cruelty

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.

ack, child stars

I’m watching Millie Bobby Brown’s interview on Hot ones…

…and I’m sickened at what a little monster she clearly is. I’ve bitched plenty about stars, and child stars in particular, and how how stardom warps them. I think MBB is, sadly, a perfect example of this. She is only 18 but she has learned so many gross Hollywood-isms, ways of acting cute-sy and sincere and affable that are, at least to me, completely transparent. She is faking all these things, she is so ‘on’ throughout this Hot Ones interview that I couldn’t even make it through it.

To make it worse, just look at how many views the video has. It’s got almost 18 million views after being up for 6 weeks. This video is a big hit. Now look at the comments. Everyone loves her, thinks MBB is charming and funny and cute and the greatest. So not only is it horrific what stardom has done to MBB, it’s horrific that most of us can’t recognize how fucked up and narcissistic she is.

I don’t know. Maybe I’m expecting too much. Maybe some guests treat this show as regular media that they have to be ‘on’ for. Just because I would want to approach interviews from an honest and genuine place doesn’t mean everyone else would. And I guess most interviewers are weird vampires anyway, just as fucked up as most stars, so stars need to put up a front to sort of guard themselves against those interviewers — I’m sure that if everyone suddenly wanted me on their shows, I’d either be too open and honest and end up in some hot water, or I’d hate the phony interviewers and walk out on them. I guess stars need defenses so they don’t end up in those situations. Maybe mature guests can see that Sean from Hot Ones is not a vampire, but MBB is too young and immature and maybe still enjoys being ‘on’ and lapping up the spotlight.

Ok, so I still think MBB comes off as a typically twisted child star and that’s really sad and gross, but I also can imagine why stars would come at interviews from a different place than I would. That’s giving them a lot of credit, it assumes they are extremely self-aware and I doubt most of them are but there must be at least a few. And I stand by my take on how the comments on this video illustrate our unhealthy relationship with stardom, the kind of fucked up star behaviour that we see as cute, charming, endearing, etc.

This post is a real mess. Whatever, don’t care.

kid90, and wow, solell moon frye seeks a lot of attention

Jenn and I watched the documentary Kid90 a few days ago. It wasn’t great. It was certainly an interesting look into the lives of young stars in the 90’s, just as awful and damaging as I imagined growing up in the Hollywood mire would be. I liked that aspect, and the (short) parts where former mega stars like Mark-Paul Gosselaar and Brian Austin Green talked about how grim it was to go from being a teen idol heartthrob to a wash-up before even age 20.

That’s not what I want to talk about though. What I want to talk about is how completely fucked I think the maker of the documentary, Solell Moon Frye, is. There were just too many massive red flags about her to ignore.

• Yeah, she was obviously decades ahead of the self-obsessed “document everything in my life and post it publicly” trend but just being ahead of an unhealthy trend doesn’t make it any less unhealthy.
• Any time people cry on camera, I don’t trust them. It always feels so performative. I feel it’s virtually impossible for any sane person to properly process that level of grief while in front of a camera, being conscious of how you look while you’re crying, what angle the camera is getting, etc. Crocodile tears.
• 98% of the documentary revolved around boys, both then and now. Besides herself, there was very little airtime given to women. Reeked of ‘seeking affirmation from the opposite sex,’ both as a teen and now as a middle-aged woman.
• Frye is still weirdly flirty with all her old crushes. Sitting on Brian Austin Green’s bed cross-legged, crying, asking him if what they had was “real”…such weird teenage behaviour from a middle-aged woman. He seemed so fucking uncomfortable in that scene, like he had been happy to talk about their experiences up until that point but once she started crying and saying asinine things, he thought to himself jeez I’d forgotten how weird this chick is — “uh, there, there, it’s all good, Solell.” Same thing with reconnecting with the dude from House of Pain, when she hops up on the planter box so they’re the same height and facing each other and it feels like they might kiss, and he’s obviously a little uncomfortable with how intense and flirty she’s being.
• If not for the other things listed here, the clip of Frye giving birth would have been fine. But considering her obsession with being in front of the camera at even the most intimate and personal times, this was the ‘jumping the shark’ moment for me. It was like, “look how much of myself I’m baring to you here — teen plastic surgery, teen suicide, drug use, losing my virginity as a teen to a 29-yr old Charlie Sheen, and now for the cherry on top, here’s me birthing a child.” Just so absurdly performative, attention-seeking.

The crazy thing is, I know all of these behaviours well because I dated a woman very similar to Frye. Right from our first date, she was oversharing, crying in front of me, making me sit on her couch while she sang karaoke-style for me, showing me home movies of herself as a teenager doing embarrassing things, asking me to give her massages in front of her co-workers just so they could see what a great guy I was and what a great relationship we had (despite never giving her a massage any other time and absolutely hating doing it, especially in public), obsessing over me for the next 10 years despite having only dated for three months, etc. I only noticed faint similarities between my ex-gf and Frye until the childbirth scene, and then I was like “whoah, this is 100% [my ex],” and that’s when I realized that Frye is definitely nuts.

My ex wasn’t a child star so it just goes to show you that anyone can be nuts, but I’m still quite sure that being a child star can ruin even the sanest person.

Anyway, I’m just surprised more people aren’t talking about this aspect of Kid90 because for me, it’s the single biggest takeaway: Solell Moon Frye is a very strange cat.