“It is realistic, and we’ve been striving very hard to make it realistic. Fights aren’t pretty. You know, when somebody gets hit, it hurts, and it’s ugly, and we’ve tried to capture that.” —Rowdy Herrington

—

“I grew up in Texas—not that this is exclusive to Texas. But what is it about men having to go out to bars at night and beat somebody’s face in, or get their face beat in, and get drunk, and you know, they don’t care which it is? There’s some kind of anger or aggression in all of us that we have to find a way to vent or it’ll kill us. And that’s what intrigued me about this, because this script looked like everything I grew up with—every level of mentality that I’ve known since I was born.” —Patrick Swayze

—

“Do you ever win a fight?”

“Nobody ever wins a fight.”

—Dr. Elizabeth Clay and Dalton, Road House

“This is the new Double Deuce,” says Frank Tilghman. We are at the start of an all-hands staff meeting, and Tilghman is pointing to the concept art for the bar’s redesign. But standing nearby is his latest hire, Dalton. It is through Dalton, with Dalton, in Dalton that the new Double Deuce will be achieved. Dalton embodies the new Double Deuce. He is its future.

When Dalton takes over as cooler he becomes more than just the chief bouncer. His role is not to handle a series of discrete incidents, but to institute sweeping reforms that will eliminate such incidents forever. “It’s going to change,” he states—not a threat, not a promise, a fact. His bouncers, too, must change for this to take place. As below, so above.

Bouncing on the Dalton Path is a matter of following “three simple rules.”

This, for the sixth time, is the third.

3. Be nice (continued)

Previously:

1. The Great Commandment
2. The Parable of Someone Getting in Your Face and Calling You a Cocksucker
3. Walking the Dalton Path Together
4. It’s a Job / It’s Nothing Personal

Whenever two or more nouns are gathered to call a name, there is hate.This is the difficulty—well, one of the difficulties, in addition to being barred from coming within 200 yards of Jasper High—facing Steve the Horny Bouncer. He has heard Dalton’s commandment. He has heard the parable of someone getting in your face and calling you a cocksucker. He’s heard about the power of community, the innate dignity of the laborer, and the fact that it, whatever it is, is nothing personal. He simply isn’t buying it.

“Uh-huh,” he says, the sarcasm dripping from his lips in sufficient quantity to stain his shirt, were he wearing one. “Being called a cocksucker isn’t personal?” Gyp Rosetti, you have a friend in Steve.

“No,” says Dalton coolly and confidently. (Considering the degree to which men routinely sexualize their antagonism toward him, I’d say this is a man who’s been called a cocksucker many, many times.) “It’s two nouns combined to elicit a prescribed response.”

Well goddamn, looks like he was a linguistics minor in NYU! Thanks there, Chomsky!

Of course, he’s right. One need look no further than the fact that this is my 130th essay about a movie called Road House in 130 days to see that combining two nouns in the right way can elicit one hell of a prescribed response. I have chosen to give myself over to that response, but that’s just it: I made a choice. Dalton is attempting to convince the skeptical Steve that he has a choice too, and he can choose to let that shit slide.

Steve, you will not be surprised to learn, is not buying it. However, while dumb, he is no dummy. He senses he will not be able to best Dalton in the squared circle of neurolinguistic programming. Better for him to take a new and even more direct approach:

“What if somebody calls my mama a whore?”

Actor Gary Hudson’s delivery of the word “whore” is remarkable, a cousin in its way to Joe Pantoliano as Ralph Cifaretto, exasperatedly insisting “She was a hooah.” He takes the word and purses his lips and shoots it out the side of his mouth, like he’s trying to send it scurrying out of the servant’s entrance before the Duchess arrives. Nervous laughter erupts. All that his smug look of triumph afterwards lacks is the voice of Ra’s al Ghul from Batman: The Animated Series saying “Checkmate, Detective” or some shit.

Which leaves him wide open for Dalton’s riposte:

“Is she?”

Nervous laughter bubbles up again, at Steve’s expense this time. His smile sours. He takes the napkin or whatever he’s been tearing up OCD-style and tosses the latest shred to the ground in a rage. Anything he says would imply acceptance of Dalton’s framework, that rather than being some outlandish insult, the notion that Steve’s mother is a sex worker is a matter of some debate. Not since Dalton told Morgan “opinions vary” has he so thoroughly shut someone down.

Note that Dalton himself is agnostic on the issue. I’m not claiming any kind of “sex work is work” points for Dalton; this was an era in which even an NYU philosophy major may not have encountered this kind of thinking, and moreover his attitude toward Denise after her topless dance smacks of SWERFiness. And yet one is reminded, is not one, of Matthew 26:63-64: “And the high priest answered and said unto him, I adjure thee by the living God, that thou tell us whether thou be the Christ, the Son of God. Jesus saith unto him, Thou hast said.” Tou-fuckin-ché, Caiaphas.

And so it us unto you, Horny Steve. You have just given Dalton the rope to hang you with, rhetorically. When you diss Dalton, you diss yourself, and in so doing you yourself have set up the perfect demonstration of the wisdom of “Be nice.” Did Dalton say anything insulting? You’ll notice he did not! He left it to his foe to be his own undoing. Petard, here be thy hoist.

“This is the new Double Deuce,” says Frank Tilghman. We are at the start of an all-hands staff meeting, and Tilghman is pointing to the concept art for the bar’s redesign. But standing nearby is his latest hire, Dalton. It is through Dalton, with Dalton, in Dalton that the new Double Deuce will be achieved. Dalton embodies the new Double Deuce. He is its future.

When Dalton takes over as cooler he becomes more than just the chief bouncer. His role is not to handle a series of discrete incidents, but to institute sweeping reforms that will eliminate such incidents forever. “It’s going to change,” he states—not a threat, not a promise, a fact. His bouncers, too, must change for this to take place. As below, so above.

Bouncing on the Dalton Path is a matter of following “three simple rules.”

This, for the fifth time, is the third.

3. Be nice (continued)

Previously:

1. The Great Commandment
2. The Parable of Someone Getting in Your Face and Calling You a Cocksucker
3. Walking the Dalton Path Together
4. It’s Nothing Personal

But there’s more to Verse 4, isn’t there? Dalton doesn’t merely tell his acolytes that bouncing is nothing personal. He chooses to emphasize that bouncing is a job. Bouncing is work. Bouncing is labor. Through this lens, perhaps, we can arrive at the cod Marxism for which Road House has been crying out for years.

We’ve discussed one interpretation of the latter portion of this verse already—the need to maintain a level head, a distanced perspective, the ability to distinguish between professional challenges to be surmounted and personalized challenges to be destroyed.

At this point Dalton could, and indeed at a subsequent point he will, emphasize the “sticks and stones may break my bones” element. He could, and will, insist that though they will be dealing with physically and verbally aggressive patrons, those patrons have no insight into the men bouncing them and thus their words and deeds carry no true weight. That’s one interpretation of “it’s nothing personal,” and it’s valid.

But what does Dalton mean by counterposing “it’s nothing personal” with “it’s a job”? By situating bouncing within the context of labor and setting this up in opposition to the personal, he is underlining—and not for the first time—the communal nature of the task. The bourgeois conception of personhood, atomic individualism, false individual consciousness, Thatcher proclaiming “there is no such thing as society”: These have no place Dalton’s philosophy. When you do a job you do so in concert with your fellow workers, and, ideally, for the benefit of workers as a class.

You are no Morgan, searching for opportunities in which to vent your rage and exercise power at the expensive of the collective.

You are no Pat, enriching yourself at your fellows’ expense.

You are no Steve, fucking young women of uncertain age in the breakroom, or Judy, selling cocaine in the bathroom, indulging in hedonistic pursuits while others shoulder your burden.

“You are the bouncers,” Dalton says at the end of the Giving of the Rules. You are the proletariat. Through your labor the value of the Double Deuce is derived, a fact which is made plainer and plainer as the film goes on.

“I am the cooler.” Dalton is the vanguard. He seizes power with the intent of awakening the wider class of bouncers to their revolutionary potential and diffusing that power among them, and unlike other vanguardist movements he does so.

“Watch my back and each other’s.” Solidarity forever.

“Take out the trash.” Up against the wall, motherfuckers.

I think it’s only natural to look at this image of Dalton and Denise, Denise sidling up to Dalton to cheerfully and in fact thoughtfully proposition him for sex and Dalton preparing to rebuff her pretty much no matter what she says, and focus on the hair. Those two glorious manes, brown and blonde, male and female, yin and yang, equal and opposite, an Aqua Net Argonath. Do they not suit each other, complement each other, mirror each other? By the end of this film you’ve seen both of these people mostly naked and once you cross that threshold—well, brother, we’re all adults here, and given what’s gone on in the back room of the Double Deuce already I don’t see the percentage in beating around the bush—you want to see these two people fuck. I sure do!

But I want more.

Oh, things work out fine in the Dalton/Doc timeline, for sure. Not for Denise, who gets beaten by Brad Wesley and then does an aggressive striptease on his behalf and then gets ridiculed by Dalton and dragged away and never seen again. And of course not for Brad Wesley and his men, who all get murdered, so hey, maybe things work out fine for Denise after all. But for Dalton and Elizabeth, you know, they find true love, Dalton turns a personal corner and quits cutting and running and gets over his guilt and trauma from the last time he murdered a guy, they have a bunch of no-nonsense sex in there somewhere, the Double Deuce and Jasper are freed from the tyranny of Brad Wesley, and regardless of where you come down on Frank Tilghman the movie implies this is a good thing so let’s go with that.

But sometimes I imagine another world. In this world Dalton does go back to Denise’s place and fucks, it doesn’t kill him, he does even like it. First of all kudos to Denise for maintaining her own apartment or whatever, maybe she and the girls are roommates, it’s a fun situation like Sarah Connor and whatsername at the beginning of The Terminator, just independent women of the ’80s living their dreams, there’s a lot of snickering and giggling when Dalton and Denise offer perfunctory greetings to them while they watch The Golden Girls and then fall into her room together. Second maybe it accelerates the timeline vis a vis Jimmy, Wesley’s top goon and illegitimate son (source for this claim?), who tells Dalton to say Goodnight, Denise. Maybe Dalton actually does say “Goodnight, Denise” in response and it really humiliates and angers Jimmy the way Dalton’s mildest comebacks seem to snap the likes of Morgan and Steve like dry twigs, and so Jimmy participates in the fight that follows with Ketchum and the anonymous goons who look like they’re dressed for Sunday services at a midwestern evangelical church. Maybe this fight is a real backbreaker for Dalton and Jack and Hank and Younger now because it’s five on four and at least two of the participants are pretty dece at fighting or would be if Dalton hadn’t yanked one’s boot off and twisted his ankle and hauled him into the parking lot like a sack of potatoes, but regardless we later see Jimmy beat Jack and Hank and Younger and damn near Wade and Dalton too before Wesley calls it off, so it could get rough. And let’s say Denise finds that boot with the knife in it that Dalton threw, technically we never see where it lands, and she sneaks up behind Jimmy as he’s about to deliver the coup de grace on Dalton and just fucking brains him with it, you see the lights go out right in front of you, it’s kind of horrifying but this abusive psychopath had it coming. And the rest of the goons fuck right off and yes I’m sure Wesley would go absolutely ape shit considering his bastard (?) just got done by his girlfriend, but guess what Brad? She’s not your girlfriend anymore, nope, she’s busy having Dr. Elizabeth Clay who showed up just in time to watch Dalton fall into the arms of another woman treat his wounds. And it’s a touchy thing for a while, what with the police in Wesley’s pocket and now there’s kind of a love triangle developing, and Brad’s acting rashly now, he’s not timing the explosives right for Emmett and Red because it’s like Tinker or O’Connor placing them rather than Jimmy and for all I know maybe Strodenmire gets run over along with his car dealership this time because Ketchum can’t sleep because all he can see is Jimmy’s vacant eyes with his boot embedded in his brain and he’s doesn’t give a fuck who gets hurt anymore because it’s hard to feel anything. But who should ride into town to help Dalton put down this pack of mad dogs but Wade Garrett, just like he always has, and even if Red and Emmett and Pete are all dead this time around there’s still Wade to pull the trigger and save his mijo from becoming what he’s always dreaded, he’ll be his sin-eater and that’s fine, and the Double Deuce will be fine, and Jasper will be fine, and yes Wade comes on to Denise pretty heavy but wouldn’t you know it, this time around Dr. Elizabeth Clay is not spoken for, and the red fucking hot sexual chemistry between the two of them combusts and they’re fucking before you know it, everyone’s fucking up against walls, left and right, like rabbits, because death’s thick in the air, it’s in their brains like a disease, and this is how you treat it, this is palliative care because you need love to feel alive, don’t you, you need to have love and make love to show death it hasn’t fucking gotten you yet, and Dalton and Denise who escaped her abusers and Wade and Elizabeth who escaped that abuser before are still alive and they say as they fuck and love each other goddammit we still have time on this earth and we’re going to live, live, live, live, live, live, live, live, live.

Look at this sorry state of affairs. Look at what the goon industry in Jasper has become. This fearsome foursome have stepped right out of a Promise Keepers meeting and into the parking lot of the Double Deuce in an attempt to assassinate Dalton by kicking him in the head with a knife. The denim bandit taking point is Ketchum, obviously, as you’ll recall from previous posts about Road House‘s most anonymous and yet also for some reason ultimately most prominent goon. The other three guys…well, they’re stuntmen, that’s the easiest way to put it, stuntmen who have no lines and appear in no other scenes and are only there to have a dust-up with Dalton and his bouncers that will leave their acid-washed asses in the dirt.

Tinker and O’Connor have better luck than these clowns do in taking Dalton on, as a matter of fact. Yes, in the previous fight Pat McGurn gets his nose broke and his ass kicked through a plate-glass window before he so much as lands a blow, though for attempting to carve Dalton like a Christmas ham with a knife the size of his forearm he should at least get an E for Effort. But Tinker comes close to killing Dalton, and he and O’Connor work both Dalton and Tilghman over pretty good before Dalton regains the upper hand against the Bleeder and the other bouncers team up on the big man.

Ketchum and company? Dalton and Jack spot them coming from a mile away. They post up with Hank and Younger just inside the vestibule and block these dopes from getting in. Dalton catches Ketchum’s would-be deathblow, violently twists the guy’s ankle, then literally drags his ass out into the parking lot. There’s some back and forth out there I suppose but there’s no reversal to speak of, where the bad guys are winning but then Dalton stages a comeback. Nope, they just go at it until the bouncers defeat the goons one by one. Ketchum is reduced to shouting “You son of a bitch!” as he’s dragged away with just one boot on, since Dalton lobbed the other one up on the bar’s roof, like Walter White with the pizza that one time. Just a disgraceful performance from top to bottom.

Ketchum, as we’ll see, returns with a vengeance, but these other guys are never seen again. After their work tonight, it’s entirely possible Brad Wesley beat them all to death in his driveway while smiling wryly as his other minions looked on and chuckled. Or perhaps after that they drifted East to perform other tasks in Wesley’s service but were never heard from again by the main characters, kind of like the Blue Wizards from Tolkien before Christopher revealed he’d revised their origin and made them part of anti-Sauron activity in the Second Age instead of the Third. (Seriously, apparently Professor T wound up deciding they came over from Valinor with Glorfindel now rather than Saruman, Gandalf, and Radagast. Blew my mind too.) My best guess, though, is that they simply went back to their day jobs at the Bass Pro Shop in the new mall. Take another look at those faces and tell me you wouldn’t be able to get a hell of a fly-fishing lure recommendation out of every man jack of them. They couldn’t possibly fuck it up worse than they fucked up being goons, I can tell you that much.

We’re near the midpoint of the movie now and things have turned around for the Double Deuce. The thugs, thieves, dope dealers, and dudes who fuck high-schoolers have been purged—and that’s just from the staff. The bad element in the crowd has had its proverbial face smashed through the metaphorical table. The first attempt by the Brad Wesley organization to re-exert control by forcing the rehiring of sister-son Pat McGurn ended in a defeat so humiliating that Wesley beat up one of the already beaten men himself upon hearing about it. Carrie Ann has gone from getting groped and forced into fistfights to getting on stage and banging out blue-eyed soul versions of “Knock on Wood” with the Jeff Healey Band. There’s a neon sign now. The floor and walls are clean of dirt and graffiti. The dance floor is jumping. The damned chickenwire is down. It’s a new day.

Denise must agree. Not that we know her name is Denise at this point. She’s just the vivacious blonde with a sense of style who rebuffed a dude who asked her to get “nipple to nipple” a while back, and who looks at Dalton like J. Wellington Wimpy looks at hamburgers. Today is the day she makes her move.

No bizarre “nipple to nipple” euphemisms that are actually filthier than the real thing for Denise, oh no. Gliding over to Dalton’s usual post-up spot near the bar, she gets, well, nipple to nipple with him, rubs his shoulder, asks him why he avoids eye contact with her (“I’m shy”), and says “Would you be shocked if I said ‘Let’s go to my place and fuck’? Ain’t gonna kill you. You know, you might even like it.” Show me the lie, you know?

Dalton, who has an inscrutable but distinct sense of decorum that I’m still puzzling out 124 days into writing about him, seems unimpressed (or blind) and unlikely to accept the offer. But the matter is taken out of his hands. Appearing from out of nowhere, Brad Wesley’s chief goon Jimmy violently grabs Denise by the arm. Whipping her behind him and thrusting himself into Dalton’s face, he growls “Say goodnight, Denise,” and they leave.

But he doesn’t say “Say goodnight, Denise” while looking at Denise. He says “Say goodnight, Denise” while looking at Dalton, and I mean looking at him, staring right into his eyes like he’s trying to psychically bore two holes through his skull. He says “Say goodnight, Denise” as if he’s telling Dalton “Say ‘Goodnight, Denise.'”

Given Dalton’s penchant for cheap sarcasm when the opportunity presents itself, and given Road House‘s penchant for dumb jokes whether the opportunity presents itself or not, it’s hard to believe, but no, Dalton does not stare right back into Jimmy’s face and say “Goodnight, Denise.” But their loss is your gain. You can be Dalton’s voice in this moment. You can say “Goodnight, Denise.” Your quick wit will delight all who have the pleasure of your company. Goodnight, Denise.

Dalton purged the staff of the Double Deuce of its criminal element.

Dalton purged the crowd of the Double Deuce of its criminal element.

Dalton defeated the minions of Wesley in open combat.

Dalton liberated the small businessmen of Jasper, Missouri from the Jasper Improvement Society.

Dalton saved the life of yeoman rancher Emmett.

Dalton put the minions of Brad Wesley down like dogs, one by one.

Dalton lulled Brad Wesley into a false sense of victory that enabled the small businessmen of Jasper, Missouri to gun him down.

Dalton taught the bouncers of the Double Deuce to walk the Dalton Path.

Dalton taught Dr. Elizabeth Clay how to love again.

Dalton freed Jasper, Missouri from tyranny.

For these deeds we honor him.

For these deeds we celebrate him.

But through his efforts, Dalton also freed the Jeff Healey Band from the loose-hanging confines of their chicken-wire prison.

And it is for this deed that we dedicate our lives to his service.

So was it nice. So is it nice. So ever will be it nice.

In the name of the Dalton, the Jack, and the Holy Wade.

Amen. Amen. Amen.

—from the Most Meet and Worthy Charter of the Holy Jasper Empire, Forty-Fifth Post-Tilghman Schismatic Revision; So Decreed by the Ass-Mother of the Sisters of Carrie Ann and the Eternal High Priestess of the Elizabethan Order; So Ratified by the Intranuclear Auto Sales Consortium, the Swords of Tinker, the Swords of Denise, the Cody Navigators, and the Guild of the Valet Visible; Sworn by the Blood of the Bleeder, Jasper IX, AD 7201 

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.

I have a mansion I visit sometimes
Brad Wesley lives there, he makes me do crimes
I live in Jasper, near the new mall
We made some old guys pay for it all

They say I’m crazy but I have a nice smile
They put most of my part in the cylindrical file
Life’s been good to me so far

Brad Wesley’s Mustang does one-eighty-five
I’ll stare at Dalton, Jimmy can drive
My necktie’s loose so I never choke
I dress like Albert Hammond the Stroke
I crashed Red Webster’s and trashed the whole place
I watched O’Connor get punched in the face
Though I’m listed as Karpis in credits as they crawl
I’m barely in this movie at all

Lucky I’m sane when my three scenes are through
(In the background at Brad’s pool)
(Brad’s pool)
Don’t say my name, but for Tinker they do
Life’s been good to me so far

I’m just a soldier in Brad Wesley’s war
After this scene you won’t see me no more
Red Webster cleans up my mess with a mop
In A Nightmare on Elm Street, I play a cop

I am in Road House but for not that much time
(Everybody say Karpis)
(Karpis)
Vanish completely after 0:45
Life’s been good to me so far

For the past week I’ve chronicled sixty seconds in the lives of Mr. Wade Garret and Dr. James Dalton. (For the purposes of this conversation I’m assuming his degree in philosophy from NYU was a Ph.D.) During this pivotal minute, Dalton calls his old friend and mentor Wade to ask if he’s heard anything about a guy by the name of Brad Wesley. At this point, friends, you and I have talked about Dalton’s initial encounters with the richest man in Jasper: watching him buzz Emmett’s horse corral with his helicopter, swerving out of the way as he sings doo-wop while driving into oncoming traffic, shaking hands and having a brief conversation at Red Webster’s auto parts store, beating the shit out of several of his minions after they try to stab him to death in an attempt to make the Double Deuce re-hire a bartender. I’d say he’s handled all this rather well. What, you might be wondering, occasioned his call for counsel?

These happy assholes.

Dalton catches two of Brad Wesley’s premier goons, Jimmy and Karpis, just as they pull out of Red’s parking lot. Karpis, whom we see exiting the store, has just busted the place up, spilling various motor oils and antifreezes and whatnot all over the place as punishment for Red’s recalcitrance in paying his full “contribution” to the Jasper Improvement Society, the legal name of Wesley’s protection racket.

“Work ain’t work when you’re havin’ fun,” Jimmy says from behind the wheel of the getaway car as Karpis hops in after doing the deed.

“Life is good,” Karpis confirms.

And like that—poof—he’s gone.

One last, lingering, smoldering staredown at Dalton later, Karpis is driven away from the store and right out of the movie, forever. It’s the last we see of him, much to my chagrin, handsome devil that he is.

But oh, his legacy! What Karpis does this day puts Dalton and Wade on a collision course with Jimmy and Wesley, their opposite numbers. The explosion that results, which includes multiple literal explosions, will leave three of those four men dead, and change the face of Jasper forever. And Karpis’s mesmerizing face that sets it all in motion. In that Cheshire Cat grin, I see the future: Life is good, but all men must die.

We joke here at Pain Don’t Hurt. We do. And we laugh, don’t we? We laugh, and we kid. We kid the movie. But I have not decided to spend three hundred sixty-five days of my life—a significant fraction of my life no matter how long I live, a fraction my kids can mention at my funeral for some chuckles—to write about a film I find funny on account of it’s impossible to recognize myself in it. On the contrary. As I’ve said in the past, Road House endears itself to me. Dalton endears itself to me. Patrick Swayze endears himself to me. I like these people, and I like the way they enact…I dunno, the things that people care about. They like to drink and dance and sing and fuck. They have to navigate moving to a new town, meeting new people, taking a new job. They keep in touch with friends. They try to fight against assholes who are ruining it for everyone. Does it matter that they get paid six-figure salaries to toss professional wrestlers out of a bar with a dirt parking lot? Only insofar as that makes it funny. There has to be something underneath to be made funny if the thing’s worth writing about it all.

This is my seventh consecutive day writing about a phone call between Dalton and Wade Garrett that lasts for one minute, to the second depending on what you count as the start or finish. It’s a funny conversation because Sam Elliott pronounces things in an unusual way, because there’s a continuity error I can spin into a CLUE, because at times it seems to undermine the system of bar-fame upon which the rest of the movie depends, because Wade calls Dalton mijo and thus invites an entire range of gutter-minded speculation.

But as Wade’s mile-wide grin when he hears who’s on the phone shows us, these men are friends, and their friendship is, I think, why I’ve gotten stuck on this single minute of film for an entire week. The friendship is what makes it a rich text, not just something you can say a lot of silly shit about. It’s the reason I like it, because it makes me like the men involved.

Wade, for instance. Wade characterizes his current place of work as such a haven for drooling cretins that “This place has a sign over the urinal that says ‘Don’t Eat the Big White Mint.'” Yet earlier—less than a minute earlier, since the whole conversation is over and done in sixty seconds—he tells Dalton that he’s in hog heaven, that “If I was doin’ any better I couldn’t live with myself.” His smile hear shows that he means it: He is thrilled to be working in a place this skeevy and dumb, where the troops charge the stage with water guns and the topless dancers flash him looks of gratitude and attraction along with everything else they flash. He doesn’t need to explain away the apparent contradiction to Dalton, his pal and confidant. He knows the kid’ll understand.

Dalton, then. Dalton seems more at home during his conversation with Wade than at any other point in the film so far other than his chat with Cody, and for the same reason: He’s not trying to impress or intimidate Wade, because Wade is his friend. Moreover, he’s not exhausted, or wounded, or trying to kick someone’s ass. His affect is genial, maybe ever so slightly deferential, the way you sound when you’re talking to a friend you haven’t seen in a while, and you’re just grateful to bask in their presence, so grateful you feel you owe them just the tiniest amount of subordination to whatever would make them happy in the moment. When Wade asks if he’s in any kind of trouble, Dalton tells him it’s nothing he’s not used to; as he does so he kind of tosses his hand up and then down in a hurry, a nervous “aw it’s nothin'” gesture that’s extraordinarily adorable. So is the uncontrollable tinge of chuckle that bubbles up as he says “But it’s amazing what you can used to, isn’t it?” He’s tickled by this, and tickled by his ability to express that feeling, and—again—confident that his friend won’t need this explained, that he’ll just get it. Indeed this occasions the “don’t eat the big white mint” gag, at which Dalton laughs gladly. Just a few seconds earlier he was nervously bringing up the Brad Wesley situation; he’s now able to very sincerely laugh at a very dumb joke simply because Wade’s the one who told it to him.

That Sam Elliott is good in this scene is obvious. He’s playing a sexy funny rough-and-tumble super-bouncer, he sounds like Sam Elliott, he nails it. That Patrick Swayze is good in this scene is crucial. It’s one I’d point people to in order to explain why he and Dalton are so appealing in this picture. There’s an ease to what he does here, a feeling like somewhere out in the multiverse there exists a Patrick Swayze who looks and acts and behaves in this exact way, and they simply traded places for a bit so they could make this movie. “What does this action hero sound like when he calls up one of his buddies” is not a question that gets asked very often, much less answered, much less answered with such charm, and since it’s Patrick Swayze we’re looking at, such beauty.

You leave this phonecall thinking Wade Garrett’s someone you wanna hear some stories from. You leave thinking Dalton’s a guy it’d be fun to grab a beer and shoot the shit with, maybe get a little philosophical in (“It’s amazing what you can get used to”) in the process. You leave thinking these guys are friends. They’re my friends too.

I hate to do this to Terry Funk of all people—it’s still real to me, dammit!—but Sam Elliott is here to take the Mispronunciation Title right out of his hands. Watching and hearing Wade Garrett talk to Dalton is fascinating for at least six posts’ worth of reasons, but the adventure of listening to him go to work on the English language is right there at the top. When Dalton asks him how he’s doing, he replies “Aw Shit Hell Kid I’m in Hog Heaven,” and it sounds like it reads there—like he’s reciting a song title he’s never come across before but thinks is pretty funny now that he’s seeing it for the first time. He closes out the call by telling Dalton “I’ll see ya later,” but not as one sentence, no, that would be the easy way out, and Wade Garrett is made of sterner stuff. “I’ll see ya,” he says, then pauses, then adds, “Later.” I’ve told people “See ya,” and I’ve told people “Later,” but never have I done so back to back. No one has done so back to back, until now. Sam Elliott decided he was gonna have some fun with the line “I’ll see ya later” and Rowdy Herrington had the good sense to let him, just as he did when Terry Funk got creative with “You’re a dead man.” People talk about Scorsese and De Niro and “You talkin’ to me?” or the tears in rain speech from Blade Runner, but real heads know.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, a principle I attempt to disprove on a daily basis. But they’ve got me here, man. Wade Garrett may be getting old, this we know, but Wade Garrett’s the best. Indeed, based on our observations thus far, Wade Garrett is a supreme hardcase. In the past minute we’ve seen him a) observe the strip club from his perch at the periphery, like Batman surveying Gotham from the top of the cathedral at the start of a night’s work; c) wrangle a horned-up jarhead in the process of charging the stage to squirt women’s breasts with a battery-operated water gun at point blank range; d) do so so convincingly that the randyman’s brother Marines all squirt him with their water guns instead of teaming up to pound the shit out of a wiry old man who just stepped to them in front of attractive women they’re there to impress; e) earn a wink-and-a-promise from the lovely young woman whose performance he saved f) return that wink with a smile for which the phrase “panty-dropping” was invented g) do all this with a pronounced limp that makes him look like he just got off his horse after riding here all the way from Cheyenne with the law on his trail. Then he hears Dalton’s on the phone for him, and this goofy-ass grin is the result. I want you to keep this smile in mind as the rest of the film unfolds. Carry it with you during the trials and travails, triumphs and tragedies, strange pronunciations and displays of pubic hair that Wade and Dalton experience together in the days to come. Dalton lights up Wade Garrett’s life. And that’s all you need to know, son.

All barfolk are not created equal. Take this fellow, who tends bar at the strip joint where Wade Garrett is working when first we see him. We know Wade Garrett is the best, because Dalton has said so. We know he’s getting old, because Frank Tilghman has said so. We know this doesn’t matter, because he just charmed about a dozen Marines out of either storming the stage to sexually harass the dancers or beating the shit out of him for telling them not to. Why the best cooler alive is working a topless bar roughly the size of your uncle’s basement is beyond me, but then there’s a lot I don’t understand about cooler economics in this film. Did the titty bar impresario pay Wade five hundred large a year to clean up a place with a seating capacity of about forty semi-erect men? Your guess is as good as mine.

Here’s one thing I know, though—or thought I knew: Barfolk know who Wade Garrett is. Barfolk know who Dalton is. On the very first day of this project we established that Dalton has a famous name among barfolk but is not necessarily visually recognizable, whereas people know who Wade is on sight. But that shouldn’t make a difference in this scene, in which Dalton calls Wade’s place of employment to ask his advice on the matter of Brad Wesley. When Dalton says “Wade Garrett please. The name’s Dalton” or whatever his phone greeting is, that should be sufficient to alert anyone on the other end of the line that they’re standing witness to history: the two best coolers in the business have something to say to each other.

This doofus above, though? When he tells Wade he’s got a phone call, he describes the caller as “Some guy name a’ Dalton.”

What kind of barman are you, sir?

Have standards at your establishment dropped so precipitously that the name of Dalton does not echo across its pool tables and down its elevated stage? Why would Wade Garrett be caught dead in such a place? If you don’t know Dalton, you’re not worth knowing, or at the very least not worth buying a drink from.

Perhaps you’re saying “Well Sean, if you stop and think about it for a second, they can hardly have this guy say ‘Garrett! It’s Dalton!’ because that would read as if Dalton is his friend as well as Wade’s. ‘Some guy name a’ Dalton’ is just screenwriter shorthand for ‘You have a phonecall from someone with whom I am not personally acquainted, and I’m relaying this information to you in a slightly rough-hewn manner. You’re rushing to judgment here.” To this I can only say bull shit, if anything I’m not rushing judgment enough. You either stick with the rules you yourselves established as the writers every time you showed any bar employee discover they were interacting with Dalton or I am forced to conclude you are casting aspersions on those who do not follow those rules. Sorry, topless bar bartender, if that is your real name, but you failed. I think it’s time for you gentleman to leave.

“What’s goin’ on, mijo?”

This is how Wade Garrett opens his phone conversation with Dalton, the first exchange the student and the master have in the film. Mijo is the term of endearment with which Wade refers to Dalton throughout the film. Mijo means “son.”

I wouldn’t read too much into that if hahahaha just kidding, boy oh boy is this a fecund (virile?) word choice! This kind of affectionate diminutive is of course common to men of a certain age when addressing younger men. It’s certainly common in Road House. O’Connor, the Bleeder himself, calls Dalton “son” prior to this exchange. Brad Wesley refers to the men he pays to beat people and destroy property for him as “my boys.” On the flip side, Morgan sneeringly calls Wade “Dad” when they jump ugly upon Wade’s arrival in Jasper. Fatherless sons and sonless fathers in this movie, almost to a man.

Let’s step back for a moment though. Whatever the implication of the term, Road House is emphatically not some sort of prophetic look at the future of nerd culture, in which daddy issues are the prime motivator for fiction, both in terms of what the fiction is about and the men who write it, most of whom have few thoughts in their head deeper than “You shouldn’t have yelled at me for staying inside to read The Incredible Hulk instead of playing pee-wee league football, Dad.” I just find it hard to believe that, for example, people stranded on a mysterious island with extraordinary powers, supernatural threats, and a relict science cult only want to look upon the faces of their fathers again, or that the Alien franchise is improved by recreating the Genesis/Frankenstein creation myth with Michael Fassbender instead of leaning hard into the birth-phallus nightmare Giger gifted poor idealess Ridley Scott with back in the day, or…I dunno, I think Chris Pine Captain Kirk is really worried about his dad for some reason in those Star Trek movies.

What does this have to do with Road House, you might ask? On one level, nothing, I’m just getting a few licks in on the sentimental excesses of JJ Abrams & Damon Lindelof. But what I’m really trying to say is that the actual father-son dynamic, in terms of a younger man rebelling against but ultimately (in nerd-culture usage anyway; rebellion against the father is always a mistake) looking up to an older man who offers him guidance, remonstrance, and ultimately approval, and an older man needing a younger man to live through vicariously, help avoid painful mistakes, and wrestle with being supplanted—that’s not here. Whatever the age difference (“Wade Garrett’s getting old”), Dalton and Wade are peers at this point. The advice Wade gives him is not much more paternalistic than that given to Dalton by Elizabeth or Emmett, or by Dalton to the employees of the Double Deuce and the small businessmen of Jasper, all of whom are his senior by a wider margin than Wade.

Mijo is rather applicable in two other ways. First there’s the “all these bitches is my sons” Nicki Minaj spin on it, sans the pejorative implication. The Dalton Path is directly descended from the Way of Wade Garrett. Dalton brings his own philosophical spin to things, but from their rangy fighting styles to their emphasis on both emotional and physical efficiency they’re father and son alright.

The second is a bit trickier to unpack, or unzip as it were. If Dalton is Wade’s son, Wade must needs be Daddy. Again, I don’t think this usage applies to Dalton himself, except perhaps with third-party women like Elizabeth as a proxy. I do know that the Doc clearly has Wade up on the exam room table of her mind within about two seconds of seeing him for the first time, and that the night is still young when Wade first shows her, the girlfriend of his best friend and student, his pubic hair. Wade isn’t into the Tumblr Daddy Dom suit-and-tie capitalist-pig shit, not at all. He simply has the steady hand, stubbly chin, and built-for-action body of a man who’s used to being in charge. For every mijo, there is an equal and opposite papi.

Nine quarters, says the sign that appears in the middle of Dalton’s pivotal conversation with Wade Garrett, right after he blows off the threat presented by Brad Wesley. Right away we can see that reality has warped a little, that a glitch in the matrix has appeared. As well it might: Dalton has just underestimated his opponent and failed to expect the unexpected, a violation of his own First Rule. And for that, a price must be paid.

But what if there’s more to it than that?

It was not I who set myself on this path, but reader @RoddySwears. It was he who noted the numerological significance of the established price. Nine quarters. Two dollars and twenty-five cents. $2.25. 2 + 2 = 9.

What could such a specific prophecy mean?

Then I realized.

The Nine are abroad.

Dalton goes to a laundromat to make his phone calls. There’s no phone in his luxury barn, we know this from Emmett’s anti-sales pitch when he rents the place. Either he doesn’t have opening privileges for the Double Deuce or he wasn’t in that part of Jasper (the Auto Parts/Boat Sales/Hellhole district) when he needed to make the call. Either way, here he is, inside this beautiful laundromat that I’m almost positive you couldn’t find somewhere in California in 1989 or thereabouts, reaching out and touching his mentor Wade Garrett. He’s wondering if Wade’s heard anything about a guy named Brad Wesley, because (I’m inferring) any man who’d make trouble for a cooler stands a decent chance of having been watchlisted by veteran cooler agents across the country. Wade comes up empty, though using his cooler-sense he asks Dalton if he’s gotten into any kind of trouble. “Nothing I’m not used to,” he says, before adding with a chuckle “but it’s amazing what you can get used to, isn’t it?” Wade banters back, they say their goodbyes, that’s that.

But look what happens after Dalton says Brad Wesley is nothing he’s not used to.

Suddenly a sign appears where none had been before. The sign lists the cost of using one of the laundromat’s large machines: NINE QUARTERS. I never noticed this until just this afternoon.

So here’s the situation. You can choose to believe this is just the kind of harmless, almost invisible continuity goof that happens in nearly every movie.

Or you can take it as a sign [pause for reader recognition of the awesome implications of the connections being drawn here] that for dismissing Brad Wesley, a price must be paid.

Search your cooler-sense. You know what is true.

Dalton and Dr. Elizabeth Clay’s meet cute is a very sexy scene, if you ask me, which by reading this blog you have in effect done. A lot goes into making it sexy, too. You start with Patrick Swayze and Kelly Lynch, two extremely attractive human beings. From there you step to the difference in their sexiness: Swayze’s Dalton, shirtless, exposed, vulnerable yet also tough in his willingness to be vulnerable, to be exposed, to be shirtless; Lynch’s Doc, whose intense French braid, enormous glasses, and shapeless white coat emphasize rather than obscure her beauty, as if you’d put glasses and a lab coat and a wig from a Halloween store on the Venus de Milo. There’s the intimacy of the scene too, of the act of a woman touching and healing a man wounded by physical contact with other men, sublimated eroticism piled on sublimated eroticism like they’re fucking. There’s the BDSM angle in the form of the Pain Don’t Hurt koan and the power-exchange positioning of their bodies and faces. Maude Lebowski might suggest that Dalton’s wound is highly vaginal. I for one have pulled off that lapsed-Catholic trick of eroticizing blasphemy, so if you remember where Christ was wounded you’ve got that going for you as well.

But the sexiest thing about it is Elizabeth’s voice when she pauses on her way out of the exam room, turns, and says “You know…for that line of work I thought you’d be bigger,” and Dalton’s utterly guileless smile and laugh before he responds with a self-effacing “Gee, I’ve never heard that before.” Man oh man are these two into each other! You can hear it! Elizabeth’s voice is so soft, almost tremulous with the curiosity that caused her to stop and turn back towards her patient. (She’s like Lot’s wife if Lot’s wife dodged the salt thing and got to go back to town and fuck.) Dalton is delighted to hear this fascinating woman, his intellectual and physical peer, say something he’s heard a million times before—it means he can contextualize her as a part of his life now, even if things don’t work out, and for the moment that’s good enough for him. Do we ever see Dalton close his eyes with pleasure like he does here, at any other point in the movie? Not that I can think of. Do we ever hear anyone say “I thought you’d be bigger” with such directness and wonder—not some weird power-trip come-on, not bants between the lads, but just a person sizing up another person they’re attracted to, in that person’s presence? No way. Woof, man, these two are hot for each other, and it leaks out of them and into their voices as they say goodbye. They know they’ll be saying hello again soon.

¹ And when the sabbath was past, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome, had bought sweet spices, that they might come and anoint him.

² And very early in the morning the first day of the week, they came unto the sepulchre at the rising of the sun.

³ And they said among themselves, Who shall roll us away the stone from the door of the sepulchre?

⁴ And when they looked, they saw that the stone was rolled away: for it was very great.

⁵ And entering into the sepulchre, they saw a young man sitting on the right side, clothed in a long white garment; and they were affrighted.

⁶ And he saith unto them, Be not affrighted: Ye seek Jesus of Nazareth, which was crucified: he is risen; he is not here: behold the place where they laid him.

⁷ But go your way, tell his disciples and Peter that he goeth before you into Galilee: there shall ye see him, as he said unto you.

⁸ And they went out quickly, and fled from the sepulchre; for they trembled and were amazed: neither said they any thing to any man; for they were afraid.

⁹ Now when Jesus was risen early the first day of the week, he appeared first to Mary Magdalene, out of whom he had cast seven devils.

¹⁰ And she went and told them that had been with him, as they mourned and wept.

¹¹ And they, when they had heard that he was alive, and had been seen of her, believed not.

—Mark 16:1-11 (KJV)

Well, there’s no joke—I just think I’m looking at a dead man, though.

—Carrie Ann, Road House

But one of the soldiers with a spear pierced his side, and forthwith came there out blood and water. (John 19:34)