We would be remiss in not mentioning before this week fades away that Steve Guttenberg's latest fifteen minutes ran out when he was voted off ABC's Dancing with the Stars. In order to find this event deserving of comment, let alone a reason to break out the good champagne, one probably has to have lived through the 1980s, a period when Guttenberg's high public profile and cockroach-like staying power seemed to be one of the great pop culture mysteries of the time: to see Guttenberg starring in a movie was to better understand what some people saw in Judd Nelson. In the 1960s and 1970s, such performers as Woody Allen, Dustin Hoffman, and even Al Pacino had played smart but alienated guys who may have felt physically inadequate compared to the bigger, more conventionally attractive people around them but who suspected that if they didn't fit in with the societal ideal, then that meant there was something wrong with society. In the 1980s, a time that was both celebrated and assailed as a period when America (or, at least, American media culture) tried to get back to a smoother, quieter, more Leave it to Beaver kind of atmosphere after the upheavals of the preceding decades, Guttenberg came across as a sweet dork, a none-too-bright guy who just wanted to fit in, and maybe he was able to coast for a long time partly on the feeling of reassurance it may have given some people to see someone so spectacularly unexceptional starring in whole string of movies, even if four of them had the words "Police Academy" in their titles.

Guttenberg's movie career basically died overnight at some point--in a spirit of generosity, I'd pinpoint its absolute last gasp at 1990, with the sequel to Three Men and a Baby--and except for a recurring role on Veronica Mars and the occasional guest shot on a Law & Order series, he's been undetectable on radar ever since. The Dancing with the Stars appearance was his Rambo IV--the sum total of what '80s nostalgia is able to do for him now. Unlike his recent TV acting jobs, where he seemed rather grumpy, he was clearly overjoyed at having a camera pointed at him again and made no attempt to play hard to get. His dancing was more notable for the facial expressions he assumed while on the floor than for anything that his body was doing below the neck, but his beaming, nearly radioactive happiness at being seen by millions while a studio audience cheered his name struck many people as very touching. On his last show, he was paired with a male partner and later that night appeared on Jimmy Kimmel's talk show, where he said, " "I did what I was told and I had a great time." There, in a nutshell, is the essence of Guttenberg's screen persona--he may not get it, and whatever part of him that does get it may not be sure he likes it, but he does what he's told, and is thrilled to be a celebrity who does what he's told. In his last minutes before disappearing again from the face of the Earth, he passionately delivered what I suspect was an adjusted version of the speech he wrote in his head more than twenty years ago just in case he won an Academy Award for Coccoon, and then, just as he was saying, "If I can just say one thing," he was interrupted by the show's host, Tom Bergeron, bluntly telling him, "You can't." (The show was in danger of running overlong because of his babbling.) It was the closest that Steve Guttenberg has come to being associated with a perfect moment since the strip-club scene in Diner.