Road House (1989) - by Leon

quote: 

Is the cooler an elegy for a man? Is he a collection of broken teeth filed to dust, is he the grinding wheel of hope? Is he a looking glass into the animal part of man? 

Dalton, the deep souled bouncer and star of Road House, struggles with the amorality of his work every day.  Early on in the film, in a clear Hamlet-like aside to the audience, he states: 

“How am I here, in this goddamn town? It’s saving grace, Larry, owner of the most efficient gas station I’ve ever seen. How am I here, locked in a job that doesn’t have a meaning; where I’ve gone from the biggest clubs in New York to some flea-bitten horse of a town whose name has been dustily forgotten? I used to have a purpose in those first few nights when I took over a new place, and with the certainty of a hammer, nail the fuckers to the wall and pierce the room with cooling eyes.”

 

It is a newfound uncertainty for Dalton, and it does not sit well on his well turned legs.  He strives to reach the control of a Nietzchean hero. “I am a cooler”, he repeats over and over, long hair streaming wild, fingertips on his barrel chest, “Be cool, be nice”, he says at one point, calmly.  He becomes a persona, so remote and stylized, almost Augustinian, whose overriding goal is to define the state of those around him.  In a scene at the Roadhouse bar, he snaps to Doc, his female counterpart:

“I only see and respect the room, I focus on my impact upon others in that space. Sometimes I feel sad, sometimes I feel sad for others, but I always feel for the situation. I stay outside, I am the constant cooling unit, I stay outside of those full of heat and when necessary pour anti-freeze down their throats. I take the fear and humbling hate, and cradle it like the most concerned son... lost in the embrace of an ideal I do not believe in. I am a cooler, but I am also a volcano simmering underneath the ocean blue of my eyes.” 

 

The contradiction of the passion that courses through his body and the limiting role he defines himself is never given expression except in a few dance moves that are snuck into the later scenes of the film. In a sick moment that recalls his starring role in Dirty Dancing, he walks into the dirty water of Mississippi and breaks a man’s neck in the dusk of a declining sky.  Looking straight into the camera, he monologues once again: 

“I broke a man’s neck and set it floating down the dirty flush of the Mississippi, and I only feel sick at myself for not feeling sick when I throttled him. All that I can do is remember his name; I remember all of their names and I put them in the corner of my mind that I call the ghetto. Is a cooler an elegy for a man? Only a collection of broken teeth filed by the grinding wheel of seeing the empty, the fearful, the animal in man? She thinks she loves me, that girl Doc, her picnic table dress reminding me of the cornfields of my past, she thinks I am a butterfly locked in a cocoon and that she will find the ‘me’ that is locked under this cold shell, but she only loves my purpose. And I no longer remember it. All I remember is the mastery of man, and inside that knowledge is a glowing bar heated by secrets I dare not explore.  Can a cooler become hot from the inside?“

Dalton asks that question in one of the final moments and none of the deep philosophical training he has undertaken in his past studies has prepared him for the death of his purpose. No one can be a cooler forever. Maxwell's 2nd Law of Thermodynamics  prevents any isolated system from existing indefinitely apart, as all things entropy toward equilibrium. One cannot be a cooler forever. 

 

The movie ends with the possibility of a romantic future for Dalton... where his newly calibrated temperature will serve him well.   

We wish him the best.