We sweded this pic last year to accompany our previous story (allegory, Montessori) about Haim & Feldman, but sadly it's even more applicable today.

As we showed in our parlour game Love/Hate, life’s often about picking favourites. Coke or Pepsi? Ralph or FHM? Coles or Woolworths? Regular or soy? Haim or Feldman?

As we sadly discovered this morning, that last choice has now become a more poignant one, for Corey Haim, teen heartthrob to a generation of kids who grew up with him in the ’70s and ’80s, has died at age 38 of an apparent drug overdose.

Haim wasn’t the first teen idol. Nor was he the first ’80s teen idol. Nor was he the first fucked-up former child star. Nor was he the first fucked-up former child star from the ’80s. He’s not even the first child star with whom we grew up to die prematurely (vale Jonathan Brandis). But somehow his death is an emblematic Gen-X death.

The weird thing, though, is that I have a clear memory of only one Haim performance – The Lost Boys – and dim memories of License To Drive. I’m not alone; at The Vine, Clem Bastow writes, “I say this not to denigrate his memory, and more to demonstrate my lack of it: so much that seems precious to my peers completely passed me by.”

Failure to remember Corey Haim doesn’t necessarily make someone a generational failure, though. It’s actually striking how little the sad reactions to Corey Haim’s death depend on a knowledge of his films. When Bud Tingwell died last year, The Enthusiast wrote that it’s a hallmark Generation X quality to grant our favourite actors a pop-cultural presence that transcends their actual body of work. Just as Tingwell became The Late Show’s beloved “Gramps”, Corey Haim will always be one half of “the two Coreys”.

Indeed, that was the title of the reality TV show in which Coreys Haim and Feldman starred in 2006. It was cancelled midway through the second season, apparently because Haim’s drug addiction made him difficult to work with.

But you probably better remember The Simpsons parody in the episode ‘Brother From The Same Planet’, in which Lisa becomes addicted to calling the Corey hotline. (The visuals may relate to Corey Worthington, Party Liaison, but the audio is the Simpsons original.) This might have seemed like a piss-take of tween girls’ general fascination with unthreatening pubescent sexuality, but the thing is that the Coreys actually did have a hotline.

Perhaps what moves us about the death of Haim is the loss of “the two Coreys”. Both the same age, Haim and Feldman were two sides of a coin, two rallying standards for the same tribe. Haim was the pretty, earnest one; Feldman the wisecracking, cynical one. Like Haim, Feldman spent the ’90s and ’00s struggling to get his career back on track, but was increasingly forced to fall back on his halcyon years with a succession of straight-to-video sequels. It’s not just that his dear friend has died; he has lost the basis of his own professional identity.

This year’s Academy Awards featured a parade of actors who worked with director John Hughes, who died suddenly last year. Hughes excelled at conveying not only what it’s like to be young, but also that the loss of youth equals the loss of joie de vivre. “When you grow up, your heart dies,” Ally Sheedy says in The Breakfast Club; and it’s a line that rang true on the actors’ careworn (or drug-worn, in the case of Macaulay Culkin) faces.

Perhaps we also mourn Corey Haim because he reminds us that we, the kids who loved him in his salad days, are also growing old. Haim was another kind of Lost Boy, because his fall into drug addiction and career obscurity symbolised not just the loss of youth but the shutting down of possibilities. Despite our own pervasive nostalgia, we still hope for better days ahead… as did Corey Haim.

He will be missed.