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Austin Pendleton is the cinematic surrogate for all of us big chickens. And he has to make our chickenshittedness more cinematic -- make it bigger and more dramatic than it it is in our day-to-day acts of standard cowardice. So Pendleton has to project his chickenhood -- he twitches, he stammers, he casts his moist and plaintive eyes down at the carpet. He barely even has to do anything, though: Pendleton has so completely become the personification of querulous cinematic wussiness that he practically doesn't even have to speak to convey it. His entire being is a metaphor of wussiness. He is, we daresay, the King of movie wussitude. (The Queen? Bob Balaban.)

One proven method H!ITG!s can use to entrench themselves in the public's hearts and minds is to put themselves in viewers' eyelines when they're young. Austin Pendleton pulled this off early in this commentator's childhood when he starred in what is still one of his biggest hits: The Muppet Movie. Pendleton stars as Max, Smithers-esque toady to frog-leg-shilling supervillain Doc Hopper. Max isn't an especially original character: where there's supervillainy, there's usually a merely moderately evil henchman who saves the day for the heroes by belatedly discovering his innate sense of morality. It's the best role an actor like Pendleton can hope for, though: wussy, to be sure, but ultimately redeemed by his generosity of spirit toward a band of felt puppets. As we all eventually are at some point in our lives.

Pendleton went on to play ineffectual weenies in many other productions: a stammering defense lawyer in My Cousin Vinny; an unhinged ex-chess phenom in Searching For Bobby Fischer; a neurotic tropical fish in Finding Nemo. In fact, in the last of these, it didn't even take a shot of his face to communicate neurosis: his voice alone got the message across loud and...well, actually not quite "loud and clear," since only self-confident types speak that way. Pendleton's Nemo voice work communicated neurosis soft and mumbly.

We will allow that it's possible Pendleton has played against shambling, dweeby type in some of the many crappy movies he's made that we never have seen and never intend to see -- from the crabby-First-Lady romp Guarding Tess to the Shelley Long vehicle (yes, kids, there really was a time when there was such a thing as a "Shelley Long vehicle" that didn't go straight to tape) Hello Again to something called The Summer Of My Deflowering (seriously). Possible that he's played against type dozens of times? Certainly. Likely? We d-d-d-doubt it very much.

But, as of last week, we can point to one instance when Austin Pendleton definitely did play a character unlike his usual type. Kind of. As the hundredth episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, which aired last week, began, we met Pendleton's Horace Gorman as he begged strangers for help at a train station, having just had his junk cut off. Eventually, we learned that there were quite a few women who had the motive to perform the amateur surgery: Gorman's special kink was abducting young women and keeping them as sex slaves in an underground dungeon. Ew, right? He was a big creepy creep! He wasn't a weenie little wuss at all, right? Except, even as an extremely perverted sexual predator, Gorman was ineffectual: he not only didn't get away with it, but he ended up stabbed to death before the episode was half over. If they ever make a live-action Ziggy movie, this poor fool should be at the top of the casting director's wish list.

Oh, and: Austin Pendleton is not the dad from ALF. He could be that dude's brother, though.