to whisk her out of town with him, she’s looking at x-rays of people’s colons and whatnot. Why? She stitches up knife wounds for patients who come to the ER. Does she do that and gastrointestinal stuff? Maybe she’s just curious? Maybe—spitballing here—the props department just said “get me a bunch of x-ray stuff” and this is what they came up with. Broken legs, bullet wounds, anything would have worked better than what they wound up with. It makes for a uniquely mood-killing backdrop for Dalton and Elizabeth’s conversation, which is really more of a confrontation: He demands that she leave with him, bodily yanks her out of her seat in fact, and she tells him no because as best she can tell he’s just as crazy as Brad Wesley, so he gives up and leaves. If these colons could talk, man, if these colons could talk.

Dr. Elizabeth Clay runs away after she sees what Dalton has wrought. As well she might: Her concern even prior to his duel to the death with Jimmy was that Dalton is as much a danger to Jasper as the people he’s ostensibly protecting Jasper from. Now Dalton has exposed himself for what he is, or at least what he can be, and she wants no part of it.

This enrages Dalton, though not against the Doc. No, Dalton lays the blame squarely where it belongs: at the feet of Brad Wesley, who ordered his man Jimmy to visit Emmett’s ranch and destroy it that fateful night. It’s his fault Dalton had to rip a man’s throat out, again. It’s his fault the Doc has run away in horror. And he needs to be made aware of it.

“Wesley!” Dalton screams. “Wesley!” Dalton screams again. “Wesley!” Dalton screams a third time. A callout in triplicate.

And then the final blow:

“FUCK YOU!!!”

It’s a hilariously anticlimactic thing to say at this point. It’s of a piece with his earlier mid-fight banter, which consisted solely of non sequitur expletives. It’s funny to think of the Doc, running away, hearing her boyfriend flip the verbal bird to her ex-husband in the middle of their murder contest.

But it gets the job done. Wesley comes back to his balcony in time to see Dalton toss the corpse of his number one guy into the river, allowing it to float downstream, offscreen, and out of the film forever. There’s no twinkle of amusement in his eyes, no sardonic smile across his lips. There’s something cold there instead, something making calculations as to who will need to get hurt to make this right. And if I’m not mistaken, there’s something very much like grief. When Jimmy floats away, there’s no doubt he takes many of Brad Wesley’s fondest wishes with him.

She sees it all. Dr. Elizabeth Clay catches up to Dalton in time to see him deliver the coup de grace to an unarmed, helpless man. She watches the man she loves raise his hand, slam it down onto another man’s throat, and tear that throat clean out. She sees him kick the man’s corpse into the water. She runs into the water, drags the body back on shore, examines his wound. She is desperate not to have seen what she has seen—to believe that somehow this man (with whom she must have some acquaintance given her one-time closeness to his master, Brad Wesley) survived what her man did to him. But it is not to be.

And standing there, watching her, seeing her see him, is that man, Dalton. When the camera first shows him after tracing Doc’s triage for some time, he is hunched over, staring at the red wet mess of his right hand. He looks wretched, like a wretch, shocked and shame-faced and horrified to have been seen like this.His posture is that of a Gollum, but written all over his face is the “Don’t look at me” plea of Frank Cotton from Hellraiser or Frank Booth from Blue Velvet. He has the mien of a masturbator who’s been caught at the end of the act by his devoutly Catholic mother and is preparing himself for punishment. There’s something very palpably rooted in sexual shame and compulsion in the way Swayze plays this moment. This is not a side of himself he has ever wanted any women to see, but when the time came, he simply could not help himself.

²⁴ But Thomas, one of the twelve, called Didymus, was not with them when Jesus came.

²⁵ The other disciples therefore said unto him, We have seen the Lord. But he said unto them, Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe.

²⁶ And after eight days again his disciples were within, and Thomas with them: then came Jesus, the doors being shut, and stood in the midst, and said, Peace be unto you.

²⁷ Then saith he to Thomas, Reach hither thy finger, and behold my hands; and reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into my side: and be not faithless, but believing.

²⁸ And Thomas answered and said unto him, My Lord and my God.

²⁹ Jesus saith unto him, Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.

John 20:24-29 (KJV)

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.

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.

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.

“What the hell is wrong with you, Brad?” Dr. Elizabeth Clay asks. “Have you lost your mind?” Elizabeth is the second person in the film, out of a total of two, to refer to Brad Wesley by his first name; the other was her uncle Red Webster. They were family once, after all. In Red’s case, he likely called Wesley “Brad” in hopes that maintaining a cordial, familial front would spare him his wrath and conceal his true feelings about their business relationship. Much the same could be said for Elizabeth’s use of his first name here—she is, after all, attempting to dissuade him from his current destructive course of action. But there’s a great bit of business that occurs when she approaches to confront him: She takes off her sunglasses, casually but purposefully, the way you do when your sunny day has been unexpectedly interrupted by something serious and you want to see it all clearly as you hash it out. It’s the gesture of one former lover to the next, a removal of a block to renewed intimacy, of whatever kind.

For his part, Brad doesn’t attempt to inveigle his way back into Elizabeth’s heart, or even her bed. His concern for her is almost, though surely Red would dispute the use of the term, avuncular. He doesn’t like seeing her wind up with “a drifter” like Dalton. “It’s a shame,” he says. No “I want you back,” no “If I can’t have you nobody will,” just…it’s a shame. More in sorrow than in anger. That’s Brad for you: perpetually disappointed that no one but his boys will listen to reason. Disappointed, but not dissuaded: “I’m not gonna lose a second’s sleep about it,” he says to Elizabeth after informing her of his plan to murder Dalton should he continue to cause him trouble. What the hell is wrong with Brad? Other people.

“Dalton, you gotta check this out,” Jack says. “Looks like Wesley wants to put a little something down on a new car.” This is his tipoff to his boss that Brad Wesley plans to take a monster truck and destroy a car dealership with it. Why he chose to deliver this information in a wisecrack is the viewer’s to decide. Spider-Man, I’m thinking—Jack reads Spider-Man comics, hence the resort to jokes during tense moments. Do I get a No-Prize?

But Jack and his banter and his weirdly small boots with his stonewashed denim tucked into them is beside the point. Mostly I want to call attention to the assemblage of humanity present for the impromptu monster truck rally. Jack is there, and so are his Double Deuce coworkers Carrie Ann and Frank Tilghman. Red Webster is there too—guess he didn’t skip town after all—along with Emmett, who has finally taken his place in the Council of Elders I suppose. Brad Wesley has brought along virtually his entire goon crew, though that’s to be expected when you’re planning to destroy a place of business in broad daylight.

And here in their car are Dr. Elizabeth Clay, Dalton, and Cody from the Jeff Healey Band. What was their plan for the afternoon? What did that conversation sound like? “Hey Cody, it’s Dalton. Look, me and the Doc were gonna swing by Wagon Days at Strodenmire Ford after lunch sometime. Wanna come with?” “Sure thing, man, just gotta drain the main vein first.” “Okay, well, as I said we won’t be heading over till like one or two, so you should have plenty of—hello? Hello?”

The destruction of Red Webster’s Auto Parts by the coward Brad Wesley triggers alarm bells for the Jasper Chamber of Commerce, or whoever the assembled worthies in the scene that follows the morning after the bar fight are supposed to be. Red and Tilghman, sure, they’d be there. Dalton, why not, he’s obviously the focal point for Brad Wesley’s anger. Doc is Red’s niece, and as the ostensible purpose of the meeting is to persuade him not to pack up and run away from town it makes sense she’d be there. These other fellows? At this point it’s anybody’s guess. So let me be the first to assure you that you will never see the two gentlemen in the background ever again. Who are they? What do they think? Are they Fotomat and 7-Eleven franchisees who got into bed with Brad Wesley and are now feeling buyer’s remorse? Does maybe one of them own the boat store that forms the third point of the Double Deuce/Red’s Auto triangle? Why isn’t Emmett here? What about Big T of Big T Auto Sales, or the crusty guy who sells Dalton spare tires, or the crusty guy who runs one of the several greasy spoons Dalton visits, or anyone we’ve ever seen before? We will never know. Accept the mystery.

But the mustachioed fellow in the ill-fitting gray suit in the center? Ah, so you’ve met Pete Strodenmire. We are currently one hour and twenty-four minutes into the film, with half an hour to go; what better time to introduce a major new character—as well as the fourth and final Car Salesman of Jasper, Missouri—who will go on to participate in the killing of the film’s antagonist? He does little of equivalent efficacy here. He just asks Red if he has insurance and offers to contact a friend in the FBI in Springfield about the arson in order to work around Wesley’s control of the local constabulary. Red truly does not want to hear about either proposal. So in its way this film is setting up our next encounter with Pete just a few minutes hence, when he proves as unable to stop a monster truck from running over his car dealership as he is to talk Red off the ledge here.

One final note here: Can you guess which august personage here assembled wants to continue the fight?

Now why on earth would that be? We wonders, precious, we wonders.