Farewell Patrick Swayze

The death of Patrick Swayze is pretty saddening for a lot of obvious reasons: he passed away young; he fought against cancer and lost; and at least as far as his public profile admitted, he seemed like a decent human being.

There is something truly terrible and truly terrifying about watching a man who was once a symbol of physical excellence wither away from a fatal disease. Not that I personally went far out of my way to watch his decline: regular trips to the supermarket, glancing at the covers of People Magazine and the tabloids in the checkout line, serves as a kind of time-lapse photography for stars gaining weight and losing life.

Besides the mortal reasons to express sorrow for his death, there are the cinematic ones. I won’t claim that Patrick Swayze was a great actor, but he was certainly an emblematic and pleasurably watchable one, especially for my generation. He carried not one, not two, but several different typecasts on his shoulders: likeable next door guy; dancing virtuoso; sex symbol; and of course, redneck avenger. As a teen in the 80s keenly interested in things like martial arts and post apocalyptic warfare, I embraced the latter, and watched Swayze deliver the goods in Roadhouse and Steel Dawn.

Appearing in a wide range of roles, it’s hard not be a fan of at least one of his movies. Or a hater. Ghost is pure garbage and its long list of Oscar nominations only testifies to 80s Hollywood as a place of rapidly declining sensibilities in artistry and intelligence; and Dirty Dancing, well, I missed it in the 80s and I’m not planning on renting it anytime during this life.

But Red Dawn? I could wax poetic for the rest of this post on this brilliant movie: classic eighties action; high concept heroics; John Milius at his bloody best; Harry Dean Stanton in a Cuban prison camp (in Colorado, no less). And let’s not forget the highly underrated (for both glory and cheese, two realms in which Swayze was king) Next of Kin in which good old boys from Kentucky make a special trip to Chicago to hunt down gangsters with compound bows and other hillbilly weapons. Patrick Swayze was the heart and soul of those movies, and during the 80s, the go-to guy for country-fried action. While Arnold was delivering quips in Bavarian-style blather, Swayze was speaking home grown American, and busting heads with a BMI suited for humans not bovines.

Finally, there is Donnie Darko, in which Swayze plays a motivational speaker and closet pedophile. It’s a great role, and certainly one of his best perfs as a purely supporting character. Before this movie made its way into my own film viewing universe in 2002, I had pretty much relegated Swayze to the annals of eighties history. I hadn’t seen him in anything new for years (and certainly wasn’t going out of my way to seek his films). But suddenly I was paying attention again. And then…

You’ll be missed, Patrick.

- Demon