When it comes to women on the screen, my fellow offenders Iris, Elaine and Roger are all fans of name-taking, ass-kicking, long legged characters who can outdo any male badass. They are the cool, lethal silent types – independent, resourceful, surviving and thriving on their quick wits, disarming sexuality and devastating body blows. Fair enough.

But I’d like to make a case for damaged goods.

I like train wrecks. I like characters who are way flawed, way hot, and who all need a nice stable Virgo to attempt to – and fail at – reforming them. But this Virgo also quickly concedes that you don’t really want to tame a tiger, that even if you could, it would kill the life spark in them that attracted you in the first place. Put that tiger in a cage and it will end up depressed, dead, or pissed.

That life spark is volatile – it glows and dims unpredictably – and erupts into jets of hot blue flame when you’re not looking. More often than not, it will burn out pretty quick and leave you singed, but for a few minutes, at least, you will have felt alive.

So…

Clementine, in Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind.

This is the first time I’ve ever seen a properly rendered “hot mess.” Pretty, yet fights her looks behind serial hair dyes and odd make up. Honest, but cruelly tactless. Mercurial in her moods. Fire and ice. Turns on a dime. From 0 to 60 without warning – pick your metaphor. This is every tattooed and pierced train wreck who has ever worked in my bars, and who is a citizen of every bohemian quarter of every decent sized city in the country.

She’s taking one junior college class somewhere with an eye toward fashion or jewelry design, she’s waiting tables, her boyfriend is in a mediocre garage bad (or, as she will spin it, “it’s kinda like Iggy meets Roxy Music,” which, of course, only a mother or deluded gf would say), and she’ll drop him soon. Not because she’s found someone else. Much more likely because she’s just vaguely dissatisfied with everything, herself included, and can’t help but f%#k things up, just out of habit. Now that is hot.

Irene Bullock, in My Man Godfrey

Can we get a shout out for the sweet, oblivious ditzes of the world? Carole Lombard showed us a goofy, incandescent woman who skips through life, oblivious to its pitfalls. She’s so sweet it’s infectious. Not toothache sweet – more like a child’s innocence and wonder sweet. No guile, no calculation. From heart to lips without censor. And none needed, because there is no meanness there. There’s no man so dour, serious or grouchy that she can’t thaw him out.

I was talking to a therapist once who told me the story of a patient of hers, a man in his 50’s who left his wife because he felt she was beneath him – not as well educated, not as prestigious a job, probably mixed up her salad and dessert forks, etc. Well, the reason he was in therapy was that now, ten years after the divorce, he desperately wanted her back. Why? As he put it, “She was always sweet and kind to me.” And he’s absolutely right. You don’t marry a college degree or job title. You marry a person, and if you can find one who treats you with kindness and respect, and who giggles like Irene Bullock, you’ve hit the lottery.

Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity and just about everything else.

First, the superficials: by traditional movie standards of symmetry and small features, she’s not the prettiest girl out there. Doesn’t matter. She could destroy “pretty girls” like Angelia Jolie or Julia Roberts with one withering glance or well placed twist of the heel. The woman is confidence. And confidence is sexiness. Through sheer force of personality, they take “looks” off the table entirely as a criterion for judgment. It’s what Katharine Hepburn did with gender equality issues: ends the debate by embodying its unassailable answer. Now obviously “confidence” isn’t a train wreck characteristic, unless, that is, it becomes hubris. Which, in Double Indemnity, it does. Stanwyck seduces and manipulates Fred MacMurray into helping her murder her husband, but even at the end, when she’s gut shot by MacMurray and dying, she’s got attitude doing it. And that’s hot.

Tina Fey on 30 Rock

Funny. Smart. Funny. Self deprecating. Funny. Cute scar. Funny. Cuter with glasses than without.

I admit, Liz Lemon is a pretty minor train wreck as train wrecks go – more of a fender bender, really, maybe even just a delay due to mechanical problems.

Of course Fey herself is no train wreck – I can’t help but consider her work behind the camera, creating the show, defining its tone, going toe-to-toe with Alec Baldwin. She’s willing to wear ugly makeup and ugly hairdos and make an all around ass of herself sometimes, not for cheap laughs, but for laughs grounded in reality and in the little misjudgments we all make, born of our human foibles: our vanity, selfishness and ambition.

And while we’re talking 30 Rock, let’s throw Jenna into the Irene Bullock category. Has unwavering self-centeredness ever been so cute?