This live video of Corey Feldman and his band performing at Riot Fest 2023 came up in my feed today. Without thinking much, I watched a bit of it, and now I regret doing so. Don’t watch it. But here it is in case you also want to regret something today.
The whole thing is a disaster, of course. Every detail, it’s all bad. I had to turn it off after skipping through the first few minutes because I was just feeling so awful about it.
It got me thinking about Feldman, and I remembered he was involved in a similar thing several years ago where he performed on a daytime talk show and it became an internet sensation. Everyone was sharing that performance online and laughing about how fucked he is, “is he for real or is this a joke, this is so insanely bad,” all that stuff. And of course, he has had many other far more serious, less funny, and just as public trials and humiliations. It all made me feel sad for him. He didn’t have a snowball’s chance in Hell, being raised as a child star in Hollywood. He was doomed from the moment his parents set him down this road.
But on top of feeling sad for Feldman, I started feeling angry that we all seem to feed on his missteps, on stars falling on hard times and making terrible choices. The video has so many views and so many comments, people are just lapping it up. I guess Britney Spears is another obvious example of someone people love to watch circle the drain.
I hate this quality in us. It’s a terrible trait to have, to feel good when someone else is doing badly. It would at least bother me less if we were more self-aware about this predilection, if we were like “yeah I’m a fucking sadist, I love seeing people suffer. I get off on being a mean-spirited person, it feels good to be awful.” Ok, that’s still horrible but at least you’re owning it. But for most of us we consider ourselves normal, fairly kind, whatever. We don’t consider watching Corey Feldman embarrass the shit out of himself over and over again a bad personal habit of ours, but I think that says a lot about who we are and what we derive pleasure from. I think it says that we aren’t as good as we like to think we are, and that we have a hidden sadistic bent that I find troublesome.
crimson highway 
I love Corey Feldman! I shook his hand at a screening of The Goonies. He and my wife talked about e-cigarettes, which were new at the time, as they were both quitting smoking. I’ve never clowned him for his music. You’d think more of his friend/idol Michael Jackson’s talent would have rubbed off, but hey, he’s happy. Like you said, it’s gotta be hard being thrust into the spotlight as a child star, abused on top of that, and largely passed up. There are videos of him singing the Lost Boys theme that I think are cool. Nobody shares those 🤷♂️