Six Degrees of Separation

I’ve always loved the idea of six degrees of separation – that two things like people, objects, or ideas can be linked by just six degrees of separation, no matter where on earth they are from or what they are related to. An appropriate example of this is Google’s project called “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon”, that allows you to type any celebrity’s name into Google and find their “Bacon number”, or the number of people distancing themselves from Kevin Bacon. For instance, if you type “Julie Andrews Bacon number” into the Google search bar, you see that her Bacon number is two because both Julie Andrews and Steve Carell appeared in Despicable Me (Julie Andrews played Gru’s mother, while Gru was played by Steve Carell), and Steve Carell starred in Crazy, Stupid, Love with Kevin Bacon. Apparently, Barack Obama’s Bacon number is two. Sometimes I really love the internet.

Just last night, my friends and I ended up accidentally doing our own version of this, when we started talking about Black Hawk Down and went from movie to movie through actors and their connections, ending up somewhere completely unrelated. It started by naming all the famous actors appearing in Black Hawk Down, and going from there – Ewan McGregor, who was in Star Wars and Moulin Rouge; Jason Isaacs, who played a British commander in The Patriot, as well as Lucius Malfoy in Harry Potter; Tom Hardy, who was Bane in The Dark Knight Rises, as well as Eames in Inception, and Tuck in This Means War; also starring in This Means War was Chris Pine, who was in Unstoppable with Denzel Washington, in Star Trek as Captain Kirk, and in Princess Diaries 2 with Anne Hathaway, who also starred in The Dark Knight Rises with Tom Hardy. The connections are convoluted to say the least, but one movie would remind us of another, or another actor, and we’d spend a little bit of time talking about that one before moving on to the next. I know this makes us sound like movie nerds but it really wasn’t that bad, we were just really excited about watching movies for some reason. (For the record, Tom Hardy’s Bacon number is 2, the mutual connection being through Jennifer Morrison, who also briefly appeared in Star Trek with Chris Pine).

That kind of process is what leads me to wasting so much time on IMDb, the Internet Movie Database, by going from movie to actor to movie to actor, which is also why I have an excessive knowledge of actor names and movies that they were in. It’s definitely something to look into, if you haven’t already. You can learn a lot of fun things on there.

Returning to the 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon project by Google, it’s interesting that they found that it was important enough to spend that amount of time and effort developing it. But hey, at least it’s entertaining.