You don’t become the best damn cooler in the business without making a few enemies. For Dalton, this is literally true: If he hadn’t made a few enemies, he’d still be the second-best damn cooler in the business, no matter what Frank Tilghman might call him. It took a gaggle of goons to take his mentor Wade Garrett out of the running and leave Dalton with the top spot.

Could it have gone down any differently? Let’s say Frank Tilghman got over his ageism and hired Wade rather than Dalton, even though he was getting old. Would Wade have wound up in a war with Brad Wesley, one that required bringing in his old pal Dalton to win?

It’s easy to see Wade taking control of the Double Deuce, winning over the staff and clientele alike with his grizzled charm. It’s easy to see him coming out on top in a few fights, against goons who’d underestimate him until he taught them who he was the hard way.

But it’s more difficult to imagine him getting attached to Jasper, or tied down by its chief resident, Dr. Elizabeth Clay, enough to go to the mattresses over it all. Sure, he’s fond of the Doc’s “attitudes,” so to speak, but…well, the Doc would be okay if Wade Garrett took a powder. At least that’s what he’d tell himself. And certainly the likes of Red Webster and Pete Strodenmire are big boys who can take care of themselves.

But I like to think that if the situation were reversed, and Wade Garrett were forced to call in his friend Dalton to help him clean up the Double Deuce with the same unfortunate results, Wade would understand his protégé’s convictions. Would he stand by and let Brad Wesley’s murder of his mijo go unavenged? I think we can glean the answer from the fact that he showed up and stuck around in the first place.

Wade Garrett may not have meant to teach love to Dalton, but Dalton learned it from the old man nonetheless. He learned it from his love for Wade Garrett—and as Wade says, Dalton taught him as much as he taught Dalton. May we all learn their lessons. For all that cooling is a cold business, it does not go untouched by the heat of anger, or the warmth of love.

The idea comes to him fast, and he acts on it just as suddenly. There’s a knife sticking out of the chest of his mentor and best friend. The knife has to come out at some point. Perhaps it’s best, perhaps it’s right, that he remove the knife himself, that he wield that knife against the perpetrators of this horrible crime. So he steels himself. He breathes deep and exhales through his closed lips. He puts his hand on the hilt. He shifts his gaze from the knife to the face of his slain friend and back again. All the while he grips and pulls, pulls, pulls. The camera cuts away as if to spare us the intimate sight of Dalton pulling the penetrator out of the body of Wade Garrett, the most famous bouncer in all of Christendom, the man who made him the man he is today. All we see is the thin trickle of blood that flows over Wade Garrett’s rose tattoo. In interviews it is canon-established that Rose was the name of the woman who gave him his favorite scar, on his hip, inches from his pubis. A permanent tribute to the glory of sex, stained in this final hour by the plain fact of violence. This is the end of the road for Wade Garrett, but the knife that pierced him will plunge into another body before the day is done. To Dalton, that much is clear.

I sometimes think of Road House as a sublime movie, and that’s not an adjective I throw around for movies that often. For me it’s reserved for films that transport me into a place of tangible, physical awe—the equivalent of musical frisson, that chill you get up and down your spine and through your skull from art that stuns you. If you know me at all it won’t surprise you to learn that I get this feeling most often from horror films. I think Jaws is sublime. I think The Exorcist is sublime. I think The Shining is sublime. I think Aliens is sublime. I think Hereditary is sublime. I think Barton Fink is sublime. You get the idea. So you get that Road House does not transport me the way any of those movies do.

Why is Road House sublime? Because sandwiched in between two identical parking scenes and a scene in which two lovers confront one another over matters of life and death in front of a bunch of x-rays of people’s colons, Patrick Swayze looks at Sam Elliot like he does above and below. First: total love, respect, humility—he is admitting he was wrong after all—and above all gratitude that he gets to know this man. Then: total loss, grief, anger, denial, anything but acceptance that this man who meant so much to him is gone.

The word I use to describe Patrick Swayze as an actor is generous. He gave himself over to this absurd role in this absurd film, used every ounce of his training as an actor and a professional-grade stuntman and a professional-grade ballet dancer. Every interview I’ve ever seen with Kelly Lynch or Marshall Teague or Sam Elliott in which they’re asked about this film is full of superlatives of how dedicated he was, and how kind he was, and how the experience of working with him was…well, they don’t say it, but I will: sublime.

Parking, acting, colons, parking, more acting, acting like his life has fallen apart, like the person he loves most in the world has been stolen from him. His eyes squint with tears and she shakes his head wildly back and forth, moving his whole upper body at one point, his whole self one gigantic No. Some of the dumbest filmmaking I’ve ever seen, and then this. Sublime.

“Sit the fuck down, have a beer, I’ll be back,” Dalton said to Wade just before departing to find Elizabeth. “Wesley wins, man. We’re outta here.” It’s then that Wade shoots him the “Attaboy, mijo” he will no doubt return to in his mind for years, even decades, to come. They’re just two men being men, swearing when it isn’t necessary, patting each other on the back. It’s who they are, even when one of them has been beaten half to death.

Dalton attempts to return to this pattern of dialogue when he comes back to the Double Deuce after his failure with the Doc. “Yo! Wake the fuck up! We’re outta here!” he says from across the room, smiling. This has alway struck me as the one genuinely superfluous f-bomb in the whole profane film. “Wake the fuck up” right away, without even a normal “wake up” first? It feels forced.

And it probably is. After all, in the guise of going along with his mentor’s wishes, Dalton is admitting to two massive failures: first, his failure to free the town of Jasper from Brad Wesley’s clutches, and second, his failure to convince Elizabeth to retreat alongside him. A nice blustery “fuck” where no “fuck” need be will paper over all of that just fine—indeed, it’s probably necessary to offset the repetition of “we’re outta here” from their previous conversation. Getting “outta here” is an admission of defeat, and that needs amelioration. The little friendly punch to the back Dalton gives Wade afterwards is of a piece with the cussword. Just guys bein’ dudes.

It falls apart quickly, though. “I said ‘one beer,’ señor,” Dalton says, still grinning, as he puts his hand on Wade’s arm to shake him awake. But there will be no awakening Wade Garrett, not now, not ever again.

No sooner does Brad Wesley hang up on Dalton than Wade Garrett stumbles into the Double Deuce, wounded and winded. He’s not dead, not yet anyway, and it’s unclear whether the beating he says he sustained at the hands of three unnamed goons—none of which are members of the core team, who we will soon get a good look at and none of whom are injured in the slightest—is part of the coin-toss murder scheme Wesley just unveiled. Dalton certainly thinks it is, though: Since Wade isn’t dead, it stands to reason that Elizabeth is in grave danger, and indeed Wade says his assailants told him he was lucky. Dalton bounces out of there as quickly as he can, but not before telling Wade that Wesley wins, that they’re all going to skip town. “Attaboy, mijo,” Wade says, grinning. It’s the last thing Wade will ever say to him.

My own mentor, Tom Spurgeon, died this week. He was too young to go. The last thing he said to me was “Your writing is important to me!” So I can say, based on personal experience, that that “Attaboy, mijo” will lodge itself in Dalton’s heart. It’s there to stay.

What’s the most you ever lost on a coin toss? This is not an idle question pretty much any time it gets asked. It’s certainly not for Dalton. Upon arriving at the Double Deuce to tender his resignation, he is greeted by a phone call from Brad Wesley. “Top o’ the mornin’ to ya!” the deranged JC Penney franchisee says, before telling Dalton “what’s on for today”: “Wade, or Elizabeth…one of them dies.” Dalton has no response but to tell Wesley “you’re a sick man,” his voice echoing Morgan telling him “you’re a dead man” lo those many moons ago. So, in the absence of Dalton expressing a preference, Brad Wesley flips a coin. He looks at the result, gets back on the phone, and says “Dalton, I’d sure like to tell you how it turned out.”

This is how it turned out:

It’s hard to see what with the corpse of Wade Garrett obscuring it, but there’s a point I’m making here: At no time during or after their conversation does Brad Wesley say anything like “Heads for Elizabeth, tails for Wade.” He doesn’t even list them in that order! The information in the note above is a point of interest, I suppose, but since Dalton was given no frame of reference for the coin toss it might as well say “It was heads” or “It was Option C” or the text of the Gettysburg Address. The point of a supervillain coin toss is to tell you what the options are and then let the coin fall where it may, not to do all of this in secrecy and only reveal the results when they mean nothing to the person to whom you’re revealing them.

Unless you’re the supervillain in Road House, in which case all bets are off. Brad Wesley didn’t bring the Fotomat here by playing by your rules.

Dalton is dripping with sweat when Wade Garrett visits to confront him. Dalton is perfectly dry when Dr. Elizabeth Clay visits to confront him a few hours later. This raises questions, considering that he’s wearing (or not wearing) the exact same thing in both scenes. Does his hair naturally revert to a feathered mullet pompadour when dry? Did he let his body air-dry naturally? Did he shower, and then put back on the same pants? Where does he shower, anyway? There’s no bathroom visible in his barn loft. Does he hose himself off in the nude for bathing purposes, and use some unseen outhouse for his bathroom needs generally?

Whatever the case, his dried, blown-out appearance in the second scene is belied by his demeanor. He’s no more in control here than he was when he was gushing sweat from every pore while yelling at his mentor. True, he doesn’t try to punch Doc in the face full-force, or at all, but he’s just as petulant and broken-sounding as he was with Wade. The situation with Wesley, the admonishments from Wade and Elizabeth, the plight of Red and Strodenmire—it’s all too much regardless of whether he’s toweled himself off. You can cleanse the boy of his flopsweat, but you can’t cleanse the boy of his flopsweat, you know what I mean?

Frankenstein’s monster must always turn on his creator, and with one punch directed at Wade Garrett’s face, Dalton renders himself monstrous. Look: You can see his fear of what he’s becoming all over his face. It’s not just that he tried to strike his mentor down, though one can only imagine what he would have felt and done had he succeeded. It’s that the violence within himself, the violence he has kept at bay for years by obeying the Three Simple Rules and walking the Dalton Path, the violence he lets out only when it’s time to not be nice, the violence that has haunted him since Memphis—that violence is besting him, growing beyond his control. The dam sprang a leak and it is only through good fortune and Wade Garrett’s own skill that he was able to plug it back up before drowning. Will others be so lucky?

Dalton thinks—Dalton knows, I suspect—that the answer is no. This is why, when he gainsays Frank Tilghman’s assertion that Brad Wesley is afraid of him, he’s only telling half the story. Dalton is afraid of Brad Wesley because Brad Wesley is not afraid of him—because without that fear Wesley is free to act in such a way as to bring out the side of Dalton that Dalton is afraid of. It’s that side of him that scares him worse than anything.

Perhaps he can see himself mirrored in Wade Garrett’s eyes in this moment. Perhaps he sees what is happening to him as clearly as we do. The horror, the horror of knowing what you’re capable of, and feeling powerless to stop it.

“No, we don’t wanna do this,” Wade Garrett says as he takes Dalton by the hand as only a fellow cooler can: by stopping the punch the younger man just aimed at his face. Toughness and tenderness in a single gesture.

But there’s more.

“I wanna tell you something else,” says the old man: “You taught me as much as I ever taught you.” The teacher has become the student. The Way of Wade Garrett, shaped by the Dalton Path as it shapes the Dalton Path. Applied Philosophy 101.

But there’s still more, and it means more than anything.

“I love you, mijo.”

At last, at long last, the subtext is text. More than a teacher, advisor, mentor, friend. Mijo means “son.” A father’s love, bestowed mere seconds after the son tried to kill the father. There is no love greater.

“I’ll see you.” Wade Garrett departs, leaving his mijo, his Dalton, to contemplate his words, and to succeed or fail in the quest he has chosen to take on. He is armed in Wade Garrett’s love, now.

We will soon see what happens when that love is taken away.

Wade Garret is calm. Cool. Collected. Most importantly, clothed. After the events of the past two days he’s ready to blow this popsicle stand (whether or not Brad Wesley brought the Good Humor Man to Jasper is unknown) and head on down the road. He wants his amigo, his mijo, to come with him. “You don’t need this,” he says, referring to Brad Wesley, to Jasper, to blown-up auto parts stores and run-over auto dealerships and aggressive stripteases.

“Don’t tell me what I need!” Dalton growls as he hits the heavy bag like a man possessed. “If you wanna go, go, get the fuck out of here and leave me alone!”

There’s a juvenile growl that creeps into his voice in that last phrase. The sound of a child desperately telling a bully to cut it out, a teenager yelling at his mom to get out of his room, Karen from GoodFellas reverting to girlhood and shouting “You don’t know how I feel!” at her mother when she complains about Henry Hill’s late-night gallivanting. Dalton, too, reverts to childhood around his mentor.

If Wade were thinking more clearly he’d know that this would happen, he’d know that telling Dalton what to do when he’s like this all but guarantees the opposite outcome. But I think it’s less naïveté that animates Wade’s words and more a grim premonition of the future should he and Dalton stick around. Horny Marines and drunken yokels they can handle. Brad Wesley and his goon army have proven themselves to be a whole new order of trouble. Faced with overwhelming firepower, the Way of Wade Garrett is to walk away, before it’s too late.

Alas.

Wade Garrett may have taken a few too many shots to the head at this point, because I swear the thing he says to Dalton as Brad Wesley, Jimmy, and the rest of the gang saunter away makes no sense. “Same town, new story, huh, pal?” he asks, which…I’m sorry, what? Surely he means “New town, same story,” insofar as Dalton and Wade both talk non-stop about how they’ve seen it all before during their lives on the road. Unless he means that their fun time gallivanting with the Doc was one story and now this whole explosion/striptease/barfight scene is a different story entirely. And the beers Wade proposes at the end of this scene—are they a third story? Or would they be a continuation of the first story, the gallivanting-with-Doc story, given how integral beers were to that story? Or is it a continuation of the second story, the explosion/striptease/barfight story, since it takes place in the same location? Or did Sam Elliott flub this line and director Rowdy Herrington liked the sound of it so he kept it intact, like how in “Pass the Mic” Mike D rhymed “commercial” with “commercial” instead of “rehearsal” but it actually made the point he was making (“Everybody rapping like it’s a commercial / acting like life is a big commercial”) better if he delivered it incorrectly?

There’s a thin line between threat and come-on, and Road House spends its final reels dancing all over it. When Dalton steps in to stop Jimmy’s trouncing of Wade Garrett (and we love Wade, we love Wade Garrett, but this is a piss poor showing on the sensei’s part), he naturally makes a mortal enemy of his opposite number. Jimmy’s relationship with Dalton heretofore has been one of long, meaningful stares, without so much as a word exchanged. But the relationship has escalated, and a statement is called for. It’s almost an overture for the opera to follow, featuring all the major melodies: smug superiority, possessiveness, infantilization, a reference to Dalton’s ass. Jimmy and his biological father Brad Wesley (that’s my statement, no further questions) will return to these refrains over and over as the duel for Jasper heads toward its bloody conclusion. After much toil and tribulation, we will finally learn whose ass is whose.

Jimmy Reno wants Wade Garrett. (Yes, his last name is Reno, as mentioned by Patrick Swayze in interview clips and as listed all over actor Marshall Teague’s CV. Yes, this could mean he is an illegitimate child of Brad Wesley born in Nevada, and Reno is his bastard name. No, I will not be taking further questions at this time.) Boy, does he ever. Enough to pole vault over Jack’s prone body onto the stage, just to be better seen and heard by his quarry. Once Wade responds, Jimmy jumps right back down again. He wanted to make a show of this. He wanted to ensure that Wade Garrett could not back out of this confrontation without losing face. He wanted the entire Double Deuce to watch him prepare to end a legend.

And Wade Garrett knows it, that’s the real asskicker. He and Dalton are off their game tonight, perhaps because of the traumatic destruction of a nearby business that’s still burning as this fight takes place, in front of the man who ordered the arson. The whole Double Deuce team is off its game, perhaps, otherwise the numbers would have worked in Jack and Hank and Younger’s favor. Instead, they’ve been laid out all over the dance floor while Wade and Dalton tussle with lesser goons we’ve never seen before nor will ever see again.

(Yes, one of them is wearing a large black hat. Yes, so is a woman visible in the background. Yes, I continue to be perplexed by the presence of all those hats. Again, I will not be taking further questions at this time.)

This is the moment Jimmy chooses to call out Wade Garrett. He vaults onto the stage. He turns. He points with the force of a kung fu strike. He bellows a single word, a single syllable: “YOU!” And Wade Garrett knows the time to be tested has come.

As Denise readies her hostile takeover of the Double Deuce’s stage, she tousles her hair up, up, up, past its already significant poofiness to previously untold-of heights. She’s feeling herself, literally. Hers is the mane of a wild thing, set loose in the Deuce, another runner in the night. She’s sending a message about the dance to come without so much as a single gyration. It’s going to make your hair stand on end, and more besides.

As Wade Garrett watches Denise dance, he too preps himself by running his hands through his hair. But in his case, he ties it back in a half-ponytail, swept back and oddly severe, like a warrior in a fantasy television series. Somehow, his superior cooler-sense in action perhaps, he senses that there will be blood when Denise’s dance is through, and it’s better to fight without your greasy gray locks obscuring your vision and distracting you. Out of sight, out of mind.

Both of these remarkable individuals play a key part in what’s to come—the start of the final round of hostilities, the beginning of the end. It’s gonna get hairy.

The fox is in the henhouse. The rats are in the cellar. The weasels are in the corn. Using the conveniently timed explosion of Red Webster’s Auto Parts as cover, a large party led by Mr. Brad Wesley has infiltrated the Double Deuce. They expect the same things everyone does when they go to the bar: some drinks, some dancing, a little idle chatter. But they are arsonists and hired thugs, so naturally they’re not the sort of people who’d be allowed in the bar. Indeed, Morgan, Tinker, O’Connor, and Ketchum have all been expelled from the Double Deuce, bodily so in most cases. Only by distracting Dalton, Wade Garrett, and all the bouncers with the fireball outside could they even get in.

The presence of Wesley and his cronies is all but an admission of guilt, but it’s more than that. It’s a sign that Dalton’s control is slipping. He couldn’t stop these goons from getting in. As we’ll soon see, he doesn’t succeed in getting them out, either. Brad Wesley is calling, ordering, and firing the shots here, in that order.

The time to not be nice is here.

“I sure ain’t gonna show you my dick.” —Wade Garret

The letter of the law more so perhaps than the spirit, but still, Wade Garrett’s word is bond.

“You’re a long way from Memphis.”

“Memphis has nothing to do with it.”

“Bullshit. That dog won’t hunt.”

Wade Garrett does not understand why Dalton cannot forgive himself for killing the husband of the woman he was dating in Memphis, and from hunting dogs on down he tries every rhetorical trick in the book to convince Dalton to, as he puts it, “cut it the fuck loose.” He peremptorily dismisses Dalton’s denialism, for starters. He says he’s living in the past. He makes a tongue-in-cheek appeal to Dalton’s schooling and wonders why he isn’t “a little more…philosophical about it.” He cajoles, he rages. He points out the facts—that “that fucking c…that girl never told you she was married”—so emphatically that it takes visible force of will for him not to call the woman involved a cunt in a family restaurant.

Then it all comes down to the way of the warrior, the knight errant, the cooler. “When a man sticks a gun in your face, you got two choices: You can die or you can kill the motherfucker!” The oath springs from his mouth so fast there’s practically a recoil.

Wade Garrett wants his mijo to be happy, with his job, his town, his new c…his new girl. Seeing him conflicted, unhappy even, makes Wade feel awful. His own best friend is being his own worst enemy. What do you do under those circumstances? Is it time to be nice or is it time to not be nice? Wade Garrett chooses both approaches, though the latter wins out in the end, as it so often does.

Right after Wade Garrett establishes that Dr. Elizabeth Clay has a level of intelligence too lofty to support a kiester of such magnificence, he slides back to a full upright and locked position and says to Dalton, “You’ve got your hands full, kid.” In any other movie I might not assume this was a deliberate double entendre, but in any other movie I wouldn’t have heard the phrase “balls big enough to come in a dump truck.” At the very least Wade is speaking both metaphorically and literally about what Dalton’s hands are full of.

So let us assume this is crude wordplay. What does Wade mean by connecting the mind with the body in this fashion? Might not the meaning of the phrase derive from implication rather than connection? Somewhere in the combination of the Doc’s sparkling intelligence and surpassing beauty there lies what we might call her soul, her chi, her life force, the thing that makes her her. More than being outwitted or banged into oblivion, Dalton is at risk of being trampled by the wild horse energy Wade himself has been attempting to gentle all night. In his own macho way he’s saying the whole is greater than the sum of her parts.