Swayze Theory: Foundational Assumptions

Recently, my lawyer Sam and I had a discussion that made me realize it was time to provide an introductory statement about Swayze Theory. The discussion was the result of a post I made titled “Movies For The People.” In this post, I made a comment about how Mark Whalberg-Marky Mark is my favorite actor and human. My lawyer accused me of being blasphemous. How, he inquired, could I possibly claim that Marky Mark, and not Patrick Swayze, is my favorite actor and human? My lawyer, with his head stuck so far up in the lex, had forgotten some of the foundational assumptions of Swayze Theory. In my mind, any theory, discourse, or practice must make some foundational assumptions—some assumed true or false statements—in order to function on the level of a theory, discourse, or practice. Here are a few such foundational statements that are revealed by the discussion had by my lawyer and I. I would also like to dedicate these remarks to Swayze himself, whose recently discovered illness will hopefully not prevent him from continuing to live a full life.

1. Swayze is not a human and I need to do little more than provide one word to prove that he is not a human: Ghost. This assumption is very much bundled up with the next assumption.

2. There are certain moments within texts where that particular text reveals its own relationship with another text. While it is impossible for a human mind to uncover the long chain of relations that exists between all extant (and non-extant) texts, we can discover small parts of this textual chain (this, actually, is an assumption within an assumption). Here is an example of how this works for Swayze Theory:

There is a scene in Point Break in which Keanu/Johnny is describing to Busey/Papas how he followed Swayze/Bodhi through out the day. He says something like the following: “He went to do his laundry, went to the bank and deposited some money, went to Tower Records to pick up some CDs, went to Patrick’s Roadhouse for lunch ….”. I’ll stop here as the secret has been revealed. In this last descriptive utterance concerning Bodhi’s daily activities, Johnny mentions a place called Patrick’s Roadhouse. In this moment, we have a firm textual connection between three seemingly disparate worlds and associated persons: i) Point Break and Bodhi, ii) Road House and Dalton, and iii) the real world (in this clip, he actually introduces several more potential forms of himself into the world) and Patrick Swayze.

What this shows is that there is no distinction between the films as texts that Swayze inhabits or those inhabited texts and the real world as text that Swayze inhabits. In this revelation we see that Swayze can safely travel between textual realities: he can move freely between, to follow the line of our example, the world of Point Break, the world of Roadhouse, and the real world. He can travel between their corresponding ontologies, but he transcends them, or embodies them. It is not that he loses himself as Dalton when he travels from Roadhouse to become Bodhi in Point Break, but he is all these things at all times and in every textual world. So, as our first assumption claimed, Bodhi is not a human because he is in fact a ghost, and we can appeal to Ghost to show this.

What does this have to do with the discussion with my lawyer? Well, Swayze is not an actor. In order to be an actor, it seems as if the person would have to be pretending to be the person that they are in the film. But, as I have just shown, Swayze is not pretending to be Bodhi in Point Break because he actually is Bodhi. Swayze is not pretending to be Dalton in Roadhouse because he actually is Dalton. Swayze actually is at all times in all textual worlds what he only appears to be at particular times and in particular textual worlds.

Welcome to Swayze Theory.

Bonus: One of Bodhi’s great speeches from Point Break.