When Ketchum and the boys from the Tuesday night Good Book, Good Burgers combination Bible study & barbecue men’s meeting show up to kick-stab Dalton in the skull for the crime of firing Brad Wesley’s nephew and then beating him and his buddies up after they attempt to stab Dalton in the face and torso over it, Dalton is ready. Arrayed Avengers-style, he and the other bouncers tell the new visitors that the Double Deuce is closed. You’ve got to get up pretty early in the morning to fool Ketchum, however, who notes that the bar is full of people and demands to know what they’re doing. Dalton merely points out the obvious, which is that they’re “drinking and having a good time.”

“Well, that’s why we’re here,” says Ketchum, grinning, before whipping his leg straight up in the air to enziguri Dalton…with extreme prejudice. 

Alas for the goon! Dalton is quicker of reflex than his assailant, which he demonstrates by catching Ketchum’s leg in midair. But he is also quicker of wit, which he demonstrates with a first-ballot Hall of Fame Road House one-liner: “You’re too stupid to have a good time!”

Dalton proceeds to QED Ketchum’s ass by dragging him into the parking lot and whipping him and his buddies but good. All is well, one would think.

But one would be wrong. Just over two weeks into this project we discussed The Shirtless Man. Much like the Green Man, the woodwose, or Dionysian mystery cults, this figure of fertility and abandon is, along with his demonic/cthonic opposite number Morgan, our introduction to the world of the Double Deuce. I won’t insult your intelligence by belaboring a point you can grasp with your own two eyes immediately: The Shirtless Man is extremely stupid, and he’s having the time of his life. Indeed much of the clientele of the bar when Dalton arrives to work there—the very same people Dalton is intent upon clearing out—are both as dumb as pillowcase full of doorknobs and as happy as pigs in shit. There’s no other way to put it: Dalton is wrong.

But in this rare instance, Dalton’s maxim reflects the world not as it is, but as he is determined to make it be. His task here is not to fix something broken according to the ways of the Dalton Path, but to break something intact so that the Dalton Path may proceed. He is changing the pig himself this time, creating the conditions under which “You’re too stupid to have a good time” is true. The Three Simple Rules, “Pain don’t hurt,” and the like are matters of observation; “You’re too stupid to have a good time” is a matter of application.

In short, we have reached the start of the Dalton Path’s rockiest stretch, and we will see Dalton pushed to the breaking point as a result before he emerges stronger on the other side. We are privy to a great becoming.

The very first people to give Dalton shit upon his arrival in Jasper aren’t Brad Wesley and his goons. They aren’t the corrupt members of the Double Deuce’s staff. They aren’t even Knife Nerds or other random ne’er-do-wells among the club’s clientele. They’re a biker gang, in the Double Deuce’s parking lot. “Mer-SAY-dees!” they whoop it up as Dalton parks his luxury work of German engineering in the unpaved unloading zone for the town’s worst element, glaring at him all the while. “Hey hotshot! What’s wrong with Dee-troit cars?” Dalton simply stares back at them and their bikes and their very cool ’80s bad-guy car, tosses away his cigarette, and goes about his business. You and I are left with more to ponder.

At first blush it’s just a bit of color, a way to convey that the Double Deuce is a rough and tumble environment before you so much as step through the doors, in the same way that watching Morgan the evil bouncer toss a guy through those doors a few seconds later (“Don’t come back, peckerhead!”) lets you know what you’re in for once you set foot inside. What makes it a uniquely Road House bit of color how none of it has the slightest relevance at any point in the future, and how no element of it is ever heard from again.

Are biker gangs a threat Dalton will face in his quest to clean up the Double Deuce, and eventually the entire town of Jasper? No. Not even a little bit, in fact. The problems all stem from Brad Wesley, the Fotomat King, and his merry band of assholes. This is Road House, not The Road Warrior. Though Dalton and Brad Wesley could well be the Mad Max and Lord Humungus of the post-guzzoline Missouri wastelands should it come to that, this is merely informed speculation.

Is there a slobs vs. snobs angle to the movie? Again, no. For one thing Dalton always stows away his fancy car and uses a ringer instead once he starts working, so he doesn’t even bring the Mercedes back to the Double Deuce, or anywhere else for that matter, until the end of the film. He doesn’t ostentatiously spend his money, or wow the local yokels with his citified ways, or even crow about his NYU philosophy degree to woo Dr. Elizabeth Clay. What’s wrong with Dee-troit cars? Nothing, as far as he’s concerned. (This is a question better directed at Brad Wesley.)

Maybe these guys play a role in the ensuing all-hands-on-deck barfight, the movie’s first? Once again, no. The instigators and all the primary combatants are just the usual drunken shitbirds and meatheads. While it is true that one of the bikers miraculously appears inside as the Shirtless Man about twenty seconds later, this is down to Road House‘s charmingly free-form approach to continuity, rather than the idea that this guy somehow raced around to a back entrance, bared his chest, and started boogying down in the time it took Dalton to cross the parking lot and enter from the front. The Shirtless Man, at any rate, is a dancer, not a fighter.

But in their own pointless way, the bikers illustrate the importance of Dalton’s First Rule: “Never underestimate your opponent. Expect the unexpected.” Your enemies could look like anyone, come from anywhere, and attack at any time, even if their offense consists solely of “Buy American” jingoism. A cooler of Dalton’s experience and skill would have devised a plan for combatting these creeps within seconds, and likely kept it filed away throughout the course of the film, in case Brad Wesley ever hired them to run his clunker off the road, or prevent him from accessing one of Jasper’s many auto and auto-parts dealerships—or, less facetiously, bring the fight to grizzled old road dog Wade Garrett before he so much as parks his motorcycle. Indeed, one could argue that Dalton’s purchase of a beat-up car to replace his Mercedes was his way of defeating these opponents by depriving them of their casus belli. Victory is his before battle is joined.

A key piece of the ambience during our introduction to the Double Deuce, the Shirtless Man is an unsung hero of Road House. He’s on screen in the shot that immediately follows the “DIRECTED BY ROWDY HERRINGTON” chyron, shown over the exterior of the Double Deuce as Dalton enters for the first time. This means he’s a tone-setter both in-story and on a meta level. In the Road House world, he is implicitly Dalton’s introduction to the place he’ll be working in, and an indication of the kind of place this is. In the audience, he is implicitly crucial to director Rowdy Herrington’s vision, and an indication of the kind of movie this is.

This pans out in both respects. It’s true that the Shirtless Man does not participate directly in any violence; in the massive, bar-destroying brawl that begins a few minutes after we first see him he’s a non-factor. He’s just a huge blond musclebound cornfed doofus, dancing his ass off to the musical stylings of the Jeff Healey Band. Picture the way Rocky rocks out to Meat Loaf singing “Hot Patootie – Bless My Soul” in The Rocky Horror Picture Show and you’ve got a good handle on his overall affect (and talent as a dancer).

But I think of the Shirtless Man often later in the film, when Dalton institutes his clean-up regime to turn the Double Deuce into a place decent people will want to visit. We’ve discussed some of the personnel changes he makes already. The other problem, as he sees it? The thing that’s keeping “people who really wanna have a good time” away? “Too many 40-year-old adolescents, felons, power drinkers, and trustees of modern chemistry.” It’s unclear into which category the Shirtless Man falls, but it’s almost certainly at least one, if not more.

Sadly, the new and improved Double Deuce has no room for men this brazenly bare-chested. There’s a time and a place for shirtlessness, and it’s on the shore of the lake, doing tai chi. The next time we see the Shirtless Man is on Dalton’s first real night of work there; what he’s wearing wouldn’t pass a high school dress code, but it certainly qualifies as a shirt. After that things really turn around and we never see him again.

Yet his ebullient presence at this stage in the film points out a rare flaw in Dalton’s reasoning. Later in the movie, when Brad Wesley’s knife specialist Ketchum (please note that he is never named in the film, unlike all the other prominent goons who make it to the end, which is a part of why he’s impossible to remember) arrives to rough the place up, Dalton says the place is closed, despite all the people “drinking and having a good time.” Ketchum says that’s why he and his henchmen are there too, and promptly tries to kick-stab Dalton’s head with a high kick from his boot-mounted knife. Dalton doges the kick, catches his leg in mid-air, and bellows “You’re too stupid to have a good time!”

The emotional logic of the fight that follows puts Dalton in the right; he and the bouncers defeat Ketchum and his fellow goons, with a late-arriving Doc looking on. But he didn’t factor the Shirtless Man into his calculations, did he? That big towheaded slide of beef is most likely stupid, and is very clearly having a good time when we see him. You can push him and his kind out to make room for people who don’t violate the basic tenets of entrance into a 7-Eleven, yes, but you can’t erase his existence. Dalton may deny it, but if Road House teaches us anything, it’s that stupidity and good times often go hand in hand, and the Shirtless Man is living proof. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy degree from NYU.