In lieu of opening an Easter basket or doing anything holiday related, I spent Easter Sunday having a Road House marathon. Having never seen the 1989 version starring none other than the love of my life Patrick Swayze, I started there. Then, high on B-movie chutzpah, I immediately followed it up with the recent remake featuring Jake Gyllenhaal.
If you haven’t seen the original, it’s hard to fully describe how absurd, yet delightfully fun it is. Ripe with a type of eroticism that was at its peak in ‘80s cinema, the movie and its stars are horny and unashamed. In other words, it’s a film that fucks.
The IMDb synopsis fails to fully capture the vibes or plot, but the philosophy major née karate acolyte née celebrity bouncer née a MAN description of Dalton starts to peel back the curtain:
A bouncer hired to clean up the baddest honkytonk in a Missouri town. Armed with a black belt in karate and a degree in philosophy, Patrick Swayze [as James Dalton] sets out to tame the Double Deuce for its owner.
While Road House 1989 (Patrick’s Version) is a cocaine fever dream, the remake can be best summed up by the title and subject of Raquel Benedict’s seminal essay, “Everyone is beautiful and no one is horny.” While the essay focuses on superhero movies and puritanical optimization vs betterment for pleasure, it’s an apt analysis that encapsulates the dehumanizing soulless display of Road House 2024.
My biggest problem with the remake wasn’t the reduced plot elements that don’t fully cohere, or the setting (a tiki bar in the Keys where people get into physical fights on the daily???), or even Hollywood’s exploitation of our loneliness. No, what bothered me the most was the lack of eroticism, or even curiosity toward basic desire, which is the lifeblood of the original.
Take Gyllenhaal’s Dalton. The character no longer has a past studying Nietzsche, or anything beyond his former career as a UFC fighter. He’s buffer and physically fits the stereotypical bouncer ideal in contrast with Swayze’s leanly rippled and frequently oiled physique. But all we ever see of Gyllenhaal’s Dalton is his ripped upper half that’s only shown to emphasize his ability to pulverize. Buns are replaced with boxers, romance is replaced with avoidance bordering on non-interest1, and friendship is replaced with lonerism.
Today’s cinema hunks are nevernudes—RS Benedict
If anything is romanticized, or given attention, it’s the fighting but the heavy handed use of CGI makes the fights look cartoonish. There’s also an odd cinematic approach that’s used to capture action throughout. In what I imagine is an attempt to draw the eye, the camera zooms in on action sequences piecemeal and seems to fundamentally misunderstand the way people see.
But the lack of eroticism extends toward the remake’s approach to violence.
There’s a scene not too far into the original movie when Patrick Swayze’s Dalton starts clearing house at the Double Deuce. The bartender skimming the till, the server who’s dealing drugs, and an existing bouncer who gets fired because of his temperament and penchant toward fighting goes against part of Dalton’s creed as a cooler, “...Take it outside. Never start anything inside the bar unless it’s absolutely necessary.”
This dismissal of wanton violence is not just a minor throughline of the original movie, but the ultimate moral conclusion of it. Fully embodying the pathos of fuck around and find out, the Double Deuce crew can and will beat your ass if called to. Hell, Swayze’s Dalton will even rip out a throat as a last straw of self defense, but at the end of the day, and the movie, violence isn’t what he covets, people are.
Which is ultimately what makes the remake, and its lens that idealizes nothing but aesthetic violence, feel so sterile. What can be expected from an industry that systematically strips out creativity, risk, the privilege of new possibilities—namely, a (or any) future—in lieu of nostalgia and safeish, predictable cash grabs?
If the future is no longer available to artists, the past and our memories are the only commodity left to mine. Perhaps the only temperament that can remain is one stripped of every desire beyond what is modeled as worthy in today’s society. Something empty, bereft, and lifeless.
There is one barely there kiss in the remake compared with a full fledged romance and deeply intimate sex scene.