Fantastic fiction often asserts that forces awesome, alien, or profound enough to overwhelm our senses will be processed by our puny brains in ways we’re capable of processing instead. The erratic movements and sudden disappearances of UFOs are how we see extradimensional travel. Vast unspeakable intelligences present themselves to us as dragon-winged squid-gods. Fire and life incarnate themselves in a flaming bird shape and a costume color-scheme change.

But can it work in the other direction? When faced with the inexplicable, can our minds process it into something more human, not less?

The life of Dr. Elizabeth Clay in Road House can be divided into five phases. She meets our hero, Dalton, when he’s admitted to the hospital where she works for the treatment of a knife wound he incurs on early in his tenure at the Double Deuce. After telling him the cut will require nine staples, she rattles off a list of previous injuries from his medical files, which he carries around with him. (“Saves time.”) She offers him a local anesthetic, which he refuses. (“Pain don’t hurt.”) She notes that his medical files say he graduated from NYU, where, he tells her, he studied philosophy. (“Man’s search for faith, that sort of shit.”) Given the damage that’s been done to his body, she facetiously asks him if he’s ever won a fight. (“Nobody ever wins a fight.”) Furthering one of the film’s recurring jokes, she says that she figured someone in his line of work would be bigger. (“Gee, I’ve never heard that before.”) Perhaps because nearly everything he says would look good as a back tattoo, she accepts his offer to take her out for coffee in the middle of all this.

Next time we see the good doctor, she shows up at the Double Deuce for their date, in a dress that looks like something Billy Joel and his first love ordered a bottle of white, a bottle of red over. She arrives in time to watch him finish beating the tar out of several of Brad Wesley’s goons alongside his fellow bouncers. During their date she brutally negs him for getting paid to hurt people, and for acting like a Nice Guy when he clearly isn’t. Perhaps impressed by how he tosses money on the counter of the diner where they’re eating so that the grumpy manager will allow a falling-down-drunk old man to sit there a while longer, or the good-natured way in which he reacts to discovering his enemies have rammed an entire stop sign through the windshield of his car, she gives him a chaste but heartfelt kiss goodnight before leaving. (He gives her the same little salute he gave the Second Car Salesman of Jasper, Missouri as she drives off.)

She meets up with him at the Double Deuce again a few scenes later, by which point Dalton has pretty much single-handedly reversed the place’s fortunes, which you can tell because the bartenders are wearing uniforms and there’s no longer any chicken wire around the bandstand to protect the performers from the audience. They go back to his place. He turns on the radio and, after they both reject Bullet’s “I Sold My Soul to Rock n’ Roll,” settles on “These Arms of Mine” by Otis Redding. They exchange five or six sentences about her Uncle Red, who raised her after the death of her parents, and her failed marriage. Then they have sex; he’s inside her, standing up, before they so much as kiss. She laughs while they fuck, like she’s in on the joke. Later that night they fuck again, on the roof, in full view of Brad Wesley, who lives across the water, and whose house she looked at ruefully shortly after arriving at Dalton’s apartment because he was the person she had the failed marriage to. (Though their relationship is confirmed, the actual fact that they were married is never stated outright, but the vacuum-sealed logic of the film allows no other possibility; there’s not enough room in anyone’s life for two major former disastrous love interests.)

When Dalton’s mentor Wade Garrett comes into town to help him in his battle against Wesley—Elizabeth has become a focal point in that grudge, and in Dalton’s desire to stay in town and take Wesley down rather than simply picking up stakes and moving on when things get ugly, as Wade advises—the two men and Elizabeth spend the night on the town, drinking beers and swapping stories about their old antics and injuries (the two are inseparable), which at one point involves Wade unbuttoning his jeans and revealing the dark thatch of his pubic hair to show her a scar on his hip that a woman gave him. They pull an all-nighter, during which Wade and Elizabeth dance in a diner (not the previous diner, nor the place they spent the night talking and drinking in, nor the Double Deuce, but a fourth dive altogether) and he comes on to her pretty heavily, with just enough plausible deniability that everyone can play it off with a smile. The sexual tension between all three is just insane, though it’s cut short by the start of the work day. (“Don’t mean to bust up the party, but my shift starts in a couple of hours—thought I’d go home, get some sleep,” says the trauma surgeon after spending the past five or six hours drinking.)

Elizabeth’s final emotional beat in the film is as the unhappy go-between in the Dalton/Wesley feud. She chastises Brad (she’s the only person who calls him that) for destroying Strodenmire Ford with a monster truck, and warns Dalton that if he’s trying to save the townsfolk from Wesley, “Who’s gonna save them from you?” Actor Kelly Lynch’s commitment to this line, which she shrieks at the top of her lungs, is so total that when Wesley’s lead goon Jimmy blows up the shack where Dalton’s landlord Emmet lives the next moment, at first it seems like she Carrie‘d the place. When Dalton kills Jimmy by ripping his throat out with his bare hands, she checks to make sure the man is dead, then leaves, horrified, and refuses to leave town with Dalton when he tries to convince her to do so at the hospital the next day. For some reason she goes to Brad Wesley’s house during the middle of Dalton’s killcrazy rampage through his army of goons; her arrival prompts Dalton to not tear Wesley’s throat out, which gives Wesley a chance to go for a gun to finish Dalton off, but fortunately four old men show up with shotguns and Sonny Corleone the shit out of the guy.

After she watches her ex-husband die during an attempt to kill her current boyfriend-ish guy, the doctor and Dalton are reunited and skinny-dip in front of his landlord Emmet happily ever after.

Every time I watch Road House I grow more and more fond of the Doc. And why wouldn’t you? She’s the smartest and most together person we meet, having one of the few jobs anyone holds outside of the automotive, alcohol, or beating-people-up industries. She has a good head on her shoulders regarding the lunacy of Dalton and Wesley’s blood feud, which has involved the total destruction of at least three buildings in town and the severe injury of dozens of human beings even before people start dropping like flies. Removed from the French braid she wears it in for work, her hair does this cool thing where it sticks out on the sides like an old Barbie doll. She’s one of the few human beings who could get bare-ass naked next to in-his-prime Patrick Swayze and hold their own.

However, she also accepts a date from a masochist who’s constantly getting his ass kicked, which she knows because she meets him while stapling his latest knife wound. She holds his job in open contempt and mocks the idea that he’s a force for good in town even when they’re getting along and used to be married to his arch-enemy, whose murder during the process of his attempted murder of Dalton she witnesses before settling down with Dalton for good. She goes into work at a hospital on two hours of sleep after spending the small hours pounding Miller High Lifes. Even by the standards of Road House, a film about famous bouncers, her behavior is hard to recognize as that of a normal human person.

Yet when I think about her, it’s always in terms of “Wow, way to put him in his place,” or “power move,” or “wearing that dress takes guts,” or “fucking before kissing, right on, this is a person who knows what she wants,” or “she must really love her uncle to hitch her star to Jasper, Missouri’s wagon on his account, I bet he was a great dad to her” or “she patches up Dalton’s knife wound but the next time we see her at work she’s looking at x-rays of someone’s colon, what’s her medical specialty,” or “she could absolutely talk Dalton into making out with Wade in front of her and she knows it, and just sits with it because knowing it is all the satisfaction she needs,” or “I wonder what she saw in Brad Wesley,” or “I bet she went to an Ivy League medical school because she’s just a little condescending when she talks about Dalton going to NYU.” In other words, things you might think about a normal human person, and a very interesting one at that. Confronted with Road House, the mind transmutes chaos into character.