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.

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.

Boardwalk Empire, Terence Winter’s underrated Prohibition Era gangster drama, featured many real-world figures of underworld renown, though mostly at ages much younger than the ones at which they’d become famous. They’d be mixed in with entirely fictional characters, or heavily fictionalized analogues of actual people. Often you didn’t realize until halfway through a scene that, oh my god, that’s Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel and Al Capone all hanging out together. The resulting frisson was a thrill.

In his lamentable mega-series The Dark Tower, Stephen King officially introduced the concept of ka-tet, a group of people drawn together by the benevolent force that partially orders the universe for a specific purpose. I say “officially” because if you’ve read his work you know that this is a recurring feature everywhere from It to The Stand. Often the characters themselves recognize that something has happened when they’re all finally assembled together—that the final piece of a puzzle they didn’t even know they were solving has slipped into place, that the whole of them is somehow greater than the sum of its parts, that when faced with other people there’s a palpable sense of belonging and un-belonging. Great deeds can be done in ka-tet.

Here you see Emmett, Red Webster, Frank Tilghman, and Pete Strodenmire, together for the first time. Until now Emmett had never been seen off his ranch, and Strodenmire had only been seen one time before in total. They’re watching Brad Wesley walk away, having proclaimed “This is my town—don’t you forget it.” Red is about to bust Strodenmire’s balls by repeating what Strodenmire said to him after his auto parts store was destroyed: “You got insurance, don’t you?” Tilghman is, as always, very peculiar.

Yet something looks right here, doesn’t it? Something about this configuration of four weird old men staring into the middle distance rings true. When ka-tet is formed, how can any JC Penney magnate hope to stand against it?

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.

This is Emmett. Emmett has just made two discoveries that, from the looks of it, have shaken him to his core. That Brad Wesley plans to send men to the Double Deuce to physically intimidate his tenant Dalton and his friend (?) Frank Tilghman? No. That Brad Wesley plans to send men to his own cabin to plant explosives that will blow it up while he’s asleep one night? No. That sales at the new JC Penney (Opening Fall 1989!) will require a loyalty oath to Brad Wesley for eligibility? No. He has discovered that Dalton drives a Mercedes-Benz, and that Dalton is doing tai chi with his shirt off.

I’ve thought a lot about this look of utter, almost abject confusion and dismay since I first saw the movie, during which screening a friend MST3K’d the bit where Emmett lifts up a tarp in the barn and discovers Dalton’s Benz by hollering in Emmett’s hee-haw voice “THIS BOY’S FROM THE FUTURE!” Time travel is indeed one of the few exigencies I’d deem capable of occasioning that kind of blind pigfuck panic in a man of Emmett’s age, experience, and Show Me State sangfroid. (Seriously, when Dalton asks him if he’s okay after rescuing him from his recently detonated, still burning shack, Emmett replies “I’d be fine if you get off of me.” Always with the wisecracks, this one!)

Is he upset because Dalton is rich? Like, are we to believe that his whole schtick about only charging a hundred bucks a month in rent isn’t because he doesn’t care about money, but that this was just his polite way of letting a man he didn’t think could afford anything more off the hook? Does he feel bamboozled because Dalton drove up looking for a place to rent in the beater he bought at Big “T”‘ Auto Sales instead of this luxury piece of German engineering? (Does Emmett know Big “T,” while we’re on the subject? Is Big “T” part of the Jasper Improvement Society? Is Big “T” related to Pete Strodenmire, his fellow walrus-faced car salesman? Down this road lies madness, so we head back.)

Is he upset because he believes Dalton may practice “alternative lifestyles”? He’s city folk, that much Emmett could tell from the car’s New York plates. He’s pretty, and he’s got that hair. He’s writing around with no shirt, unless you count a fine sheen of oil and sweat as a shirt, which in the case of Dalton perhaps you should. His pants are mighty snug. And he’s performing some kind of Eastern dance ritual. Is the idea that Emmett’s iconoclasm regarding the local Presbyterians is a front and he actually is more on board with down-home American values than he lets on? Or is he a New Atheist?

The simplest answer, I think, is the question we’ve been asking on and off for three months now. What kind of man works as a bouncer and lives in a barn but also drives a Mercedes and practices martial-arts meditation? Shirtless, at that?

The other answer I’ve come up with is that he’s mistaken tai chi for karate and, between that and the Benz, believes Dalton to be an agent of the Axis. I mean, you’d look worried too.

WESLEY: This is my town. Don’t you forget it.

DALTON: So what does he take?

RED: Who?

DALTON: Brad WesIey.

RED: Ten percent…to start. Oh, it’s all legal-like. He formed the Jasper Improvement Society. All the businesses in town belong to it.

DALTON: You’ve gotten rich off the people in this town.

WESLEY: You bet your ass I have. And I’m gonna get richer. I believe we all have a purpose on this earth. A destiny. I have a faith in that destiny. It tells me to gather unto me what is mine.

RED: Twenty years I’ve watched Wesley get richer while everybody else around him got poorer.

TILGHMAN: Anyway, I’ve come into a little bit of money.

TILGHMAN: This is our town. And don’t you forget it.

Past two rocking chairs,
Emmett slips into the house
where he lives alone.

Emmett is Dalton’s landlord. He rents him an apartment constructed out of the loft in his barn. It’s open to the outside and has no TV or telephone or “conditioned air,” which Emmett explains is why no one wanted to rent it from him, not even for the price of $100 a month, which he seems willing to be talked down from anyway. It is a preposterously well-designed living space to be owned and operated by Emmett. If he can afford to have it built and to rent it for a song, he probably has enough money socked away somewhere to give his neighbor Brad Wesley a run for his money in the real estate, liquor distribution, mall development, JC Penney franchising, and goonery businesses alike. But we’ll take his self-presentation as a crusty but kindly old coot at face value for the purposes of this essay, which concerns an entirely different (I think) curio about the character.

When Dalton first arrives at his ranch to inquire about the “room to rent,” Emmett’s affect is wary and his response monosyllabic. He’s a far cry from the guy who, about a minute and a half later, will kvetch about Brad Wesley to this total stranger and then tell him “callin’ me ‘sir’ is like puttin’ an elevator in an outhouse—it don’t belong.” Farther still from that affable man with his colorfully dumb similes is the Emmett we witness on the stairs up to the apartment in between.

“You honest?” he asks Dalton.

“Yessir,” Dalton responds like the good boy he is.

“You expect me to believe that?” Emmett replies. Get it? Because he asked him if he was honest, but if he doesn’t know the answer to that already he wouldn’t know if he was lying in reply, hence the follow-up inquiry, haha, how droll.

Dalton thinks it’s funny too. “No sir,” he says, smiling and laughing and warming to the old man.

Only here’s the thing: There’s no indication from Emmett’s tone of voice, facial expression, or body language that he’s kidding at all. He pretty much freezes and LOOKS DALTON DEAD IN THE EYE during the ostensible punchline part of the exchange. Without knowing anything else about Emmett, you’d think he’s dead fucking serious about wanting to know if Dalton is really being honest when he says he’s honest. He could launch into a “What do you mean I’m funny” routine right there, that’s how intense it sounds.

Then Brad Wesley buzzes his horses with a helicopter and the thaw begins. Before long we have the Emmett we’ll have for the rest of the film—a guy who drops corny jus’ folks wisecracks and aphorisms with a straight face and then immediately loosens up, letting Dalton and company in on the joke. He ribs Dalton immediately after Dalton saves him from the burning wreckage of his own firebombed house by movie’s end.

What’s going on here, then? I have a theory, and don’t I always. Emmett is a servant of the Secret Fire, Wielder of the Flame of Anor.  He’s Major Briggs, he’s the Log Lady, he is of the White. Not himself a spirit, he is nonetheless their tool, their agent, sent to Jasper and instructed, Noah-like, to build a fancy schmancy loft and wait for the indwelling. To him shall come a stranger, one who will make the wrong things right. How will I know him, Emmett asks the glowing voice, and that voice replies You will test him with paradox, the language of the righteous. Then and only then will you recognize him as a traveler on the Dalton Path.

You honest/you expect me to believe that. Be nice/until it’s time to not be nice. Yin/yang. The White Lodge and the Black.

It’s not all fun and games. No, it’s not all fun and games. We joke here at Pain Don’t Hurt, we laugh here, because Road House is a fun and often (nearly always) funny movie. But the Dalton Path leads inexorably toward darker days and nights.

This is Jimmy, Brad Wesley’s right-hand man, chief enforcer, and bastard son. (Non-canonically.) We’ve met him before during the nearly fifty days I’ve been writing about Road House, but he has remained a liminal presence, his dark eyes and blue denim looming in the background like a pale man at a party in a David Lynch film. He accompanies Wesley to Red Webster’s store for their weekly payout but doesn’t say a word. He drives Karpis (unnamed handsome man, in the parlance of the film itself) to fuck the store up later on but never gets out of the car. He laughs as Wesley beats O’Connor for bleeding too much but never throws a punch. He scoffs at Dalton and the Doc as he and Ketchum (the other unnamed goon) spy on them but doesn’t make a move.

It’s at the precise moment when Jimmy is finally set loose, battling Wade Garrett and the entire Dalton-led bouncing staff of the Double Deuce after Dalton cruelly shuts down Denise’s Wesley-approved antagonistic striptease (?!), that things go bad.

Brad Wesley, who moves through life grinning wryly at virtually everyone and everything he sees, has taught his boys well. All of them, even Tinker, have learned to laugh at the misfortune of others, and at nothing else. But Jimmy is Brad’s best boy, and his is the deepest laugh, the fullest laugh, the loudest, the longest—and the last.

Jimmy emits this piercing and preposterous peal—the supervillain laugh to end them all—after blowing up the shack where Dalton’s landlord Emmett lives (and, judging from the size of the explosion, cooks meth) in the middle of the night. So delighted is he by the night’s mean work that he actually stops his getaway motorcycle to look back, take in the extent of what he has done, and enjoy the moment to its fullest. He laughs like a man not acquainted with the concept in any context where the smell of blood and cordite is not on the night wind.

In this moment, Jimmy exhausts the good humor of the Wesleyan Goons with one titanic cackle of pure, joyous malice. No longer are they the cocky cut-ups who run over car dealerships with monster trucks or get beat up in bars. From here on out they exist to kill. Jimmy inhales horseplay and exhales murder. And Dalton is the man who breathes that fire back in.