Best of 2023: Corey Feldman's Creepy Appearance on Celebrity Wife Swap is Both Embarrassing and Incriminating
In the many pieces I wrote about Corey Feldman for this site’s Corey Feldman Month, I’m afraid I glossed over a rather important aspect of the Lost Boys icon’ life and career: Corey Feldman is a creepy motherfucker. No, that’s underselling it. Corey Feldman is a super creepy motherfucker so scarred by the powerlessness and vulnerability he experienced as a deeply troubled child actor and even more troubled twenty-something drug-addled fuck-up that he’s devoted the past few years of his life to controlling the lives and careers of his “Angels” (the sexy, lingerie-clad young proteges/backing-band whose careers/lives he’s overseeing) with a feverish, wild-eyed intensity that makes Charles Manson seem positively chill by comparison.
Needless to say, the creepy Sex Cult leader element of Feldman’s persona and career is front and center in his episode of Wife Swap. Feldman comes off so badly that if I were a family member of one of Feldman’s “Angels” I would take the Wife Swap episode to the police as conclusive evidence that my loved one was caught in a malevolent, criminal cult and needed to be liberated and/or de-programmed.
Wife Swap is a perfectly fitting, generic title for this preeminent guilty pleasure, but more accurate and punchy names for the clearly scripted and manipulated “reality” show would be Celebrities Are Fucking Nuts and Holy Shit, Celebrities Are Just The Worst, Aren’t They? Both titles would fit this particular episode, as Feldman comes off as fucking nuts and also the fucking worst.
In his memoir Coreyography, Feldman grouses about the selective editing, scripting and manipulation employed to make him look like a huge asshole in Surreal Life but it’s hard to imagine a cut of this episode where Feldman wouldn’t look like a simpering, giggling, over-sexed, controlling man-child living out some weird fantasy at the expense of unfortunate young women.
As is their custom, the show begins with its mismatched subjects describing themselves in ways guaranteed to make them seem like insufferable caricatures of pompous, self-absorbed entertainers. In this case, that means Feldman describes himself as “avant-garde”, which I think to him means “wears a lot of colorful, flamboyant hats.” By that definition, Feldman is very avant-garde. By all other definitions, he is not.
Feldman is paired with In Living Color funnyman Tommy Davidson, who somberly rattles off credits like Juwanna Mann before saying, without a shred of irony or self-deprecation, that it would actually be difficult to not know who he is.
Davidson gives his entertainment world bona fides in his introduction but Feldman, as we have established, has a little bit more going on than most faded celebrities. Not every faded child star has their own sex cult, but Corey does, although he prefers to think of it as a management/production/talent type business that takes runaways from broken homes who are, in Feldman’s not at all creepy words, “coachable” and “teachable” and “not hung up on the concept of free will or agency.” Okay, I made that third one up but that is clearly the implication. There are zombies with more free will than Corey’s Angels. The pod people of Invasion of the Body Snatchers are brazen individualists compared to Corey’s Slavegels (that’s a portmanteau I just created combining “slave” and “angel”)
Feldman’s Angels must sign a contract and while I have not seen said contract, I’m guessing that a pretty central component of it involves a Non-Disclosure Agreement keeping people who’ve escaped Corey’s cult, I mean, amicably moved on from their purely professional relationship with the actor and musician, from spilling the beans and making a “program” where nubile young women sign a contract giving a troubled former addict with power issues control over their diet, exercise and personal lives seem even more ominous and repressive than it already does. Strange men are not allowed inside the “Feld-mansion” without the Feldman’s permission.
Early in the episode, Feldman is asked if he and the Angels pursue a polyamorous lifestyle and he giggles a creepy, Sex Cult leader giggle and replies that what happens behind closed doors stays behind closed doors. So, yes? Unless you want to believe otherwise?
Feldman’s Angels may be a sex cult. As with most sex cults, there’s a hierarchy with the Wise, All-Knowing Master (that would be the star of National Lampoon’s Last Resort, of course) at the very top as the unchallenged guru and master, with his main consort or “Maingel” underneath. Next up comes full-on Angels who have completed “the Program” but are not Maingels. At the very bottom lie Angels trainees.
For this episode of Wife Swap, Feldman swaps wives, or at least romantic partners, with Tommy Davidson. Davidson’s wife is a tall, buxom blonde sex bomb in painted-on jeans who modeled earlier in life and runs an upscale baby resale emporium. She embodies our culture’s impossible beauty standards: skinny, blonde, white, without an ounce of cellulite, but nevertheless busty and curvaceous.
You’d imagine a man obsessed with busty blonde woman like Feldman would welcome this vixen into his household and his harem. You would be wrong. Feldman has such impossible standards for female beauty that he condescendingly tells her that if she would only follow the Corey Feldman exercise and vegetarian diet regiment—a core component of “The Program” as laid out in the “Feld-Manual”, the ultimate guide to life inside the “Feld-mansion”—then she’d lose enough weight that she’d finally be ready to parade around in a white thong and tiny push-up bra the way God intended. And by “God” I mean “Corey Feldman.”
Feldman almost seems to be “negging” Davidson’s perfectly hot wife, who is understandably confused and not particularly overjoyed to suddenly find herself be part of a household single-mindedly devoted to serving the God complex and sexual hungers of a tacky former child star.
The Busted star-director has a disconcerting habit of using language, terminology and ideas that strengthens the impression that he’s running a mind-control sex cult with a sideline in modeling and live musical performance. If you don’t want people to think you’re taking runaways from broken homes and brain-washing them into doing your bidding continually referring to “The Program” and “The Contract” doesn’t help your case.
Feldman is clearly concerned that Davidson’s fiance will break his spell over his Angels by giving them forbidden knowledge about how, in the outside world, they’re allowed to do verboten things like talk to boys, eat a cheeseburger or take a Community College class if the mood strikes them.
Davidson can’t help but come across as relatively bland and decent by comparison. He talks throughout the episode about how he used to “party” for a long time, but came to a point in his life where he had to stop and devote his life to family and work. Davidson continually talks about how hard Feldman and his Angels “party.”
Now “party”, in this context, has two primary definitions. There’s partying as in “children’s birthday party”, “Super Bowl party” or “engagement party” and then there’s partying as in “drinking heavily and using illegal drugs and having casual sex with a bunch of other debauched revelers.”
It seems clear that Davidson is not saying that Feldman and the Angels throw birthday parties for children, yet sobriety is one of the cornerstones of Feldman’s life and philosophy. It seems weird to imagine Angels being allowed to snort a few lines or do shots if they’re not allowed to, say, wear pants or invite strange boys to their house.
Was Feldman indeed “partying” when he taped Wife Swap? His dark glasses, non-stop giggling and inability to behave like an adult suggest that he might have been. It’d actually be sad if every damning, flat-out pathetic moment in the episode was the product of a sober, lucid brain.
Davidson understandably isn’t too keen on his wife stripping down to a G-string for Feldman’s prurient delight. I can’t imagine Feldman leeringly telling her that her outfit was fine but “it would look better on the floor” because he wants to see “her physique” would make Davidson feel better about having his wife lost in Corey World.
The experience of Corey’s “Maingel” in Davidson’s home is nowhere near as morbidly compelling or awful. The only real conflict in this half comes from the Maingel feeling like Davidson isn’t supportive enough of his 21 year old daughter’s show-business dreams. Honestly, if I were Davidson I’d probably feel ambivalent about my progeny entering show-business as well. If Feldman weren’t so busy controlling vulnerable, suggestible woman, I suspect he’d be the first person to tell you the entertainment business if a hellhole that destroys lives and should be entered with caution or not entered at all.
Feldman lords over Feld-Mansion here like Hugh Hefner’s Mexican, non-union equivalent but the moment Davidson’s fiance starts to stand up to him he buckles immediately and behaves like a child apoplectic he’s not getting his way. See, “The Program” only works if you believe in it, and Davidson’s wife, to her credit, has no time for that bullshit. She calls him on his shit and his weird megalomania, but not as harshly as she could.
This episode of Wife Swap actually goes fairly easy on Feldman. He comes off as a flake, a creep and a weirdo, but his weird Sex Cult is portrayed as a harmless eccentricity when it seems like something more sinister.
Davidson is no feminist but he comes off about as well as anyone possibly can on a scuzzy enterprise like Wife Swap while Feldman comes off as badly as possible. Considering that just about everyone comes off looking like a jerk and a bastard on Wife Swap (to the point where they might as well just rename it “Bastards Swap”) that’s almost an achievement.
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