Monday, November 7, 2016

Roadhouse Via David Lynch

So many years ago, I was watching a double feature on TBS: Point Break followed by RoadHouse.  I love the move Point Break,  I get a lot of pleasure from it, particularly the Gary Busey stuff. However, I had always assumed Road House was just stupid.  Until this one time, when I really tried to understand the world that was being created.  Now - imagine if some kind of David Lynch figure directed this movie - and it was considered an auteur film.  I propose that under these conditions, it would be clear that what we have here is nothing less than a surrealistic masterpiece, held together by the fact that every, single scene contains within it - something absolutely, utterly, impossible.

Let's just unpack some of our plot-points and I think this will become shockingly clear very quickly.

1) Patrick Swayze/Dalton is a world-renowned bar bouncer (which is a thing you can be in this world).  He is known as the the second greatest bar bouncer because Sam Elliot was his teacher and so is clearly his better - at least until Sam Elliot is killed to send a message to Swayze/Dalton.

2) Swazyze/Dalton has a philosophy degree where he apparently embraced eastern philosophy - and he uses this to fight rednecks at the Double Deuce.

3) The Double Deuce (That is the bar name right?) is a bar that has a knife fight nightly, but still has attractive women that frequent the place and blues guitar great Jeff Healey leads the house band.

4) Swayze learns about the town dynamic from a guy in a hardware store who will soon have his hardware store blown-up because he's taken Swayze's side.  This arouses no investigation from any State or Federal police agency.

5) Swayze carried around his own medical records and says things like "Pain don't hurt." This leads him to eventually seduce a doctor who he has sex with against a brick wall!  Soft music is not going to help her back.

6) Swayze, of course, is renting out his one room apartment with no amenities which is located across the lake from the bad guy (Brad Wesley).  His goons hang out there and can be found driving monster trucks and getting punched in the face, while his girlfriend does nothing but aerobics ostensibly all day, every day.

7) A fight will take place on Swayze's side of the river where he will rip a man's throat out of his body and send his carcass back across the lake.

There's more, lots more.  But here's the point.  If the world is boring or monotonous - try looking at it differently.  See if there's not more going on than what was "intended" as if we can ever know that anyways. That is the brilliance of a director like David Lynch - he makes the normal look unusual.  To paraphrase David Foster Wallace "Tarentino is interested in cutting off the ear.  Lynch is just interested in the ear."  

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