Part One of “The Agreement,” a special Valentine’s Week series

“Ever seen a better pair a’ attitudes?”

Even for a film that has already introduced us to “dirtball” and “moose-lips” (though “chicken-dick” is still a ways away), Road House still enters uncharted linguistic territory with the euphemism the person on the left of the above photo uses for the breasts of the person on the right. This is of course the right, perhaps even the calling, of screenwriters David Lee Henry and Hilary Henkin. If your goal is to make an audience that is quite possibly already inured to chuckleheaded idiocy sit up and take notice when a large, sweat-soaked gentleman, whose first line of dialogue is the kind of guffaw you’d write out as “HAW HAW HAW HAW HAW!” like he’s Pete from the old Mickey Mouse cartoons, proudly displays the body of his special lady for particularly besotted onlooker…I mean, admittedly the bulk of the work has already been done for you. Still, in a language with more slang terms for tits than tits themselves, “attitudes” doesn’t hurt.

Our new friends, billed in the credits as Sharing Husband (Christopher Collins, no relation) and Well-Endowed Wife (Cheryl Baker) may have hit on something more than skin deep with this coinage, however. One look in the eyes of Well-Endowed Wife will tell you that her attitude is, indeed, half the fun of engaging with her in a bit of shitface-drunk barroom repartee. It’s in the way she smiles, twirls her hair, angles her body toward the audience, and on and on. As we’ve said before, arousal is lovely, desire is lovely, and by that standard Well-Endowed Wife is lovely. It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing, and to borrow the words of a great man, Well-Endowed Wife is swingin’ on the front porch, swingin’ on the lawn, swingin’ where she wants cuz there’s nobody home.

But the use of “pair” is unintentionally revealing. (That’s the last time you’ll hear that phrase used to describe this scene.) The joy on Sharing Husband’s face and in his voice as he proudly draws attention to Well-Endowed Wife’s unabashed sexual self-confidence is unreconstructed and pure and palpable. (Not as palpable as some other things in this scene, but still.) Without his Wife’s endowments, Sharing Husband would have nothing to share. She’s the reason he is who he is, in a sense so literal it scrolls up the screen in black and white at the end of the movie.

And now we come to the heart of the matter. Would either of them look like this, act like this, feel like this without the other across that table? For while her happiness clearly fuels his, we may conclude from their conduct, and from the words chosen to describe the situation, that the reverse is also true. Just as Sharing Husband requires the endowments of his Wife to thrive, Well-Endowed Wife relies on her husband to share those endowments to maximal erotic effect. To give the complexities of cuckoldry, polyamory, and swinging as thorough an examination as they deserve would distract us from walking the Dalton Path. But while there are certainly varieties of each in which the presence of both partners is not necessary to achieve the desired sexual frisson, that does not appear to be the dynamic in play here. They exist in tandem, and it is in tandem that they must be observed. They take that sawdust-strew stage together.

Sadly, they are given reason to reconsider the particulars of their arrangement by scene’s end, in this respect and many others. For now, though? The whole is greater than the sum of Sharing Husband and Well-Endowed Wife. They are pandrogyne, the two-in-one. Ever seen a better pair a’ attitudes? Can’t say that I have, sir. Can’t say that I have.