There are two pool tables in the Double Deuce. There are two pool tables in Wade Garrett’s topless bar. There are two pool tables in Brad Wesley’s foyer. Yes, it seems like you can’t swing an uprooted stop sign in this movie without hitting one of every location’s two matching pool tables.

You have to respect the preparedness here, particularly on the part of Brad Wesley. Frank Tilghman and the unseen owner of the strip club might reasonably expect that patrons looking to unwind with a game of skill and chance might want to play pool in numbers sufficient to require parallel pool tables.

Wesley, though? That’s his home. His home! In his foyer where his mistress jazzercises, and his goons come to escort his nemesis. His home. The man has pool parties yes, but of an entirely different variety. And to go back to The Godfather, I can’t figure out a secondary meaning to their presence. Ceci n’est pas une orange.

Yet there they stand, the Jasper Argonath, the Pillars of the Fotomat Kings. They let all who pass between them know they have entered the realm the giver of gifts, the bestower of levity and liquor, the gamesmaster, building his parody of the recreations of every day folk, a grotesque satire, now perfected, the uruk-hai of billiards. Hither came Wesley, gray-haired, sullen-eyed, cigar in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the JC Penneys of the Earth under his sandalled feet.