“Dalton, Red’s place is on fire!” Once more unto the beach, dear Jack, once more; or put the fire out with our Jasper booze. When Brad Wesley’s minions—presumably Jimmy, the go-to guy for arson—sets Red Webster’s auto parts store ablaze, who but Jack would be the man to bring Dalton the bad news? He bursts through the packed Double Deuce crowd with the kind of speed that would make a man his size an absolute phenomenon in today’s pro wrestling world, where agile big men are star attractions. He grasps the severity of the situation. He understands that Dalton is the man to be told, intuiting on some level that Dalton is involved in the conflict that caused the conflagration. Even now he follows the Three Simple Rules, allowing his cooler to determine whether to be nice or to not be nice. He’s watching Dalton’s back, and everyone else’s. He is Jack, the heir apparent, the Dalton Dauphin, the Crown Prince of Cooling. All hail.

Nothing to see here, folks. Nothing at all, really. Just Frank Tilghman, illuminated by the chiarascuro of red light and black shadow of horizontal blinds, spending the last few moments before his friend and neighbor Red Webster’s auto parts store succumbs to arson by holding a drink and tensely gazing out over what anyone who didn’t know a major crime was about to be committed would think is a happy nighttime crowd at the bar he owns. Definitely no Bad Guy shit going down here, no siree bob. Why, if you were to show up with a posse of Jedi Masters to arrest him he certainly wouldn’t scream UNLIMITED POWER before blasting you through that window to your doom, no way no how.

With the Memphis Monologue on one side (following hot on the heels of Wade Garrett’s area hair) and the destruction as if by napalm of Red Webster’s auto parts store on the other (followed immediately by Denise showing us the girls), it falls to Jeff Healey to provide us with a bridge commensurate to that level of emotional intensity and body heat. Boy, does he deliver. The Jeff Healey Band’s rendition of that perennial nightclub floor-filler “White Room” by Cream (just go with it) is an absolute barn-burner (no pun intended), featuring a solo by Healey that could peel paint off the walls. It makes Wade Garrett consider attempting to get hisself double-teamed by two lovely young ladies standing next to him and Dalton, as he indicates to his protégé with a knowing nod and wink. (Dalton shakes his head in that “oh you lovable scamp” fashion; don’t think for a second he’s tempted himself, since his virtue will be put to the test shortly.) I think it’s possible it’s actually what sets Red Webster’s place on fire. It whips ass, is what I’m saying, and the movie is lucky to have music of such self-evident force and badassery in its arsenal when no one’s around to get punched in the head.

The staff of the Double Deuce react to the Coming of Wade in a variety of ways. Tilghman leers, of course. The Nameless Bartender’s eyes get a little wide, his mouth goes a little slack. Jack, baffled, asks “Who is this guy?” Hank mutters an awestruck “Holy shit.” “Exactly right,” Wade replies, as if his name were in fact Holy Shit.

In the middle of it all there’s Cody, who whether by the rasp of his voice or the scent of his musk recognizes who the mysterious stranger is and fills in Jack and the assembled gawkers accordingly. “Gentlemen,” he says, “Wade Garrett.” This is a callback to the moment he told the patrons of the Double Deuce that “The name…is Dalton,” obviously; It is Cody’s fate to be the standard bearer for the coolers of the world, the voice announcing their presence.

But does he have to be such a damn sexist about it? He was led out the back door to the scene of the fight by Carrie Ann. When he tells everyone it’s Wade, Stella literally has her hand on his shoulder. “Gentlemen” is what they get in response? “Ladies and gentlemen” and people of every gender identity deserve to know they are in the presence of Wade Garrett when this is in fact so. If Cody has the time to spill the tea on Doc and Brad Wesley, he can throw in a few extra syllables for the sake of inclusivity. They deserve it. Wade deserves it.

MOUNTAIN: Are you gonna fight, dickless?

WADE GARRETT: I sure ain’t gonna show you my dick.

MIKE NELSON, RIFFTRAX: I don’t think that was even on the table! I…It wasn’t one of the options!

This brief exchange between Mountain (Tiny Ron) and Wade Garrett (Sam Elliott), and the response to it by Michael J. Nelson (Mystery Science Theater 3000), can’t be improved upon. In two lines you have all the hallmarks of Road House‘s bad-good writing style: hostility so severe it reads as a non sequitur, pointlessly escalated profanity, disconnected logic, attempted aphorisms that have never before or since been uttered by human beings. This exchange is Road House.

But to boil it down to dialogue is to miss what makes it even more Road House. Immediately after telling Mountain he is not going to show him his penis, Wade Garrett punches Mountain, you guessed it, right in the nuts. He then kicks him hard in his right knee, sending the giant tumbling to the ground with an oddly subdued “Oh, shit!””Goddamn, that hurts, dudn’t it?” Wade asks rhetorically, smirking while running his hand back over his hair. He’s not going to prove he isn’t dickless, but he’s sure as hell gonna make Mountain wish he was.

But wait, there’s more! Remember earlier in the film when Dalton told Jack “Gimme the biggest guy in the world: You smash his knee, he’ll drop like a stone?” QE motherfucking D.

So: needless profanity, needless hostility, gibberish idiom, illogic, dick joke, violence, cooler technique. Truly, this moment has it all.

DALTON: I want you to be nice…until it’s time to not be nice.

YOUNGER: Well, how are we supposed to know when that is?

DALTON: You won’t. I’ll let you know. You are the bouncers. I am the cooler. All you have to do is watch my back—and each other’s…Take out the trash.

Submitted for your approval: O’Connor, beaten senseless by Wade Garrett, collapsing unconscious into a dumpster full of garbage. Essentially literally, Wade and Dalton watched each other’s backs and took out the trash. No more evidence of the efficacy of the Dalton Path’s Three Simple Rules need be presented. Everything is proceeding as he has foreseen.

When Wade Garrett walks—actually it’s more of a mosey/saunter hybrid—through the back door of the Double Deuce, he’s greeted by quite a scene. On a concrete loading area surrounded by smashed cases of liquor, he finds two large men holding Dalton still so a third large man can pound his stomach like a punching bag with intestines inside, overseen by the largest (and at this point bloodiest) man of all. “How’s it goin’, mijo?” he asks with characteristic cool. Then Morgan, the fellow doing the punching, turns to him and absolutely snarls “MIND YOUR OWN BUSINESS, DAD!”

As my partner Julia Gfrörer once put it, “You know he’s been working up to that line for a few decades.”

That really is the only way to interpret the ferocious hostility with which Morgan imbues that paternal sobriquet, and the alacrity with which he selects it as the proper label for the older gentleman who’s just made his presence known to him. Hearing “Dad” used as an insult by a teenager is one thing, like “What are you, my dad?” when a friend objects to you trying to huff Pequa drain opener or something. From an adult, to another slightly but not really significantly older adult, it’s just…well, it raises certain questions, is what it does.

For the record, actor Terry Funk is actually a month older than actor Sam Elliott; they were both born in the summer of 1944, Terry on June 30, Sam on August 9. Perhaps, then, Dadness is merely a state of mind. A miscreant like Morgan would naturally chafe at the suggestion of supervision, as indeed he did when Dalton fired him. And a cooler like Wade Garrett, whatever his aversion to living a normal rule-bound life might be, sometimes needs must embrace his role as the enforcer, the stickler, the cooler head that must prevail. The kind of people who tell dads to mind their own business? They are his business. Morgan will soon learn this, to his dismay.

People have been placed on FBI watchlists for less than the way Frank Tilghman greets Wade Garrett upon the aging cooler’s entrance into the Double Deuce. “I know you,” he says, wielding the words like a tongue across Wade’s stubble, like Ramsay Bolton bidding farewell to Sansa Stark before she feeds him to his own dogs, like a flea leaping from a rat to the roughspun tunic of a fourteenth-century European peasant. If I were Wade Garrett I’d have turned around, gotten on my motorcycle, and driven right back to the topless joint with the “DON’T EAT THE BIG WHITE MINT” sign above the urinal. Fortunately for Dalton (busy getting pounded into hamburger out back) and Tilghman (Cui bono) and unfortunately for Wade Garrett himself (“IT WAS TAILS”), Wade Garrett is a braver man than I. He decides that helping his mijo out of a jam is worth braving whatever Gary Heidnik chamber of horrors Tilghman has hidden in the Double Deuce’s expensive redesign and heads to the service entrance to whip the shit out of some goons, and the rest is Road History.

What this makes me wonder, as did Tilghman’s thoroughly sinister introduction of himself to Dalton way back at the beginning of the film a couple hundred days ago, is how many coolers Tilghman went through before finding people who could stand to look and listen to him long enough even to entertain an offer. Maybe at some other bar in New York there’s some other NYU-graduate warrior-poet with some other grizzled graybeard of a mentor, who took one look at the corpse rictus Tilghman calls a smile and had him ejected from the premises immediately. Los Angeles, Chicago, New Orleans, who knows, there could be master-and-apprentice pairs of coolers scattered across these United States, all of whom told Tilghman “My eyes are up here, pal” and then sent him on his creepy way.

As with so much about Tilghman, we’ll never know the rest of the story. Perhaps that’s for the best. In elementary school my gifted class went to see an assembly on UFO encounters in which the speaker wondered if the sudden movements and disappearances attributed to alien spacecraft were not unlike what our own trips to the grocery store must read like to our housepets: We know where we went, but they don’t. I’ve seen this basic phenomenon described also with the metaphor of trying to describe a fork stuck through a paper plate from the perspective of one who can only see the tines poking out of one side, not the whole fork jammed into the other, let alone the human being holding it on the other. Tilghman is as Tilghman does, and any speculation as to what else he might be and do beyond the four walls of this movie must remain speculation. Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen; whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

I kid, I kid the goons, and why not—they’re constantly getting their asses kicked. But look at our man Mountain here. Mountain knows that he and his comrades-in-arms have been sent to the Double Deuce with a very specific mission: Stop any and all liquor shipments. Mountain does not abandon this mission the moment Dalton throws hands. No, Mountain picks up a case of Tia Maria, throws it to the ground, turns, picks up a second case of Tia Maria, and throws it to the ground. Then and only then, after Dalton has rung the bells of Morgan and Tinker and O’Connor singlehandedly, does he turn his attention to Dalton.

Granted, once you’ve see what happens to him when he does attack Dalton—he lifts him clean off the ground in a bear hug, only to have his face bashed in by a pair of reverse headbutts—you’ll start wondering if maybe there wasn’t a third case of Tia Maria that wanted smashing. And if you pay close attention you’ll notice that by decking Morgan right into the back of the truck, toppling pretty much every remaining case of booze it contains, Dalton himself did more damage to the shipment than Mountain. But I’d consider that last bit a loss leader. Better to lose a few bottles in the process of leveling men who’d present a constant threat than to spare them but also spare the saboteurs. To flip that logic around, perhaps Mountain should have worried about the cooler first and the wine coolers second.

Be that as it may. Brad Wesley so rarely gets his money’s worth out of his “boys,” not that this dissuades him from sending the same clowns out to get got over and over again. This is Mountain’s one and only mission, and I think he acquits himself admirably, to a point. A good goon is hard to find, and he would have been a good goon, if it had been somebody there to beat the shit out of him and his buddies every minute of his life.

Look at this beautiful shot of Wade Garrett and Dalton, embracing after a long separation. The late afternoon light gleaming off Wade’s silver hair and hugging the sculpted contours of Dalton’s grinning face. Smiles as wide as the day is long. Each with one approving hand on the other’s shoulders, their other hands clasped in merry meeting.

From the looks of them you’d never know they just beat four men unconscious.

But that is the Dalton Path, that is the Way of Wade Garrett, that is the tao of all coolers. The Time to Not Be Nice passed when their last enemy collapsed to the ground in a bloody heap. The Time to Be Nice has come, and they welcome this as readily and naturally as they responded to an attack with superior force of their own.

A crowd of Double Deuce employees has gathered at this point, to gaze in wide-eyed wonder on these two knights errant, these sworn swords, and on those they cut down. To walk the Dalton Path, a gray ribbon that runs to either horizon, the lines on the road alternating streaks of white and red.

Irony is a valuable weapon in the arsenal of any cooler. Take Dalton, for example. When Tinker, O’Connor, Mountain, and Morgan roll up and force the liquor delivery guy to stop wheeling out crates of booze—”This bar is closed for business!” booms the Bleeder, proud to pick a fight he can win for once—Dalton hits them with all the faux-graciousness he can muster. “Can I buy you guys a drink?” he asks, expecting the answer no. Morgan, who has clearly been spoiling for a tantrum ever since Dalton gave him the boot, responds by petulantly smashing a bottle on the ground. “Guess not,” Dalton replies, and the fight is joined.

Both Morgan’s toddler destructiveness and the savagery of Dalton’s initial fusillade against his assailants—he makes mincemeat out of all of them until Morgan smashes a bottle against his head rather than the ground—go to show how much energy and emotion can be hidden under the veil of wordplay. The fig leaf of sarcasm allows a man to interact with other men despite the fact that they will soon attempt to beat one another unconscious with their bare hands, wound each other with shattering glass, and generally wreak havoc on one another’s bodies until one side or the other is unable to do any further damage. “Can I buy you guys a drink?” is one last sardonic attempt to conceal violence beneath civilization’s veneer, but the eternal struggle between cooler and goon cannot be contained forever.

Here come the goons again
Pounding on my head like a memory
Pounding on my head like a new emotion
I want a shirt with an open chest
I want to talk like bleeders do
I want to dive clear of your boot knife
Do you bleed too much too?

O’Connor talk to me
Like bleeders do
Walk with me
Like bleeders do
Talk to me
Like bleeders do

Here come the goons again
Kick me in my head like a tragedy
Tearing out my throat like a new emotion
I want to bleed in the open wind
I want to kiss like coolers do
I want to dive clear of your knife boot
Do you bleed too much too?

O’Connor talk to me
Like bleeders do
Walk with me
Like bleeders do
Talk to me
Like bleeders do

Ooooooh
Ooooooh yeah
Here they come again
Ooooooh
Hey hey hey hey hey hey hey

Here come the goons again
Pounding on my head like a memory
Pounding on my head like a new emotion
(Here they again, here they comes again)
I want a shirt with an open chest
I want to talk like bleeders do
I want dive clear of your boot knife
Do you bleed too much too?

Wade Garrett is not the only miscreant to grace the dirt lot of the Double Deuce with his presence on this fateful day. Right behind him apparently—I wonder if they were stopped behind him at a stoplight at some point, not realizing what was to come—is a pickup truck full of Brad Wesleyans. There’s O’Connor and Tinker of course, who I guess haven’t gotten their asses kicked recently enough and need that sweet chin music. There’s Mountain, the gigantically tall guy last seen cavorting poolside at Wesley’s mansion; he’ll accomplish approximately that much in the fight that ensues.

Finally, there’s Morgan, the inveterate hothead tough guy played by wrestling god Terry Funk, returning to the Double Deuce for the first time since he collected his severance and was told to consider barber college and pronounced Dalton “a dead man.” (He too was last seen cavorting poolside, with his pants around his ankles no less, but he acquits himself a bit better than his towering counterpart.) You’ll recall him scoffing at the idea that Dalton has “balls big enough to come in a dump truck”; I don’t know if irony is the right word for him being a goon big enough to come in a pickup truck, but there’s something there. I dunno, we’ll workshop it.

Anyway the highlight of the moment isn’t the hero shot of all four goons rolling deep towards Dalton as he stands at the service entrance, supervising the delivery of liquor from a distributor he apparently convinced to run Wesley’s blockade. It’s Dalton’s reaction to said goons.

No confident smile this time. No squaring up, either. He looks at them through sun-squinted eyes, his shoulders rise as he inhales deeply, and then he just…sighs, silently. If you ran his body language through Google Translate you’d get Welp, here we go again, I guess.

It’s the most noncommittal thing he does in the whole film, which otherwise invests his every word and deed with energy and purpose. All his energy and purpose is directed elsewhere at the moment—at Doc, his lover, whose scent probably lingers on his body, and at Wade Garrett, his mentor, whom he called to take care of this whole liquor-blockade thing. These clowns? He’ll fight them, sure, but only because they leave him no choice. He’d just as soon they turn around and drive away. There’s only one way this is gonna end, and until then it’s just workaday drudgery. Sigh. Okay, fellas, whose face do I break first.

“Hither came Wade, the Garrett, gray-haired, stubble-chinned, beer in hand, a sage, a bouncer, a cooler, with gigantic mirth and additional gigantic mirth, to tread the Double Douches of the Earth under his exposed happy trail.”

Gossip is a cruel mistress. Here’s Dalton, jauntily strutting into the Double Deuce for another night’s work at what has become the ideal bar. He knows his pal Wade Garrett is on the way (though of that day and hour knoweth no man). He’s just had a night of romance with Dr. Elizabeth Clay. Here he thinks he’s just sitting down for the usual chit-chat with Cody. But Cody keeps his ears to the ground in addition to those white-hot blues licks, and he feels obligated to inform his friend that Brad Wesley had a thing for the Doc once upon a time too.

Here’s how he puts it: “As I hear it, she left town and he went nuts. Heh. Small town, huh, Dalton? ‘Course, that’s just the word.” Hitchcock himself couldn’t have conceived of a crueler and more confounding open ending than that final sentence. Now instead of clearing things up for his pal, Cody has muddied them further. How can he discover for certain what the truth is?

Well, by asking Elizabeth directly, that’s how. Knowing Dalton, that’s something he’s unlikely to do. He keeps himself buttoned up, allowing others in when necessary and desirable, keeping other problems at arms’ length unless and until they make themselves impossible to ignore. A man like that would go right on ignoring his girlfriend’s failed marriage to his nemesis unless pushed—pushed, perhaps, by a friend who phrases his revelation of this information in a deliberately ambiguous way, so as to force his buddy’s hand and force him to address uncomfortable truths rather than letting them fester. A good friend, in other words.

Fortunately for Dalton, Wesley almost immediately starts attempting to kill all of his friends and associates, so the motion is tabled. There’ll be time enough for rehashing the past after a bunch of old men shoot Brad Wesley to death.

(previously)

Ernie straightening up behind the bar. Carrie Ann lighting a cigarette. Hank sipping his coffee. Whatsername the German schoolgirl–looking waitress wiping down a table. And Dalton, smoke in his mouth, fresh from a day working out and helping Emmett and a night of love with Dr. Elizabeth Clay, doffing his jacket as he arrives for a night’s work, greeted with a “Hey, doll!” and a “There he is!” from his admiring underlings. This is the Double Deuce as it was always meant to be: safe, familial, professional, with a lot of matching reds.

But it is not yet the Double Deuce at its absolute finest. That will require the arrival of another cooler, older, slyer, more powerful, subtle and not quick to anger. It will require us, at long last, to walk the Way of Wade Garrett. Between now and then Dalton will receive very bad news and a very bad beating. It is as if the universe itself cries out, “Not yet, Dalton. Not yet.”

Dalton is in a Western whether he wants it or not. That’s the message sent to him by Dr. Elizabeth Clay, who greets him as they meet up for a late-night rendezvous by saying “I hear you’re the new marshal in town.” “You heard wrong,” he response perfunctorily; he’s said “Opinions vary” with more force. I think that after the decision to not be nice to Brad Wesley, to treat it as personal rather than a job with Brad Wesley, Dalton is still struggling with that decision. The enormity of it pains him, as life changes forced upon us by circumstance often do. He can live with threats, obviously; that’s the nature of his job. But the meaning of the threats, the rationale behind them, his culpability in soliciting them by doing what he’s doing regarding Wesley—all of that is new, and hard to swallow. As late as their post-coital pillow talk several minutes or hours or whatever later he’s still talking about moving on, getting out of Jasper, finding a new adventure. He’s talking about it to Elizabeth, no less, whom he’s just bedded down (or rather bedded up). She’s the one who asks then, just like she’s the one who brings up the idea that he’s a lawman taming the Wild West, thwarting outlaws and bandits one barfight at a time, now. She additionally notes that his body will give out early at the rate he’s going through injuries, inflicted and sustained. She recognizes the tension at work in Dalton: His instinctual pursuit of justice and order and his determination to be a man bound by no law or order stand at odds. She, like he, is content to fuck away the difference for the time being. It’s amazing, the balm that a little pleasure can be in a life that’s fundamentally unsustainable.

“Work ain’t work when you’re having fun.” By Jimmy’s own definition, then, his bit of late-night = espionage outside the Double Deuce, where he and Ketchum catch Dalton and the Doc meeting up, isn’t work. The two men are having an absolute blast discovering that their boss Brad Wesley’s ex-wife is dating his new-in-town nemesis.

“Uh-oh…” says Ketchum wryly as they take it all in.

Jimmy chuckles, rears his head back slightly, and says “Dig a hole.”

The two men then chortle and guffaw at the prospect that one or more of the people they’re spying on will be slain and buried in an unmarked grave for the crime of being an item. It’s all in the way you tell it, I guess.

It’s a noteworthy moment for several reasons. First, it’s one of the few chances we have to see goons goon it up all on their own: no one to intimidate, no one to suck up to, just two peers enjoying their job together. We’ve seen how different Dalton feels under similar circumstances, chatting with old friends like Cody and Wade Garrett. We’ll see a bit more of it among the goons near the end of the film, when Pat, Morgan, and Tinker take a few moments to discuss a young woman of their acquaintance, before Dalton assaults the mansion they’re guarding and murders most of them. The same principle applies here. Left to their own devices, out from under the watchful eyes of either Dalton or Wesley, they’re good-time Charlies. In actor Marshall Teague’s full-throated rumble, “Dig a hole” may as well be “Laissez les bon temps rouler.”

Second, we get a glimpse of how they see their own boss through this instinctual, jocular reaction to what they’re observing. They don’t say “Uh-oh, I wonder what the boss is gonna say,” or even “Uh-oh, the boss is gonna be pissed.” They jump straight to “Uh-oh, it’s murderin’ time.” When they see Brad Wesley’s ex with another man, they just assume that someone’s gonna die for it, presumably at their hands or the hands of their fellow goons. It’s just how things are done here in Jasper. This off-hand wise-aleck remark reveals as much about life under Brad Wesley as Karpis tossing Red Webster’s store or the whiskey getting cut off at the Double Deuce. More, perhaps.

Third, see the eyelines in that image above? Jimmy and Ketchum are looking downwards from the front seat of their vehicle to spy on Dalton and the Doc. That’s because their vehicle is a monster truck.

Admittedly, such a vehicle presents certain advantages on a reconnaissance mission, providing mobile high ground from which to observe the surroundings. On the other hand, and see if you follow me here, they drove a fucking monster truck to a stakeout. 

They’re in the same goddamn parking lot, no less! It’s not like they could be inconspicuous if they wanted to, but they’re not even trying to hide it.

Why do neither Dalton nor Elizabeth notice the professional killers staring at them and yukking it up while perched some ten feet in the air in a comically massive motor vehicle? Maybe all that smoke blurred Dalton’s vision. Maybe his cooler-sense fails him when he’s horned up. Maybe there are enough monster trucks tooling around the streets of Jasper that Dalton would have no reason to believe this is the one driven by the guy who tried to kick him to death. Maybe—and again, stay with me here—it’s an extremely goofy movie. It’s a matter of opinion, I suppose, and you know what they say about opinions. Just remember, “Dig a hole” is not an opinion. As far as Jimmy’s concerned, it’s a spoiler.

What you’re seeing here is the look on Dalton’s face just after he staggers out of the smoky Double Deuce and finds Dr. Elizabeth Clay waiting for him, and the look on Dr. Elizabeth Clay’s face as she looks back at him while leaning back against her car one frame later. I don’t think you need to be an expert analyst of body language or facial expressions or human mating rituals to figure out what’s going on here, and what will be going on shortly hereafter. The Doc is about to get lucky, and Dalton feels lucky about it. That’s predictable enough: They’re both right, as it happens. But how it happens—ah, friends and neighbors, there’s the rub. (The rub against a rock wall, specifically.) It will be absurd, romantic, laughable, red hot, impersonal, extremely personal, erotic, uncomfortable, uncomfortably erotic, erotically uncomfortable, giddy, bold, slightly impractical, intensely physical, eminently watchable. It will be, in short, the Road House of sex scenes. It could be nothing else.