Ketchum is a forgettable goon. That’s just facts. I know who he is because I’ve watched Road House a million times, and you know who he is because you’re reading this series of daily essays about Road House. But it took me a long, long time, and many, many viewings, to put Ketchum together, as it were: that he drives the monster truck any time it shows up; that he’s the guy who tries to kick Dalton in the head with the knife in his boot and gets his ass kicked instead; that he’s the man who kills Wade Garrett, as evidenced by his retrieval of the knife used to kill him and insertion of that knife into a custom sheath on his hip; that he’s the last goon to tangle with Dalton hand to hand; that his name is Ketchum.

Alone among the goons present for the climax of the film, no one even says his name in the movie, a privilege afforded to Pat McGurn, Morgan, O’Connor, Tinker, and Jimmy. I’ve made a fuss about this over the past few months, alleging that it’s one of the reasons he’s so forgettable. But I’ve been thinking about that assertion lately, because I don’t think it has to be that way.

Consider the orcs.

Remember these handsome fellas? Sure you do. That’s Lurtz, Grishnakh, and Gothmog, from Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. No one says their names in the movies. No one says any orc’s name in the movies. For that matter, Lurtz is a made-up name for a brand-new character the filmmakers introduced, and Gothmog is simply their best guess as to what a Mordor commander from the books whose species isn’t even specified by Tolkien might be like.

But if you’ve watched those movies recently, or if you find them memorable at all, you probably recall them as the uruk-hai leader with the Ariana Grande hairstyle whose head gets chopped off by Aragorn after a big fight, the raspy-voiced weasel who tries to hunt and kill Merry and Pippin before Treebeard squishes him, and the leader of the orc assault on Minas Tirith with the big puffy pink face. You remember how they look, how they sound, and what they do, because Jackson and company made a big point of giving them memorable introductions, isolating them with distinct camerawork (closeups, angles, whatever the case), and having them do their most memorable stuff right there for all to see. Lurtz was created to give the uruk-hai chasing the Fellowship a distinctive leadership figure so the film’s climax would work as such. It’s a far cry from the aggressively nondescript Ketchum first showing up as a non-speaking background character wearing face-masking sunglasses during the Bleeder scene and eventually killing Road House‘s secondary protagonist off-screen.

For that matter, it’s a far cry from these fellows.

Karpis and Mountain are also never named. They’re only shown in close-up in couple of scenes apiece; in Mountain’s case, one of those scenes is a pool party (in which Karpis appears in the background). Neither of them make it to the film’s final reel but it’s not because they get killed—they simply stop showing up, because that’s how Road House rolls.

But you remember them, right? They each have a distinctive look, with Karpis’s clothes from the Bun E. Carlos collection and Mountain’s sheer size. They each do something interesting: Karpis stares down Dalton, and Mountain dances like an idiot and later Sam Elliott tells him “I sure ain’t gonna show you my dick” before taking him down. The camera makes a point of both of them: Karpis stares right into it in closeup, while Mountain becomes the focal point as it follows Wesley and Denise into the pool party.

When it comes to differentiating your goons, bothering to say their name during the film helps, especially if you name half a dozen comparable characters during the film and run the risk of drowning the unnamed one out. (That doesn’t apply to LotR.) But you need the look, you need a distinctive action, and you need a memorable trick with the camera to make the look and the action click in the viewer’s mind. It’s a bit unfair to compare Rowdy Herrington’s work with Ketchum to Peter Jackson’s work in The Lord of the Rings, which is better at this than any other film I’ve ever seen. My point is simply, what’s in a name?