It’s midmorning on a Sunday. The bar looks even shabbier than it did the night before, though traces of the fight have been swept away. Last night was rough, which is to say, it was an average night for business: a waitress selling coke in the bathroom, a bartender skimming cash from the till, bottles thrown at the musicians on stage, a fight breaking out early in the evening. Dalton (Patrick Swayze) has come to clean house. He fires two of the staff who’d been involved in the worst of the evening, then launches into his three rules for being a bouncer.
One: “Never underestimate your opponent.”
Two: “Take it outside.”
Three: “Be nice … Until it’s time to not be nice.”
That last rule turns out to be a sticking point; the bouncers find it counterintuitive. They’re used to getting into fights just about every night. Bare minimum, their egos are going to be wounded. They want to be able to dish it just as much as they take it, especially when the patrons start getting ugly. “Being called a cocksucker isn’t personal?” asks one of the staff, as if being called names is an irrefutable excuse to punch somebody. Dalton replies, “It’s two nouns combined to elicit a prescribed response.” In other words: grow up. Most of the denizens of the Double Deuce haven’t managed to do that yet. Dalton promises to teach them if they stick around long enough.
It’s dark on the main strip in Tampa. Adam (Alex Pettyfer) bumps into Mike (Channing Tatum) on the street outside a nightclub. They met for the first time that morning at Mike’s roofing job, where Adam made a poor impression on Mike for wearing tennis shoes to a construction site. The foreman, for his part, had taken issue with Adam swiping two soda cans from the company cooler, firing him at the end of his first day at work. Now, as the nightlife is starting to pick up, Adam is still in the red hoodie he’d been fired in, while Mike has changed into a crisp button down and jeans that have never seen a day of manual labor. Mike seems bemused by the 19-year-old following him around, but he takes him under his wing anyway. “They’re never gonna let you in like that,” he tells Adam, and then, after he tells the bouncer at the club that the kid is with him, “You gotta not wear tennis shoes, bro.”
In other words: grow up.
*
Both Road House (1989) and Magic Mike (2012) are about learning how to be a person in society. It’s possible to pick some of it up in passing—human beings are good at learning things, even indirectly—but it’s easier to learn a lesson when there’s a teacher involved, someone who knows what they’re doing. Good teachers want their students to learn well, not the hard way.
Structurally, the two movies couldn’t be more different. Of the two, Road House is the simpler story, content to lean on the stimulus-response rhythm of a slick script and a handful of familiar archetypes. It follows the traditional structure of a Western, mythologizing itself as it goes. A man with a mysterious past rides into town, self-sufficient, a perfect specimen of masculinity. He finds corruption—which he cleans up almost single-handedly by teaching a roadside bar how to better handle their business—comes to grips with past shame, and finds a little romance, too. The film’s attitude is unexamined, a story about white hats and black hats resolving their issues through violence, the good guys winning because the movie says they’re good regardless of the actions they take to win the day. Everyone has smooth skin and big hair and they all glisten with sweat in a way that makes them pop off the screen, larger than life.
By contrast, Magic Mike has barely any plot at all: a male stripper takes a college dropout under his wing for a summer. It’s a hangout movie. But the film’s sensibility is smarter and sadder than its logline promises. You think you’ll get a good time—and the movie is a good time—but you’ll also get an interrogation of capitalism and respectability. Director/editor/cinematographer Steven Soderbergh shoots the movie in his signature jaundiced yellow—the color of gold, the color of the sun, the color of something aging past its prime.
Under their respective presentations, both movies are concerned with similar subject matter: masculinity, nightlife, the thankless service work necessary for people to have a good time. Dalton is a bouncer, Mike is a stripper, and both are questioned to their faces about the validity of their respective professions because of the physical nature of their work. “You get paid for beatin’ people up. Tell me you don’t love it,” taunts Road House’s villainous Brad Wesley (Ben Gazzara) to Dalton, while Mike lets judgmental comments about his own job roll off his back. Both movies are set in locations that are quintessentially ‘real America’—Jasper, Missouri, for Road House and Tampa, Florida, for Magic Mike, country town and beachside city framed in the nighttime romantic light of American exceptionalism and in the drab breaking day of life under capitalism in the United States.
*
Adam worships Mike. After their first night out on the town, he tells Mike that they “should be best friends,” which Mike laughs off with an “Okay.” He’s a denizen of Tampa nightlife, while Adam is just sticking his toe in the water for the first time. Mike isn’t just a promoter for Xquisite—a male revue off the Tampa strip—he’s also the club’s star dancer. Adam is curious about Mike’s world in an opportunistic sort of way at first; he’s got nothing else going on, and dancing, it turns out, means cash. And the more time he spends with Mike, the more he wants the perks that come with Mike’s job.
As for Mike, he becomes Adam’s mentor because the kid chose him first. The relationship starts with irritation when Mike finds himself teaching Adam how to lay roof tile under the hot sun. The tension eases when Mike realizes that Adam is hopeless at everything, not just roofing. The teacher/student dynamic isn’t ever formalized; Adam seems to think of Mike as a peer more than a mentor. But Mike is comfortable telling Adam whenever he’s messed up, and he’s also comfortable pushing him out of his complacency, first by nudging him toward a pair of sorority girls in a nightclub that very first night together. He needs Adam to go talk to them so that he can slide in and promote the revue.
Laying roof tile is a matter of expertise, but it’s also a transactional job by nature: one person paying another to do manual labor. Convincing people to go to a club is a more delicate matter; you have to make them feel wanted without feeling like they’re part of a business proposition, even though that’s the nature of service work, too. It’s still a transaction, it’s just that human beings are part of the equation. Mike draws attention to everyone’s aspirations of success—and to the money involved—with a toast: “Here’s to, um, our children…May they have rich fuckin’ parents.” His sense of humor smooths out the awkwardness of Adam finally realizing that they are only in the club to try to get people to come to Xquisite.
Dallas (Matthew McConaughey), the owner/MC of Xquisite, notes that Adam has beginner’s luck his first night on stage at the revue. “Cannot dance for shit, that is teachable,” he tells Adam, before giving him a few basics about holding the attention of a crowd of straight women until they give up their cash. “Fuck that mirror like you mean it!” Mike’s performance is an expression that goes outward, beyond himself. Dallas plants seeds that encourage Adam to keep looking inward, to behave selfishly.
By contrast, Channing Tatum lends his character an unaffected sense of physical grace in every scene, and particularly shines when he’s dancing. The skill is only teachable up to a point; most of the men at Xquisite are better at posing than they are at staying on beat. They shuffle through the motions, approximating a rhythm but never quite hitting their marks. Their job, bare minimum, requires them to be a set of abs. Mike lives to move; it’s what he does best. Soderbergh frames dance sequences with Tatum dead center, dancing in unbroken shots that showcase his entire body on stage. No one else in the cast can come anywhere near his ability. Mike’s good at it because he has a talent for it, but he’s the best because he makes each woman in the room feel like they’re the only one there.
He’s less accepting of his mentor role toward Adam, though he never outright rejects the kid as they’re getting to know each other. He knows enough to teach Adam how to dance, how to behave, how to dress. The dancing, the nightlife, the kid’s career—all of it’s a lark, none of it’s permanent, none of it’s serious. Mike has bigger concerns on his mind. Besides roofing and dancing, he has a side gig as a car detailer, and he hopes to open a furniture-making business with the money he’s made from tips. But he’s just one of thousands of entrepreneurs in Tampa, sweating to make ends meet, trying to have a good time before the hurricane hits.
*
In a sense, the hurricane has already hit Dalton multiple times. He makes a habit of carrying his medical records with him, the better to get in and out of the hospital whenever he lands somewhere new. He’s broken bones and suffered lacerations. He has time and experience and a litany of hard knocks on his side. That experience informs his teaching style: he’s seen it all, and speaks with authority. Swayze’s performance is about an economy of movement. It isn’t subtle, but he tells us what Dalton thinks about the Double Deuce with a tilt of the head and a smirk. His body speaks volumes, and the staff at the Double Deuce respond.
Like Channing Tatum, Patrick Swayze was a dancer, his movement background informing his performance in Road House. Like Tatum’s Mike, Swayze’s Dalton is most compelling when he’s in motion—though his kind of movement mostly consists of fighting. Swayze ducks and weaves with the grace afforded him by his training. His jabs are swift, an explosion of motion; when he spin kicks, he turns his head like a ballerina before zeroing in on his target, the rest of his body swinging around to follow true. When he’s fighting, he goes for a decisive victory. Once his opponent’s exhausted, he invariably grabs them by the lapels, teeth gritted like he’s holding himself back. With one crucial exception, he drops his beaten opponents on the ground without hurting them further.
The restraint goes against the character’s instincts. Swayze strains against himself when he holds his opponents by the collar; Dalton wants to keep going. “Be nice until it’s time to not be nice” is an open-ended statement; once it’s time to not be nice, he doesn’t have any advice about how to deescalate. It’s a lesson he’s learned from his own mentor, Wade Garrett (Sam Elliott), the best of the best in the business. Garrett advises Dalton to forget his dark past, to stop holding himself accountable for other people’s actions. “When a man sticks a gun in your face, you got two choices,” he tells Dalton. “You can die, or you can kill the motherfucker.” So much for showing mercy.
If Dalton is a warrior-philosopher, Garrett is a warrior-poet with a jester’s gleam in his eye. Road House is fun enough at first, but Garrett’s arrival is a shot of adrenaline. He’s firm with the barflies and kind to the sex workers in the topless bar where we first meet him. He’s wiry, a tall thin man who snaps into action when facing down tank-shaped goons. Suddenly Dalton isn’t the only character worth watching. The central relationship finally snaps into focus. Dalton may be a teacher, but Garrett is a mentor. The older man calls the younger one “mi hijo”—my son.
The mentor/mentee relationship is especially apparent in the way that Garrett fights. Hands up in a guard in front of his face, he puts a stop to his opponents with sucker punches and kicks to the knee: all movements we’ve seen Dalton make to cut a fight short and get the unruly patron out the door. The physicality is different—Swayze is compact, Elliott is lithe, and they move completely differently—but the ethos is the same. Disable the opponent and get them out of the bar before they ruin everyone else’s good time. It makes sense that Garrett taught Dalton everything he knows. Mentor and mentee fight well together; at one point Dalton intercepts a kick meant for Garrett, the younger man literally stepping into the place his mentor had just occupied.
*
Mike finds himself supplanted by his own student, though the image of Adam taking his place on stage feels more like a tragedy than the image of Dalton coming to Garrett’s defense. Mike is careful; Adam, less so. The kid starts dealing drugs, taking baggies of MDMA with him on house call jobs, until a stupid mistake means that he and Mike have to flee the scene without their clothes…or Adam’s supply. The loss means $10,000 in the wind and a group of vengeful dealers out for Adam’s blood. Adam goes to ground, and Mike gets stuck covering the debt, which he pays off by giving up most of his savings from dancing. It’s the end of his dream to start a furniture business. It’s also the impetus for him to leave the club, much the same way Adam came in. Three months before, one of the other performers was unable to take the stage mid-show, so Mike had the idea to throw Adam out in front of the crowd with no instruction to Madonna’s “Like a Virgin.” When Mike leaves, it’s without fanfare out the back entrance in the middle of a show. Adam takes Mike’s place in the final dance: Dallas thinks of his employees as interchangeable parts.
The game’s loaded against Mike, and he’s never going to be able to come out on top, despite his street smarts and his hustle and his skill. We’ve already seen him denied a business loan at a bank; his people skills can’t make up for nonexistent credit. Adam doesn’t know he’s on a dead-end road yet; he thinks he’s king of the world, able to take advantage of Mike’s mentorship and generosity. Magic Mike takes a premise—a male stripper takes the new kid under his wing and shows him how the work is done—and pushes it past “romp” to a difficult kind of conclusion.
Crucially, the movie isn’t judgmental about Mike’s line of work. It draws a fine line between the workers and the people who enjoy the work that they do without giving them the credit or the benefit they’ve earned. “I’m not my goddamn job…It is what I do but it’s not who I am,” says Mike. Adam doesn’t get it. His job is to sell a fantasy to anyone who will hand him the cash, and he’s unable to differentiate his own identity from the job and the perks that come with it. He takes Dallas’ lesson to heart. “Three months ago…I was nowhere,” he says to Mike, after Mike’s paid up for his debt. “[Now] I have money. I can fuck who I want to fuck. I have freedom, thanks to you…I have only one thing to say, and that is,” he raises a glass to toast, “To my best friend. A guy who has given me more in this lifetime than I could ever ask for. And to bright futures.” All without really acknowledging Mike’s sacrifice. No apology, just a fantasy that everything’s okay because it worked out for him, specifically. He believes the fantasy, though the movie treats his belief as the self-delusion of a kid who hasn’t learned his lesson.
Road House takes its premise a step further, too—though where Magic Mike toes the line of realism, Road House believes in its own fantasy. Because it’s an action movie from 1989, Dalton’s opponents aren’t limited only to patrons with bad manners. Cleaning up the joint means confronting Wesley, the businessman who put Jasper on the map, the kind of man who likes scaring horses for fun, who drives his car all over the road because he feels like he owns it. He goes for the throat and refuses to let go. Dalton does, too, after Garrett dies, collateral damage in the struggle to free Jasper from Wesley’s grip. Dalton gets his revenge by literally ripping the jugular out of one of Wesley’s goons. When a man sticks a gun in your face, you die or you kill. Dalton takes Garrett’s lesson to heart.
*
Magic Mike sees nightlife as an ecosystem to be navigated—any lessons that can be taught are just a small piece of a larger, more complex whole. It’s canny in contrast to Road House’s unexamined id, which bleeds all over the film. Road House views running a nightclub as a management problem, a series of simple lessons that can be learned from someone who’s been there before. Never underestimate your opponent. Take it outside. Be nice (until…).
Both movies are about physical lines of work supporting the carefree play of nightlife, the kind of work that’s mostly noticed when it’s done poorly and goes unthanked when done well. Mike and Dalton are reduced to their work even as they’re lauded for their expertise. Dalton’s accused of enjoying his job too much; if he didn’t enjoy beating people up, wouldn’t he find another job? Meanwhile Mike is told, again and again, that he is his job and nothing more. When he dances, he’s caught in the awful tension of doing the thing he’s best at and being reduced to just a body doing the work, no soul recognized. Both movies are about finding the dignity in work that other people find undignified.
Both are about keeping the work alive, too, which is to say they’re both about passing on expertise. There isn’t really a lesson to be imparted from either movie per se. Just lessons the characters learn. “You taught me as much as I ever taught you,” Garrett says to Dalton shortly before he dies. For his own part, Alex might have been Mike’s student, but it’s unclear that he ever really learned anything other than going through the motions. Alex and Dalton both find themselves students with the best of teachers, but they’re each left without by the end, left to learn the rest for themselves from the school of hard knocks. Alex doesn’t learn from his own experience, though perhaps he hasn’t hit rock bottom yet. Dalton—and by extension the staff of the Double Deuce—already has everything he needs from his own mentor. He, like Mike, just has to figure out how to put the pieces together. He has to learn how to grow up.