(Programming note: I had originally planned
only four movies for Camp Month, but since there are five Thursdays in July, I've
decided to squeeze one more onto the schedule. Depending on your perspective,
I'm sorry or you're welcome.)
"Pain don't hurt." —Patrick Swayze as Jeff Dalton
in Road House
It's like the sound of one hand clapping: Say the
words "pain don't hurt," and a gentle breeze rustles the cobwebs from your
mind. Last year, my colleague Noel Murray wrote a fine feature for this
publication called "The
Way Of The Swayze: How To Be A Thoughtful Hunk," and though "pain
don't hurt" didn't make his list of Patrick Swayze aphorisms, it doesn't get
any purer than that. (To be fair, Swayze does give you a lot of options.) Where
I come from—and where everybody else comes from, too—pain tends to
hurt, and the amount of hurt increases in direct proportion to the amount of
pain inflicted. But in Swayze's world, hurt is just a state of mind that pain
can only access if you lack the mental discipline to turn it away. And the
provincial misuse of "don't" is there to make sure his core audience (i.e. guys
who like Movies For Guys Who Like Movies) doesn't cast him off as an elitist.
Because when you're a bouncer with a philosophy degree from NYU, people might
think you're a little fruity.
More on Swayze the Zen philosopher in a minute. For
now, let us stand in awe of Road House, a supremely vulgar, winningly goofy
entertainment that to my mind set the actor apart from his action-movie peers.
Some of Swayze's shtick here is familiar to other action heroes: Nearly all of
them since Clint Eastwood's stoic "The Man With No Name" keep the chatter to a
minimum, Steven Seagal was also known to dabble in Eastern mumbo-jumbo, and
Jean-Claude Van Damme could fill out a mullet to make the rednecks in the
audience swoon. Yet what's unique about Swayze is his feminine appeal; Van
Damme and Seagal could kick all the ass they'd like, but neither of them could
have smoldered their way through Ghost or Dirty Dancing and into the fantasies of
pre-teen girls and middle-aged women alike. He's a tough guy and a sex symbol,
and the mix of the two makes Road House uniquely and hilariously pansexual: For
all the high-heels, miniskirts, and leggy blondes trotted out for Joe Six-Pack's
delectation, Swayze is the real pin-up here.
True story: When I worked in a suburban Georgia
movie theater from 1987 to 1990, I can recall two times when I heard actual
gasps coming from the audience. The first was in Dangerous Liaisons, when Uma Thurman
revealed the stunning figure underneath those drab, baggy late-18th-century
bedclothes. The second was in Road House, when Swayze slips out of bed in the
morning, casually allowing the sheets to drop past his naked backside. This
galvanizing moment is underlined by an awed reaction shot from his waitress
friend, who looks like the mysteries of the universe have just been revealed to
her. Throughout the film, Swayze's soft features—the feathered '80s hair,
the sensitive blue eyes, a body that's impeccably cut and toned rather than
grotesquely muscled in Schwarzenegger mode—are accentuated to a degree
that borders on pornography. How else to explain this Vaseline-lensed sequence
in which his morning workout ritual has the quality of an exotic dance?
In the dusty hicktown of Jasper, Missouri,
Swayze's brand of Eastern-influenced meditative techniques clearly isn't an
ordinary sight, but then, his occupation isn't ordinary, either. All bars and
nightclubs have bouncers, but Swayze's Dalton doesn't scan fake IDs and usher
out the occasional lout. He's what's called a "cooler," a bouncer who directs
all the other bouncers, and he's considered the best in the business. Until
seeing Road House,
I was unaware that such a rich, multi-tiered bouncer subculture even existed,
one where the best of the best could draw enough of a salary to afford a
Mercedes with a built-in cassette deck. But Dalton is the type of guy who can
transform a shit-kicking, backwoods dive into a slick nightspot run with the
strong-armed efficiency of a gulag.
As the film opens, a club owner (Kevin Tighe)
lures Dalton to Jasper as part of a plan to reinvest in a dump called the
Double Deuce—or, as aging cooler Wade Garrett (Sam Elliott) indelibly
refers to it later in the film, "the Double Douche." Tighe calls it "the kind
of place where they sweep up the eyeballs after closing," and he isn't kidding:
The exterior looks like an old barn, the band plays behind chicken wire to
protect it from flying beer bottles, the bartender steals from the till, and
the meathead bouncers are responsible for more bar-wide mêlées than they break
up. (Are fights where everyone is throwing punches and busting chairs
commonplace in roughneck bars, or do they only happen in the movies?) Dalton
silently observes the operation on his first night, then delivers this stirring
address to the staff:
Next time you get called a cocksucker, remember
it's only "two words combined to elicit a proscribed response," which is
Dalton's fancy way of describing his "sticks-and-stones" pacifism. The quirks
and colloquialisms in the dialogue are part of what makes Road House so much guilty fun. A few
other choice examples:
"Calling me 'sir' is like putting an elevator in
an outhouse. Don't belong."