“I used to fuck guys like you in prison.” This much we know about Jimmy. Or do we? Picture growing up as Brad Wesley’s unacknowledged bastard son. Absent father, mother who doesn’t understand him. He starts hanging out with the wrong kind of kids, starts acting up, getting into trouble. A few scrapes with the law, a few misdemeanors, the specter of juvie on the horizon. Then it happens: he gets pinched for a big one, grand theft auto. He does time. And what happens to a handsome young man like Jimmy in prison? I don’t want to say it but I think we all know.

So. “I used to fuck guys like you in prison.” Is that a fact? Or is Jimmy identifying, in Dalton, the traits he grew to hate in himself, the traits he feels made him a victim, something he’s sworn he’ll never be again? The good looks, the great hair, the attitudinal softness, and most importantly the fact that he’s being beaten in this fight. He deserves what he’s gonna get, just like the old Jimmy deserved it, the Jimmy who existed before this new Jimmy emerged, harder and stronger and ready to dish out everything he’d been made to take.

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.

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)

Right after Dalton tears Jimmy’s throat out, killing him, he spin-kicks the man’s still-standing corpse into the water. It feels like an instinctive maneuver in a way: Dalton is used to barfights in which it behooves one to keep fighting until one is the last man standing, ergo if Jimmy is still standing, one more kick is warranted.

But perhaps another instinct is at work: the instinct to distance himself from the carnage he has wrought, the instinct to hide Jimmy’s grisly visage from his sight, the instinct to seek a means to wash away his sins. Dalton has killed tonight, breaking a taboo learned the hard way during the devastating events of his Memphis sojourn. Best to get the body out of here, get it away, dump it where its deadness can do Dalton no further harm.

Jimmy blows up Emmett’s house. Dalton knocks Jimmy off his motorcycle. Jimmy and Dalton fight. Dalton gets the upper hand. Jimmy pulls out a gun. Dalton kicks the gun out of Jimmy’s hand as he fires. Dalton tears Jimmy’s throat out. Dalton kicks Jimmy’s still-standing corpse into the water.

That, in broad strokes, is the beach fight scene. But this simple recitation of facts does not do justice to the magnificence of the throat rip, one of the great cinematic acts of violence of the past thirty years.

Until this point, fights in Road House always go a certain way. Some goons show up and pick a fight, and they exchange blows with Dalton and his men until they have been hit in the head, gut, or legs so many times they can no longer fight. It’s time consuming, and messy, and involves a lot of back and forth.

Dalton and Jimmy’s fight was already an escalation of this pattern insofar as the combatants are so much more talented at violence than the bulk of Dalton’s opponents. In Jimmy he met his match, or something very near to it. These kicks and punches had something serious behind them, even if Dalton seemed barely able to suppress a laugh at one point. These are precisely targeted strikes. It’s not a matter of Tinker nearly getting lucky with a knife—everything Jimmy does is meant to maim and kill.

But the throat rip is something singular, something special. It is the purest encapsulation of The Time to Not Be Nice. Faced with an opponent willing to violate the sacred spirit of hand-to-hand combat in order to settle matters with a gun, Dalton unleashes his own lethal weapon: his bare hand. A chop, a grip, a pull, and no more Jimmy. It’s as simple as pulling a trigger.

But in keeping with Dalton’s mien as a man who bridges the natural and unnatural worlds, it’s messier than a gun. It’s like digging your hands in the cool earth and uprooting a weed. Dalton grasps the violence in Jimmy and pulls it out of his neck, and behold, there’s no Jimmy left inside there anymore, no Jimmy at all.

Michael Kamen is the sound of bombast. The go-to orchestral collaborator for a plethora of huge rock acts, including Metallica, Roger Waters and David Gilmour, and Queen, he also had a hand in emotionally soaring recordings by Eurythmics and Kate Bush. His work as a film composer was the accompaniment of choice for action and science-fiction filmmaking in the ’80s and ’90s, too, as he springboarded from his work on the film version of The Wall into The Dead Zone, Lifeforce, Brazil, Highlander, the Lethal Weapon and Die Hard franchises, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen AND Adventures in Babysitting…the list goes on and on. There’s a broad swathe of culture where if you have any fond memories of it at all, you have fond memories of Michael Kamen’s work.

Michael Kamen also contributed the original score for Road House, which is easy not to notice if you haven’t watched Road House several dozen times. In the trifecta of house band leader Jeff Healey and music supervisor Jimmy Iovine, Kamen is undoubtedly the lowest on the totem pole in terms of how you hear the film.

But you definitely hear him here.

When the time comes for Dalton to fight Jimmy Reno (that’s his canonical last name even though it’s never mentioned in the film; the same could be said for Emperor Palpatine in the original Star Wars trilogy, just for the record, and look how well that turned out), there’s no barroom boogie to be found. It’s Kamen’s frightened-sounding strings and call-for-help brass that define this fight. I’ve watched the movie with people who, for whatever reason, notice this right away, and their reaction is almost always incredulous: “What the hell is this music? When did this become Batman?” Incredulous, but delighted, since music this ostentatiously HOLLYWOOD EPIC is just about the only kind I can think of that’s appropriate for this savage escalation of hostilities.

From here on out, Kamen will be the dominant sound of the film. That should tell you something right there.

It is the position of this publication that until Jimmy pulls a gun on Dalton, Dalton has no intention to kill Jimmy at all. Why would he? Men have come at him hard again and again, brandishing knives the size of an infant, and he’s let them slide with a mere ass-whupping. It’s true that Jimmy just blew up Emmett’s house, but the old man’s alright. So is Pete Strodenmire. So is Red Webster. Is Dalton going to make the first kill in this feud simply because Jimmy expresses his preference for raping Dalton-like men in prison? I doubt it.

But when that gun comes out and Jimmy says “I’m gonna kill you the old-fashioned way,” all bets are off. You can’t block a bullet with tai chi. You can’t be nice and escort a bullet off the premises. You can’t growl a dopey comeback like “Kiss my ass” in response to a direct threat of murder, because in that time the murder may well already take place.

This is not to say that Dalton was given no choice but to murder Jimmy once the gun came out. He disarms the man and could deliver any number of non-lethal coups de grace were he so inclined. But as I’ve been saying for weeks now, the time to not be nice is upon us. If Jimmy’s gonna open the death door, Dalton’s for damn sure gonna stroll right through and dump Jimmy’s body in the foyer. As Cody put it, long ago, “You fuck with him, he’ll seal your fate.” This is Jimmy fucking with Dalton. The rest is just math.

Jimmy uses his leg to break a tree; Dalton uses that tree to break his leg. How often can you describe the turning point of a fight in terms so symmetrical they could pass for aphorism? That’s the beauty of this extraordinary fight. It uses its environment, and spacial relationships between the combatants within that environment. To see and hear him, Jimmy looks and sounds like he’s closing in for the hill when he delivers the kick that misses Dalton and separates a branch from the tree between them instead. He seems momentarily surprised, and that moment is just long enough for Dalton to grab Jimmy by the ankle and use the tree trunk as a fulcrum to pulp Jimmy’s lower leg. One could make a point about Dalton being in touch with nature here were one so inclined.

After that the fight is all downhill from Jimmy, until he finally abandons the whole Marquess of Queensbury thing and pulls out a gun. At that point, too, the result will be the opposite of what he’d intended. Some people you can’t stop from signing their own death warrant.

Take a moment, won’t you, to appreciate the faces pulled by Marshall Teague as Jimmy dances his last lethal dance. He’s marvelously expressive, isn’t he? His face contorts like a noh demon mask when he’s preparing to strike, and his eyes twinkle with malice and delight when in repose.

And this elasticity, this reactivity, tells us something about the face’s bearer. This is a man who loves what he does, and that love is written all over his face. The professional is personal with Jimmy as a rule, whereas for Dalton this kind of fury and passion is the exception. Perhaps you need to form murderous intent in advance to channel this kind of rubber-faced self-expression. Perhaps malice aforethought has a transformative effect on the jaw and the flesh. Viewed through this lens, what Dalton does to Jimmy can almost be seen as simply pulling the plug and turning this beautiful and terrible face off.

At any rate we were robbed of a Marshall Teague/Bruce Campbell fight when both men were in their prime, and someone should go to jail for it.

JIMMY: Damn, boy—I thought you were good!

DALTON: Go fuck yourself.

Ah, the rapier wit of Mr. James Dalton. Once again, he responds to a fairly specific taunt from his enemy with whatever generic oath he finds lying around in his battered mind, nearly to the point of non sequitur. He doesn’t defend his martial prowess, he doesn’t malign Jimmy’s in turn—he simply picks a more colorful version of “Go jump in a lake.” (Which indeed Jimmy will soon do, sort of, and fatally at that. Be that as it may.)

But the thing is, why would Dalton keep a complement of insults ready to hand? Recall the Giving of the Rules: Insults are just two nouns combined to elicit a prescribed response. What’s he gonna do, call Jimmy a cocksucker? Call his mama a whore? A seasoned fighter would know better than to respond to such meaningless verbiage, so there’s no reason to accumulate it. You are such an asshole, go fuck yourself—these are the comebacks of a man whose mind is taken up with more important matters, both physical and philosophical. Because Jimmy is wrong—Dalton is good, as Jimmy is about to learn to his great misfortune.

“So, it’s come at last. At last, it’s come. The day I knew would come at last has come, at last.”

—“A Mother Doesn’t Matter Anymore,” Bye Bye Birdie

The most infamous line in Road House was not in the script. That much we can agree on. Marshall Teague, the actor who says it, claims it was improvised and given the seal of approval by on-set super-producer Joel Silver. Rowdy Herrington, the director, says it was Silver’s invention. Whoever the author, their work is not present in the basic-cable cut of the film, for obvious reasons. Few pleasures have I known greater than watching Road House in the company of men who considered themselves Road House superfans but who had never seen the uncut R-rated original article, only to arrive at this line. It’s a moment the phrases “Holy shit!” and “What the fuck?” were made for.

Why is that? Because it’s the moment when the band-aid gets ripped off, the pustule is pierced and drained, and the sexualized violence toward and involving Dalton is finally made manifest. No more talk about taking Dalton, no more innuendo about how we thought he’d be bigger, no more homosocial power-dynamic establishment with words like “son” or “boy” or “mijo“—this is just Dalton’s would-be nemesis stating outright that in other circumstances, fights like this ended with him raping the bested combatant.

Yet despite its awful—I was gonna say implications, but it’s not implying anything, is it? It’s coming right out and saying the awful thing. Yet despite that, the line does not short-circuit our enjoyment of the film, or even of just this fight scene, the way you might expect it to. In part that’s because our society does not take prison rape seriously and never has. In part it’s because Jimmy is about to get his in a way that’s even more spectacular and gruesome than the line itself. And in part it’s because Road House is a cavalcade of outrageousness from the start. Every yokel and goon who gets punched in the face, every gratuitous ass and boob shot, every ridiculous line reading by some weird old crank, every arrhythmic scene in which Brad Wesley does twelve contradictory things, every explosion, every monster truck, every mention of the concept of famous bouncers—all of it prepares us to weather virtually any storm to come our way. “I used to fuck guys like you in prison?” Okay, sure. What else ya got?

Midway through their fight on the beach, Jimmy wallops Dalton in the side with a hunk of…I want to say driftwood? It could be a fallen branch from one of the nearby trees, too. Either way I commend his astute use of innate environmental advantages in his fight. That’s the root of all good fight scenes, as I’ve said for many years now—they distinguish themselves from one another by making use of the physical space around them and the objects that inhabit that space. It’s a bit disappointing that at no point does anyone throw sand in the other person’s eyes to momentarily blind them, but be that as it may. It’s also unclear how Jimmy can muster enough force to break an item hard enough to injure Dalton’s ribs a less than one-foot swing, but we’ll ignore that as well. Jimmy’s presence of mind is what’s on display here. And when Jimmy gets his leg tangled up in a tree, Dalton will pay him back in kind, reversing the fortunes of the fight and leading to his overall victory. Watch the wood.

Relatively early on in the proceedings, Dalton flashes a grin at Jimmy while they square up after a flurry of blows and counters. Is he…enjoying this? Yes, at the moment anyway, and for several reasons. First, he’s just told Doc that he’s only good at one thing: He never loses. Of course he’s glad to be doing the one thing he’s good at.

Second, consider Jimmy’s rhetoric. He opens their battle banter with “Prepare to die.” Dalton knows he’s in a life-or-death struggle, for himself anyway—I don’t believe he has any plans to kill Jimmy at this stage—and with that in mind Dalton is pleased to have weathered Jimmy’s initial murderous assault with roughly the same alacrity as he’s fended off countless others. He’s doing well, and he knows it.

Third, and again springboarding off Jimmy’s declared intent to kill, Dalton knows that being as good as he is is pissing Jimmy off. He can read the frustration all over Jimmy’s face, and thanks to Marshall Teague’s enormously expressive mug, so can we. There’s some delight to be taken there, as any number of the smug smiles he’s shot at the Tinkers of the world indicate.

But we have another face to look at here, don’t we. Jimmy is not just annoyed, or even pissed—he’s furious. He decided to kill Dalton the moment Dalton knocked him off his motorbike, and he’s doubling down on that decision.

When Dalton realizes this, when Dalton decides it’s really kill or be killed, Dalton will smile no longer.

We’re several exchanges of kicks, strikes, and wrestling holds deep into Dalton and Jimmy’s vicious fight at a small beach on the shore of the mysterious body of water separating Emmett’s ranch from Wesley’s mansion when Dalton takes to the skies once again. He winds up delivering a knee to Jimmy’s midsection, which takes his opponent down. This gives Dalton his first chance to really lay a beating on the guy, albeit briefly as they’re very evenly matched.

But in a film with approximately half a hundred fight scenes, what we’re watching Dalton do stands out. Balletic leaps through the air were not part of his arsenal at any point inside or outside the Double Deuce, which is where all of his fights had been contained until now. So in part we’re seeing him respond to the environment, which has no walls or ceiling or furniture for him to navigate—just the branches of the trees. Small wonder Dalton’s offense becomes a more soaring thing, a thing of beauty.

But one other point worth considering is his motive for the fight. Dalton is off the clock right now, after all. And he’s not defending liquor shipments, or simply performing his routine job of keeping riffraff out of the bar where he works. He’s just seen his friend Emmett nearly get blown to bits by a cackling ghoul in head-to-toe denim. He wants revenge.

Seen in that light, this dance-like formation is how Dalton expresses his rage, his bloodlust, his thirst for retribution. Could there be anything more Dalton than giving voice to his basest instincts in the most beautiful way possible? Dig deeper and deeper into Dalton’s psychophysicality and you’ll find the place where the heavens meet the earth.

JIMMY: Prepare to die!

DALTON: You are such an asshole.

Noël Coward it isn’t. Peter Parker it isn’t. Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Running Man it isn’t. Jimmy makes an explicit threat, and Dalton dodges the threat component completely—no “not today,” no “prepare to think again,” nothing directly tied to Jimmy’s words. Just, “You are such an asshole,” a statement he could have accurately made about Jimmy at any point during their relationship, not predicated on being informed he should prepare to die at Jimmy’s hands.

Not for the last time in the two-minute fight that follows, Dalton’s mid-battle quip is essentially a non sequitur. He hasn’t come to banter—bantering just gets on his nerves. He won’t reply to the banter, but he’ll assert his feelings about the banterer, merely using the banter as a logical starting point. It’s a fascinating series of choices for someone engaged in a life-or-death struggle, like if Luke Skywalker had responded to the Emperor’s taunts by saying “You are one ugly motherfucker.”

“Prepare to die!” “You are such an asshole.” Say it loud and there’s music playing, say it soft and it’s almost like praying.

Decking a man off the back of a moving motorbike is no mean feat. You have to run full-tilt, first of all, as close to motorbike speed as the human body allows, just to get in the door as it were. You need to properly angle your body and the leap it makes so that you’re aimed in the right direction rather than just jumping blindly. You have to lead the bike so that you’re not jumping at air where the bike once was. You have to not lead the bike too much so that you’re not gonna land on the dirt a few feet in front as the bike runs you over. You have to count on your quarry being so preoccupied by his own glee over the wanton destruction he’s wrought that he doesn’t notice the man in sweatpants barreling towards him. It helps to be shirtless and glistening with sweat, too. (I mean, I assume. Aerodynamics and all that.) You need your arms and legs at full extension, buying you time in midflight to readjust and aim appropriately, to say nothing of the asethetics. And you have to be animated with a blinding thirst for vengeance against a man who dressed up in head-to-toe denim in order to blow up the house of the weird old man who rents you an extravagant loft apartment for a hundred bucks a month, a nominal fee intended to keep the local Presbyterians at bay. You put it all together and you have Dalton, running at breakneck speed, then soaring through the air in order to crash into a man on a moving motor vehicle and then, after the crash, to kick his ass and tear his throat out. Poetry in motion. No, wait: Philosophy in motion.

Like a 1950s nun kicking the little girl under her desk.

Like a billionaire ejaculating on a $40,000 watch.

Like tyrant hearing a sycophant’s joke during the purge.

Like a budding killer dousing a cat with kerosene.

Like a border patrol agent who’s learned just enough Spanish to be cruel with it.

Like a wildfire taking a sudden turn toward inhabited areas.

Like the commander of the trebuchet that launches severed heads over the battlements.

Like an incumbent senator the night of his eighth reelection.

Like a man in wraparound sunglasses swerving his SUV toward a rabbit.

Like student loan officials at an all-expenses-paid luau.

Like a shitposter reading about the latest mass shooting.

Like a child’s nightmare of a cartoon villain as he slowly makes his way down the hall to the bedroom door.

Like a piano with only black keys, played by unseen hands.

Like a flash flood, like a rabid dog, like cut brakes, like hate speech, like black ice, like a sudden sharp pain in the left arm, like knives, like cuts, like blood.

Jimmy Reno has exactly four minutes to live when he sets off the initial explosion in Emmett’s home. Four minutes to the second. What an emotional journey that must be for him. The tension and thrill of being a sneak in the night. The firebug awe of the detonation. The bonus, unlooked for, of the secondary explosion, even bigger than the first. Stopping his getaway motorbike to laugh uproariously at Dalton, Doc, and Emmett, reveling in their powerlessness compared to his fiery prowess. The sudden shock of being knocked off his bike by a flying man. The determination to kill this man. The back and forth of their battle. The pain of incurring blows and the satisfaction of inflicting them. The sadistic delight of reminiscing about his time as a prison rapist. The moment when it all changes and he realizes he’s in trouble, deep trouble. The desperate decision to pull a gun and settle things for good and all. The rushed in-the-moment thinking that occurs when you feel you’re at immediate risk of death. The pain in his throat. Oblivion. From lighting up the night with his malice to floating face-down dead in a river, in the time it takes the Beatles to do the “na na na nanana na” part of “Hey Jude.” Take a sad song and make it wetter.

Gary grins from ear to ear. Jimmy does a double fist-pump. O’Connor raises an arm aloft in triumph. Tinker yee-haws his hat off his head. Pat McGurn and Morgan? They literally embrace. (Jimmy and Tinker merely clasp hands.) The Goon in Blue (about whom more later) is just happy to be there. And Brad Wesley acts like a game show host. Truly, the destruction of Strodenmire Ford by the coward Gary Ketcham is the high-water mark of villainous delight for the Brad Wesley organization. For once in their miserable lives they managed to get one over on their enemies in a way that did not require any of them to get their asses kicked. They didn’t even need to throw a punch, much less take one. They just had to get behind the wheel of a monster truck—one of them did, anyway—and drive on through to the other side. The rest take a joy in this of the sort you see in bars when the home team wins the Super Bowl. They are thrilled, inordinately thrilled, “the director overdid it” thrilled, to have watched a monster truck run over a car dealership. Did I point out that Morgan and Pat, the two orneriest cusses in the whole gang, hug each other, like one just announced his wife is expecting? This is the rough beast they gave birth to instead, haulin’ ass towards Bethlehem to put a little something down on a new car.

It’s not often that you encounter two shots of two diametrically opposed characters doing basically the same thing but in such different ways that you can understand everything there is to know about them both at a glance. It’s not often that you encounter a movie like Road House either, though. And here we have two future combatants in a life or death struggle, one arm pulled back, the other extended. The first is poised but serene, making a fist but with no intention to use it, shirtless, glistening, one with nature, wet with nature. The second is enraged, pointing at an enemy, singling him out, hungry for a kill, blocking out the blue light of the happy societal microcosm in which he is an interloper. Dalton and Jimmy, two sides of the same coin, the Batman and Joker of the JC Penney.