(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."
"I heard you had balls big enough to cum in a dump
truck, but you don't look like much to me."
"Does a hobby horse have a wooden dick?"
"That gal has got entirely too many brains to have
an ass like that."
"I see you found my trophy room, Dalton. The only
thing missing is your ass."
That last line is spoken by Ben Gazzara, who seems
to be having the time of his life as Brad Wesley, the nefarious rich guy who
runs the town and takes 10 percent in protection money off all the businesses.
A band of well-armed thugs and at least one monster truck are around as
enforcers, and with his ascot and fedora, he seems to have acquired his wardrobe by
raiding Peter Bogdanovich's closet. Wesley's showdown with Dalton, who sticks
up for the good-'ol-boy townsfolk under Wesley's thumb, takes Road House out of the rarified world
of bouncers and coolers and into more conventional explosion-filled action fare.
The one wrinkle is that Dalton is haunted by a dark secret: Back in Memphis, he
once ripped a man's throat from his neck, and he fears his own lethal
capabilities. (Incidentally, I'd place Swayze's throat-removing claw-hand maneuver
right up there with Ralph Macchio's unstoppable crane technique in The
Karate Kid
and John Saxon's above-the-waist fighting style in Enter The Dragon in the annals of
white-guy kung-fu.)
One of the qualities that separates Road House from lesser Swayze vehicles
is that it's a Joel Silver production—glossy, vulgar,
testosterone-driven, shamelessly commercial, and given to catchphrases. When
Silver agreed to produce the Coen brothers' The Hudsucker Proxy to the tune of $40
million, they tried to give him a catchphrase worthy of Die Hard's "Yippie-ki-ay,
motherfucker," but "You know, for kids" didn't quite take off. Here, Swayze's
Dalton is greeted on several occasions with the feeble, "I thought you'd be
bigger," which never quite seeped into the national vernacular. Still, Silver's
more-is-more instincts help lift Road House into the camp
stratosphere, when in other hands it might have been drab and all business.
Action vehicles built around stoic heroes tend to take themselves too
seriously, but casting ringers like Gazzara and Elliott in key supporting roles
is a good indication that Silver and company were happy to embrace the film's
florid excesses.
There's no justifying Road House as a good film, exactly,
but it's so entertaining that it provokes philosophical musings about how "good"
even applies sometimes. It has many laugh-out-loud moments, and though some of
them are intentional and some perhaps less so, there's precious little to be
gained by parsing out one type of laugh from another. And that's one of the
pitfalls in judging camp movies in general: Where do the filmmakers stop and
the viewers begin? What can be credited to their vision and what can be
credited to our camp sensibilities kicking into gear?
Road House blurs the line often—or just obliterates
it—and perhaps the best solution is just to lower your defenses and enjoy
the many moments of sublime ridiculousness: Gazzara swerving back and forth
across a road to the tune of "Sh-boom"; a studly bouncer giving the best excuse
possible for banging a random floozy in the storage room ("But I was on my
break!"); a monster truck laying waste to the showroom at a car lot; Swayze's
overly modest summation of his academic pursuits ("Man's search for faith. That
sort of shit"); and a finale staged in a taxidermist's paradise. It's brilliant. It's idiotic. It's Road
House.
Coming Up: Camp Month continues…
Next week: Manos: The Hands Of Fate vs. Troll 2
July 24: The Devil's Advocate
July 31: Showgirls
August 7: Back to business with Sexy Beast