Strange Pleasures: Patrick Swayze

When Patrick Swayze moves, we like to watch. In Dirty Dancing (1987), 17-year-old Frances “Baby” Houseman (Jennifer Grey), her mouth agape, fades into the background when Swayze’s Johnny Castle hits the dancefloor for the first time. His passionate mambo scatters the crowd. When Swayze as James Dalton, the lead bouncer at a skeevy gin joint in Road House (1989), takes out the proverbial trash, Elizabeth (Kelly Lynch), the dreamy doctor who becomes his love interest, grips a wooden post, her lips trembling as she takes in the sight of her man beating shit-stirrers to a pulp. Then there’s the scene that introduces us to Swayze’s bank-robbing surfer Bodhi in Point Break (1991). Twinkling synth tones announce his arrival as if he’s an otherworldly being descending upon us. Bodhi emerges from his liquid cave, cutting through the tide, his hand grazing over the ripples of the current, literally stopping Keanu Reeves’s undercover agent Johnny Utah in his tracks.