cocksman

I think I was buying into, or I felt obligated and it was my fault, to feed that image of bachelor, cocksman guy.

Such perfectly neat deadpanning, but with a trace of humility, too: sometimes even a cocksman realizes that he is also just a schmuck.

This was before they attained Oscars and honors and entered the Hollywood pantheon, when Spielberg was still an overgrown teenager who could barely dress himself, Scorsese was bloated by the cortisone he took for his asthma, Schrader was still a confused misogynist, De Palma was still plausible as a studly cocksman counting the notches on his bedpost, and Milius was still the over-the-top blowhard-surfer-raconteur he remains to this day.

Arnett’s Gob Bluth – an insanely unintegrated magician, clueless cocksman and a champion of lachrymose self-loathing in times of crisis – stood out as a brilliant comic creation even among the monsters and gargoyles in the rest of the cast.

The director’s and actor’s point, boldly taken and bravely shown, may well be that for this nonstop cocksman there is no hope of change, no resolvable crisis, no there there.