Blog On The Motorway

In all of the coverage of the death of Patrick Swayze, the focus has been on his hugely successful romantic lead roles, which for millions of young girls seemed to define the blossoming allure of the male form.  But for me, he also defined an early example of what masculinity was in two completely different movies.

Road House, in which Swayze played tough bouncer Dalton, was at the time an effortlessly cool movie. A tough guy movie, where the good guy rolls into to town and takes on the badass gangster who has taken it over, winning over the heart of a local girl in the process. Predictable enough, but Swayze put a different spin on the role, playing him as a peaceful man who centres himself with yoga and eschews material goods.

As the son of publicans, I grew up watching this film and imagining my parent’s lives to be as glamourous and cool as Dalton’s, but this film also provided me with a view of masculinity as something that can be understated, calm and reserved, rather than full of bravado. 

But Point Break, which starred Swayze as surfer/bank robber Bodhi, provided my adolescent self with that first definition of cool. Sure the film is a cliched manfest, with terrible dialogue and almost uniformly bad performances (most notably from the triumvirate of Swayze, Reeves and Gary Busey) but watch it again today and it’s still so fucking cool.

Bodhi is a man who lives life on the edge, who does whatever it is that he wants to do, unbridled by modern society. A man who willingly dies doing something he loves rather than be shackled by society. As a thirteen year old this was an entirely new concept to me, and while I’ve never been an adrenaline junkie, the first seed that I could carve out a life as I saw fit took root with Point Break.

So cheers to the Swayze, the chain-smoking man’s man, who showed me two small but important lessons growing up, through two terrible but brilliant films.