did Chris Martin just... fix us?
on modern scandals and the weird warmth of feeling part of something bigger
I don’t know about you, but I haven’t been able to make it two flicks of the thumb without the Coldplay kiss cam scandal popping up on my feed. It’s a Moment, for sure - one that started small and then spiralled into something far bigger than the sum of its parts.
I couldn’t confidently tell you their names, just that he is (or was) the CEO of a company that sounds vaguely space-adjacent but isn’t, that she’s the Head of HR, and that Chris Martin outed them. And that says a lot, really. About how two otherwise innocuous people making a deeply human and desperately average error in judgement managed to define a week of a social media generation.
Will we still remember next year? I wonder. It’s the sort of flash-in-the-pan cultural blip that ends up as a trivia question on The Big Fat Quiz of the Year. Let’s see, do we think it will be the play that the Mitchell Brook Primary School children act out for the contestants to guess? Or maybe one of them will appear as the ‘Mystery Guest’ that everyone has to guess who they are and what event led to them being known around the world?
Or maybe, most likely, it will dissolve into the meme-ether, replaced with the next best 6 seconds of content.
But what’s struck me is how nobody is really moralising. No one seems particularly concerned about protecting the privacy of the people at the centre of it. It’s as though the Moment has moved so fast that the real people have already been recast in the Netflix documentary version of the story and replaced with nameless caricatures. A CEO. A Head of HR. It’s so cliché (and as one memer observed, “one of the whitest things to happen ever”) that it folds back in on itself and becomes woefully ironic.
But for those of us observing and engaging through a screen, it’s also harmless in a way that feels rare these days. It’s a broadcast that is inconsequential to the rest of our lives, aside from providing some humour and conversational fodder, unlike a lot of the other headline-grabbing stories, which are tied to deeply problematic and concerning behaviours of people with far too much money and far too much power that we will all be materially impacted by their decisions in some shape or form.
Maybe that's part of why it’s resonated so widely. In a media landscape full of genuinely disturbing news, here was something we could collectively joke about without feeling complicit in something darker.
In my scrolling, I stumbled upon the latest from digital creator Morgan Evelyn. Perhaps you have seen her mumbling to herself, walking around her apartment, making inane observations that we’re all thinking but she’s just saying out loud into one of those tiny microphones. Well, never one to miss a beat, her viral play-by-play of this whole incident captures the journey I think most of us have been on these past few days:
White people at a Coldplay concert hardly seems like news.
Then
Am I supposed to know who these people are?
Then
Three things in life are certain. Death, taxes, and that you heard about the two people having an affair at Coldplay.
And finally:
I love that this was a shared experience for like all of society. I feel we really needed that.
That tracks. Because if you strip away the schadenfreude and overlook the ethical duty to be kind to our fellow humans, what’s left is a strangely warm feeling. Like we’ve all been part of something. Yes, technically, that thing may have been finding collective amusement over two people’s personal and professional implosion, but for those of us not directly involved, it was more wholesome and well-intentioned than that.
We’re clawing for things that bring us together. Moments that remind us we’re part of something bigger than ourselves, even if what binds us is as absurd as an affair being outed on a kiss cam. (The double irony being that’s largely why we seek out live music in the first place, scratching our itch to be one among many, a nameless face in the crowd. Well, usually nameless… har har.)
I honestly believe that the ability to find lightness in bleakness, and humour in tragedy, might be one of the most human instincts we have. And that we must protect that instinct at all costs.
In the middle of a bleak news cycle, generational existential dread, and generally rising baseline levels of anxiety, we found some temporary levity.
We all want to feel part of something. Now and then, a glitch in the cultural matrix offers it to us. This week, it was conducted by Chris Martin.
Turns out he was right.
Lights will guide us home.
And ignite our bones.
And maybe, just maybe, he did fix us.
(For a little while, at least.)
