Road House, Magic Mike XXL, and the Power of a Sincerely Ridiculous Lore
A stripper and a bouncer — sorry, a "male entertainer" and a "cooler" walk into a bar...
“Sorry Malik…but a ghost is a ghost…”
So murmurs Jada Pinkett Smith’s enigmatic club owner, “Rome,” as the eponymous, and apparently infamous, “Magic Mike” Lane drifts into her room. With one line we understand there is history here; long, deep, messy.
It is also an insane string of words to hear in the middle of a Magic Mike movie. “A ghost is a ghost??” Where are we? Who is this? What’s happening? Did The Bard take a punch-up pass on this script?
It’s neither the first nor last, but perhaps the most memorable of Magic Mike XXL’s implications that a dense mythology permeates the — sorry, checking my notes — right, exotic dancing/stripping/“entertainment” community of the southeastern seaboard. In nearly every scene some worldly new character swaggers up to Channing Tatum’s Mike, shakes their head in disbelief, and spins out some yarn to the tune of, “Well, well, well, if it isn’t Magic Mike. You disappeared, man. I heard you got outta the game three years ago. Yet behold, here you are, flesh incarnate, standing before me.” He’s a strippe-sorry, a male entertainer. And you, Magic Mike XXL, are telling me that his legend precedes him? And to such a fanfaric degree that apparently everyone between Miami and Myrtle Beach knows that Mike Lane left his strip show and started a custom furniture business precisely three years ago?
But…I do, actually, buy it. That unexpected mythos is a major part of what makes that movie dick- uh, tick. The movie doesn’t think it’s ridiculous — the lore is presented with abject sincerity. This is simply their world. In it dwell legendary figures, like Mike and Rome. When they’re onscreen, you understand the notoriety; Mike is, of course, “Magic,” and Rome, only introduced in the latter half of XXL, is a conquering presence. The gravity is certainly goofy; but it pulls nonetheless. In spite of all the preconceptions and associations we the audience may have with entertainers, to Mike and to Rome and everyone else, the world is real, the stakes are high, and the consequences of the past are playing out in real time, and given great respect.
A similar sort of thing happens in the indisputable Patrick Swayze haymaker, 1989’s Road House. The film opens at a rockin’ bar in Memphis, Tennessee. The place is packed with gyrating bodies, raised voices and the house band blending into a raucous Friday night cacophony. A couple of guys get unruly; Swayze saunters over to calm them down. He gets a knife-slash in the arm for his effort. “I’ve always wanted to try ya, Dalton!” shouts the knife-wielder, manically. Dalton (Swayze) replies, “All right. Let’s take this outside.” They head out to the parking lot. The knife-wielder and his buddies turn around to confront Dalton — only to be faced with eight large bouncers blocking the front door, Dalton standing behind them, smirking as he walks back into the club, the situation successfully cooled.
Moments later, Dalton’s patching up his arm in the club office when a man walks in, sporting a tailored suit fixed with a bolo tie, a real Southern Gentleman. He’s looking for a bouncer; Dalton corrects him. “I’m a cooler.” The man says he just bought this small town seedy bar, a fixer-upper with promise, “...the kind of place they sweep the eyeballs up after closing. I need the best to help me clean the place up.”
Dalton replies, “Wade Garrett’s the best.”
The man says, “Wade Garrett’s gettin’ old.”
This is nuts. A bouncer who’s locally famous for winning fights at a popular club? I’ll buy that. A bouncer—okay, cooler, who’s so famous that some guy who bought a bar somewhere heard of him, and decided to seek him out because he “needs the best?” And Dalton’s not, actually, the best? The best is another cooler named Wade Garrett who’s also famous enough as a bouncer that this guy knows “he’s gettin’ old?”
Of course, that’s not the last time in Road House that the Legend of Dalton and the World of Coolers comes up. Much like with Mike Lane in MMXXL, throughout Road House Swayze’s Dalton is the subject of numerous hinting proclamations, “I heard’a you!” and “You’re smaller than I thought you’d be” and “You fuck with him, you seal your fate.” All, it should be noted, long before he ever does anything of note onscreen. Ultimately the mythmaking fits because Road House turns out to be a Western; with fists for pistols and brawls in place of gunfights.
So how are we to feel about such ridiculous mythologizing in stories ostensibly set in our own world? Could there be, perhaps, something beyond the surface silliness?
The fact that both movies are set, more or less, on our Earth, in our America, in our mundane small towns and monochromatic coastal cities, is what makes the legend-building feel ridiculous. They whirl a bit of fantasy into our gritty existence, where the fantastical is usually reserved for the ancient past or distant future, or more boldly for young adults’ fiction. The subjects are important, too; one a stripper, the other a bouncer (though interestingly both of them request alternate titles, “male entertainer” and “cooler”). Stripping remains considered a socially fringe profession; a last resort. Bouncers are seen as obstacles, the intimidating guys you have to get past to get to the good times, and then they’re forgotten until the event that they become violently necessary. Is it so ridiculous to weave these outlier professions a legend, when every industry has its leaders, its faces and voices of note, that are increasingly treated with religious exultation? Or maybe it’s that all modern occupational myth is inherently ridiculous, from the toxic legions that slobber praise over Snyder, Musk, and Vaynerchuk to celebrity chef culture to the theocracy of High Fashion to, most prominently, politics — and we’ve just become calloused to the joke. What makes the unexpected gravitas of Magic Mike XXL and Road House feel ironic in comparison? What makes our everyday demagoguery so normal?
Hell, I don’t know. But the legendary treatment does make those movies better. I still laugh every time I watch both films. They are inescapably silly. Yet, in spite of the silliness, it’s admirable that the likes of Mike Lane and John Dalton are celebrated as bonafide heroes, with their own impossible victories and signature moves, that travel with rumor as their vanguard and whispers in their wake. They are respected by their own stories; and so deserve at least a little respect from us, too.
If you ever get a chance to see Magic Mike XXL in a theater with people who like it — do it. It is one of my few universal recommendations.