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Five or six years ago, the "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" game started to get reported as a quirky, silly story in magazines like Movieline, Time, and EW. Looking back on it now, it is the kind of phenomenon that defined the early days of the internet as it became a resource in use by regular people, as opposed to scientists and engineers and such; the Kevin Bacon game was the sort of frivolous trifle people used to email to their friends in that halcyon, long-ago time before their friends' in-boxes were overrun with spam touting herbal Viagra and unsecured credit cards. The conceit of the game -- in case you were born yesterday -- is that any celebrity can be connected, in six steps or fewer, to Kevin Bacon, through his many film roles. (Though -- psst! It also works with just about anyone who was in JFK. Because everyone was in JFK. If you think back to what you were doing in the spring of 1990, I think you'll find that you were, in fact, in Dallas filming JFK. But I digress.) The Six Degrees game turned into a medium-sized blip on the pop-cultural radar, with the game's creators coming out with a book and board game based on the Bacon-centric pastime. An entire episode of the middle-of-the-road sitcom Mad About You was built around the game, ending with an appearance by Bacon, playing himself. And then, earlier this year, Visa made a TV spot to promote its check card, in which Kevin Bacon -- asked to produce ID when writing a cheque in a bookstore -- instead produces several civilians who represent the six degrees of separation between himself and the cashier.
The question is: how did Kevin Bacon get here? What is he, Wayne Newton, all riffing on himself in a damn Visa ad? I mean, it's all well and good for a celebrity to have a sense of humour about himself, but there is a time and place to display it. Go on Conan and do a "Bacon Secrets" segment; don't give even MORE attention to the dipshits who made up this stupid game about you by referencing it in a credit-card ad. IN WHICH YOU PLAY YOURSELF. That's for Donald Trump and Mr. T., not ostensibly respectable actors.
But on the other hand, by the time the Visa spots started running, Bacon hadn't starred in a movie in nearly two years -- nothing since Hollow Man (which this commentator judged the worst movie of 2000, by the way). And yeah, there was the uncredited cameo in Novocaine, and sure, he could tell anyone who'd listen that he'd spent the long hiatus making more Bacon Brothers albums or playing with his kids -- and that's all well and good, but the hard fact is that his fame field has been lying fallow. Maybe Bacon needed to do the Visa ad to remind the public that he was still alive.
Kevin Bacon's career started circling the drain quite some time ago. Other than Footloose and Diner and Apollo 13 and maybe The River Wild, it's been a while since he had anything to do with a hit movie, much less headlined one (and I would argue that, given that Tom Hanks's giant head obliterated the view of everyone else in it, Apollo 13 doesn't count). Think about it. Wild Things? Picture Perfect? Telling Lies in America?
Some of Bacon's recent film choices probably looked good on paper. Sleepers, for instance. Based on a hugely successful true-crime (or was it?) book, starring megastars like Brad Pitt and Robert De Niro, and stars of tomorrow like Billy Crudup and Ron Eldard. And yet, its box-office performance and impact on society would best be described as "blah." The Air Up There? How were we to know that audiences only like to watch benevolent white people teaching black people from backwards countries how to bobsled (as in Cool Runnings), not play basketball. Maybe audiences would have found Stir of Echoes more compelling had it not come just a few weeks after -- and shared similar subject matter with -- The Sixth Sense. Bad timing seems to have doomed his current film, Trapped, as well; because the movie's kidnapping plot line mirrors that of several real-life abductions over the past few months, Columbia cancelled the movie's ad campaign and declined to arrange publicity for any of its stars. The result: the movie landed in tenth place, with a gross of $3.2 million.
Why can't Bacon get it together? It doesn't seem to be for lack of trying. The long post-Hollow Man break notwithstanding, he's worked pretty steadily since his film début in Animal House, starring in 46 movies since then. But he just can't catch a break. And from what we can surmise about him personally -- which isn't much; his middling career success has meant that he is not, like so many other stars, oppressively overexposed -- the cause of his career flatline doesn't seem to be that he's a giant asshole. (The same could not be said, we hear, of, oh, say, I don't know, Val Kilmer.) Bacon's just amassed a list of credits that are almost good -- sufficient to get him later jobs (so he's not box-office poison; more like box-office ipecac), but not so good that he can claim a permanent place on the A-list.
Why, then, is Kevin Bacon still among us? Residual fondness for Diner? Because he and wife Kyra Sedgwick are the cutest Hollywood lookalike couple since Eric Stoltz and Bridget Fonda broke up? So that hack profile writers have an excuse to use the headline "Bacon Sizzles!"?
Whatever the reason, we've coddled Kevin Bacon long enough. It's time for him either to make a hit movie or step aside and make room for James Spader's comeback.
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