The Five Movie Characters Men Wish They Were, Part 3-David Wooderson

So far, we’ve had the cool guy and the criminal. Now, it’s time to hit you with the ladies’ man. And, in the annals of film, there has never been a ladies’ man like David Wooderson.

“Who is David Wooderson?,” you might ask, if you were an awful being that I wouldn’t hesitate to run over. This…this is David Wooderson.

That line makes “To be, or not to be” sound like loose excrement tumbling forth from a squatting bum’s asshole onto a garbage-strewn Bronx pavement by comparison. Maybe I could have gone with Richard Gere in American Gigolo or An Officer and a Gentleman, but a vital criteria for “ladies’ man” in my book is seducing women, not Habitrails and their occupants.

Ryan Gosling’s Noah Calhoun in The Notebook was also quite the romantic, but all of his efforts were faithfully focused upon a single woman, which practically brands him a homosexual in my book. He does deserve points for getting through this scene without delivering a right cross to Allie’s glass jaw, then allowing the tide to gently sweep away her still-warm corpse, though:

“Now say you’re a bird, too.” Really? How did he restrain himself from yelling back, “I’m not a bird, but I do have two big eggs you can scramble in that mouth, bitch!”? I suppose a youth spent listening to N.W.A. really has taken its toll upon me.

David Wooderson was the man because he was on screen for roughly 17 seconds of Dazed and Confused‘s run time, but for every last moment of it, we were certain that moustache smelled of cheap cigarettes, bong resin and an opened can of tuna. There wasn’t a single scene where he failed to spit game that would have made Mother Theresa drop to her arthritic knees. Here’s a perfect example:

That entrance alone, the “All right, all right, all right,” combined with that smile, would be enough to make a receptive woman’s vagina do an impression of New Orleans’ levees during Hurricane Katrina. Ginger is stuck with her two beta male friends, though, so she can’t quite pop out of the car and let Wooderson relieve her of her virginity across the hood as those two yutzes look on and quietly sob to themselves.

What brings the scene home is Wooderson’s declaration of, “I will see you there,” with the quick cut to our redhead about to put her teeth through her lip like a hamster that hasn’t gnawed enough toilet paper tubes. Is she grossly unattractive? Yes. Does she probably have a bush that looks like a halved basketball comprised of wiry red bristles? Yes. It doesn’t matter. Wooderson landed her with the same effort it’d take Michael Jordan to make a shot five feet from the hoop. But this isn’t the penultimate display of Wooderson’s seductive powers. No, that would take place in the clip below.

I’ve analyzed this like the Zapruder film. Wooderson is last on screen at the 0:38 mark. At 1:21, he’s back, now flirting with a foxy black chick. For those of you who didn’t breeze through first grade arithmetic like I did (yeah, I’m a savant), that’s less than 45 seconds, and she’s already looking like she’s hurting for a squirting. David only has one hurdle to clear: The penis size check. At 1:22, the woman in question takes a furtive glance down at Wooderson’s junk. Note his reaction: There is no flinch, no look of, “Well, the jig is up.” No, instead, Wooderson begins to smile even wider. You can practically hear him say, “All right” in that voice of his as she looks back up to convey that they’re in business. I have failed to build chemistry that strong with a woman over the course of years. David Wooderson did it in under a minute.

And that is why I wish I were David Wooderson. Why we all wish we were David Wooderson. Just remember, when you quote the “That’s what I love about these high school girls” line from above (and you will), don’t forget the “yes they do” at the end. If it were unimportant, Wooderson wouldn’t have wasted his time saying it.

Tagged as: david wooderson, dazed and confused, five movie characters men wish they were.