Kevin Bacon was my first celebrity crush at the ripe age of eight.
Sure, Chase from Zoey 101 was cute, and Austin from Austin & Ally was okay… Harry Styles would come along in a few years to really rock my world (along with my impending bisexuality, thank you, Miley Cyrus). But Kevin Bacon? The start of a girl’s yearning for the long-haired skater boy.
As a child, I watched Tremors, presumably with my father on a weekend cable binge (around the same time I was traumatized by The Good Son with McCauley Culkin). I was equally enthralled by the young, mulleted Bacon and his one-liners (“I found the ass end!”) and his love interest, sparkly blue eyes and brunette curls, and gulp, there’s Kevin cleaning her wounds. Clearly, this movie, thirteen years my senior, was a pivotal moment for little me.
I tried to recreate this feeling the only way I knew how— by finding and watching every Kevin Bacon movie. I grew up with the belief that Kevin Bacon was an A-lister, the best of the best; I also grew up being told by my dad (a different Kevin) that they grew up near each other and “probably passed each other on the streets”. So yeah, I know Kevin Bacon, no big deal. He’s basically my godfather.
Shockingly, I never found a connection to Footloose, a result of an unintentional (and lifelong) bias against musicals; little me had decided, Kevin Bacon or not, that Footloose fell squarely in this box. My parents gifted me several copies of Tremors, though, and a signed copy of Footloose since I wouldn’t watch a signed copy, anyway. I received numerous Kevin Bacon DVDs for Christmas that year; the next year, I received four copies of Drake and Josh Christmas, though that’s a whole other pop culture obsession of mine.
Some of Bacon’s newer stuff, I will admit, is harder to get through — They/Them, the horror movie based on a conversion camp, was absolutely unwatchable, no matter how hard they tried to do it “well”. However, the 2013 show “The Following” quickly climbed to the top of my list once I spotted Bacon’s familiar face in my Recommended one afternoon. Already ahead of the game as a crime/horror/cult-ish drama, and produced in the golden era of cable TV, “The Following” is the long-term Bacon-fix I’ve been searching for.
Kevin Bacon isn’t the only weird, funky man I’ve found myself landing on, however. Willem Dafoe? Have you seen that man play the Green Goblin, do the crazy eyes? Dafoe is definitely less classically attractive today (though his younger days… PHEW! Young Harry Styles, anyone?!), but something about the man is alluring. As a child, I loved Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man, despite my intense fear and hyperfixation on the Green Goblin. My mom would pull up scene selection, and I would point furiously to the World Unity Festival, where the Green Goblin makes his grand appearance to Peter, MJ, Harry, and the rest of New York City.
I want to make clear that this appreciation for weird, funky men is not a sexual attraction, though I’m not arguing the validity of their sex appeal.
A new addition to this group is Jonny Bernthal, discovered when my partner forced me to watch “The Walking Dead,” which quickly took on a life of its own in my head. Jonny — crooked nose, rugged jawline, choppy accent — was immediately granted entry to my Weird Funky Men Club. Now accepting Jonny Bernthal recs….
I call this, loosely, the Harry Styles effect — of course, Harry is the latest to the game of these men, but he embraced his Unique-ness head-on and allowed me to discover the common principle I admire in each of them. I could be wrong, projecting fantasy ideals of a safe and feminine man, but they all share a certain ruggedness, rejection of the status quo, and self-assurance that draws them to me. For example, Willem Dafoe does not have a single normal picture; many of them may now be AI, but they were inspired by the plethora of photoshoots Dafoe has done, posting up in the strangest ways. And I’m here for it — I know Harry would be too.
Go find yourself a weird, funky man to watch while the world ends!
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