For this month’s Mutant Roundtable, we asked our writers to develop an extra measure of introspection and answer the question, “What movie character are you most like — and why?”

I’m Bruce from Matilda, or at least it’s who I most want to be. This is a kid who knows what he’s about. He wanted that cake, and he went for it. He knew he would get caught. He knows all about The Chokey. He ain’t scared.

Then, when faced with a daunting task, does he let it get him down? Absolutely not! He dives mouth first into adversity, and with the help of his friends, nothing is insurmountable.

I’d vote for Bruce for President, to be honest. Bruce inspires me daily.

Oddly enough, the character that popped into my mind was Kenny (Seth Green) from Can’t Hardly Wait. It’s not really that he’s incredibly short or addicted to goggles and suburban gangsta culture.

I think it’s because Kenny represents how much I was fishing around for identity back in my late teens and being an incredible dork while doing so. Everything about Kenny is an act until he finally drops it and becomes more comfortable with himself and his best friend. There’s nothing cool about him, nor is there about me, but that’s OK.

Long thought leads me to Casablanca’s Rick Blaine. I’m disillusioned with pretty much everything, but I still hate go*dam Nazis.

OK, so I was originally going to say Reggie Dunlop here, the Paul Newman character from Slap Shot. And then I was going to wax poetic about getting a bit older, losing just a bit of steam and recognizing that the brass ring just gets harder to grab as the years go by. Pretty heartfelt stuff. There wouldn’t have been a dry eye left in the house.

But then my lovely wife walked by and I asked her, “What movie character do you think I identify with?” and before I even completed the question she replied, “Chazz from Airheads. Duh.” And then she went off to work on the Forbin Project or whatever it is she does. I’ve never been quite sure, but it entails a lot of typing and threatening her four or five (I stopped counting) computers with bodily harm whenever one of them blue screens her.

So there you go. Chazz from Airheads. Because my wife said so.

When I heard this month’s roundtable question, “Who’s the movie character I most identify with” my mind immediately thought of Joe Gillis from Sunset Boulevard. And no, not the baroque Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, but the classic 1952 film noir from director Billy Wilder. As played by the excellent William Holden, Joe is a doomed B-movie screenwriter entangled by the delusions of the crazed, forgotten screen legend, Norma Desmond. The movie is a cynical deconstruction of the Hollywood dream, as Joe struggles to leave Tinseltown behind, only to be pulled back in for one last job. And a shot at a legitimate writing career when he falls for the charms of Betty Schaefer, a fellow screenwriter who wants to collaborate on a script.

I saw Sunset Boulevard in my college film class, and it blew my mind, surprised that an old black-and-white picture could pack quite a punch. Now, many years later, my life has some uncanny parallels with my celluloid avatar on the silver screen. I’ve had brief flashes of success in my writing career, but nothing that broke through. Like Joe, I found the constant hustle of the entertainment industry exhausting and demoralizing. I even had my version of Schwab’s Drugstore, the writing “headquarters,” where Joe meets up with Betty to work on a script. In my case, it was the West Hollywood Starbucks, a place where all manners of filmmakers and writers would gather, drink bad expensive lattes, bitch about the studios, and generally procrastinate on writing the next great American script.

Yet Hollywood holds both Joe and me under its spell. Where Joe is caught in the web of a silent screen starlet clinging to her past glory, my fascination is with the city itself. Los Angeles is a hard town, a labyrinth of overcrowded streets with attitude to spare. I’ve had many opportunities to leave this life and return to, as Joe would say, a quant desk job in Dayton, Ohio. Yet there’s an energy here that I’ve never found in another city. It truly is a city of reinvention, a place overflowing with ideas and creativity. And when you get depressed, you can look up at the iconic Hollywood sign and find that second wind to take on more abuse. So, Joe and I continue to be mesmerized by the crazed stare of Norma Desmond.

Now let’s hope I don’t end up like Joe Gillis, whose Hollywood ending is his dead body floating face down in Norma’s swimming pool. That’s not a spoiler; it’s the opening scene of the movie. Which means if you haven’t seen Sunset Boulevard, stop what you’re doing and watch it now. It truly is one of the great screen classics of all time.