This weekend, the New York Times took a break from reporting meaningless, trite news items like the Democratic nomination of Barack Obama and the fragile state of the economy to give a report I actually cared about: Patrick Swayze will still be starring in the under-production A&E crime drama “The Beast,” despite being recently diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
The Times article was filled with the kind of positive sentiments and enthusiastic quotes from friends and colleagues that one would expect to find in a story about any good man battling a disease, but one quote from Swayze himself stood out to me. Not because it was especially poetic or insightful –- at least not in the traditional sense — but because it inadvertently encapsulated the essence of the “Dirty Dancing” star’s entire career. When asked about his upbeat attitude toward recovery, Mr. Swayze is quoted as saying, “I’m a cowboy. I’m a dancer. I’ll beat this.”
I am a cowboy. I am a dancer. With all due respect, the words read like Eagles lyrics. Life-threatening illness or not, these sentences would sound ridiculous coming from the lips of just about any other actor – or person, for that matter – on the planet. (Could you imagine the fallout – and religious implications – of Tom Cruise calling himself a cowboy?) Yet they somehow feel natural when uttered by Swayze, whose roles over the last 25 years have included bouncers, dancers, surfing bank robbers, and a shirtless banker who fucks Demi Moore on a pottery wheel.
Yes, technically Mr. Swayze does own a ranch and is a trained ballet dancer. But the acceptability of Swayze’s words is about more than that. For the bulk of his career, Swayze has chosen roles so absurdly bodacious that they border on parodies of themselves. In those roles, however, Swayze has never given in to the urge to take them as anything less than serious. Weather he’s killing invading Russians in 1984’s “Red Dawn” or killing post-apocalyptic bandits in 1987’s similarly titled “Steel Dawn,” Swayze has never taken the “Hey, how silly is this movie I’m in?!” approach, as so many contemporary leading men (Clive Owen in “Shoot ‘Em Up,” Bruce Willis in “Grindhouse,” the entire cast of Tony Scott’s “Domino,” etc.) have done.
The surprising sincerity of Swayze’s words reminded me of a 2007 essay by “A.V. Club” writer Nathan Rabin praising the non-ironic “awesomeness” of “Point Break,” a 1991 action film about an undercover FBI agent (Keanu Reeves) who infiltrates a gang of surfing, bank-robbing adrenaline junkies led by a wavy-haired skydiver named Bodhi (Swayze). If that description sounds like a joke, it isn’t. And that, Rabin argues, is precisely the point:
The key to Point Break’s enduring awesomeness is that it plays its premise one-hundred percent straight. If the film were made today I suspect it’d be filled with invisible air quotes and non-stop winks to let the audience know that the filmmakers are way too cool and hip and ironic to expect anyone to take Patrick Swayze seriously as the Buddha of the surfboard set… As “Snakes On A Plane” and “Spice World” both illustrate, nothing kills a potential camp classic quite like constantly letting audiences know you’re in on the joke.
The same way “Point Break” can have Swayze give Keanu Reeves a mid-air high five while sky-diving without a hint of irony, so Swayze can now proclaim with complete frankness that he’s a cowboy and a dancer while coming off as neither pompous, out-of-touch, or joking.
Silly choice of words or not, ironic or serious, I’m just happy to know that recent events haven’t taken the Swayze out of Patrick. Like all his fans, I wish him the best. And though I’m at a loss for the wisest words of consolation to offer Swayze at this juncture, I can borrow a few of the man’s own, spoken in “Road House” when his character, an ass-kicking bouncer with a PhD. in philosophy named Dalton, is asked what he studied in college:
“Just man’s search for faith,” answers Swayze, “and that kind of shit.”