Millennials Magazine

“Regrettably, I did in fact fail my most recent drug test and if I am asked, I am prepared to appear before judge Fox next week as a result.”

-Lindsay Lohan’s Twitter, September 18 2010.

THIS SUMMER, I wrote a lot of stories about a lot of things. When you blog, sometimes you’re going to spend a good 30-40 minutes scanning your Google Reader and sweating it out, hoping with increasing desperation that someone with good SEO will do something. You can’t just sit there twiddling your thumbs, and sometimes nothing is going on, so you find something, even if you’ve written about it a lot.

I wrote a lot about bedbugs. I wrote a lot about American Apparel. I wrote a lot about Jersey Shore. And I wrote more than I expected to about Lindsay Lohan. By the beginning of this past summer, she had already been a tabloid fuckup for a few years. If you search “Lindsay Lohan” on TMZ, you’ll come up with almost 1,700 results. She had entered into the realm of Constant Mess (class: We No Longer Can Keep Your Fuckups Straight Anymore), joining fellow victims of tabloid fame like Paris Hilton, and looking farther back, River Phoenix. Even Marilyn Monroe. Jail, DUIs, a stormy relationship (with the tabloid-friendly bonus of being a homosexual one), erratic behavior, drugs, disconcerting photographs with knives, incriminating photographs with drugs, the whole bit.

This summer she was sentenced to jail for violating her probation stemming from a DUI charge in 2007. I wrote a quick post about it. I embedded a video from The Parent Trap, which came out when Lindsay Lohan was 12 years old. It’s the scene in which the American twin, posing as the British twin, meets her mother for the first time since she was a baby. It’s sweet. Above the video, I wrote, “Poor girl. It’s been a strange trip since this, huh.”

My post got two comments: “Ha! This is what Lohan gets. You break the law, you pay.” And: “Lindsay really is a great example of all the things wrong about America today. I definitely can’t believe why she would get so much blog attention!”

“Hey, buddy, you’re not pretending anymore. You’re plastic. Cold, shiny, hard plastic.”

-Janis Ian, Mean Girls

AFTER A FEW DAYS, I grew tired of the LiLo blitz. I wrote a post called, “Let’s All Stop Giving a Shit About What Lindsay Lohan is Doing in Jail,” and I argued (even though I had written a post only one day before about that exact subject) that it was time to call off the dogs.

Listen: whatever. It was fun for about five minutes to speculate about what she’s doing in there, but a reading list? Talking on the vents? Come on. She’s probably not going to do a damn thing, she’s in solitary confinement. Then she’ll be in rehab, and then after that, she’ll be back in the public eye, probably messing up again, and then let’s get back to talking about her endlessly, as is our duty as a culture. Let’s consider this a well-deserved vacation for all of us.

A vacation, for us? As if tearing into this girl’s disastrous  life is normal and expected? “Our duty as a culture?” David Foster Wallace would have a fucking field day with the above.

Yeah, I was that presumptuous, although I don’t know if my heart was really in it. It’s funny, because when you say that you pity celebrities like her, people scoff. Stars have money, opportunities. In the most obvious ways, I guess. But just try to look at a recent picture of this girl and tell me that “tragic” is not the right word. It’s just that – and it’s hard to put your finger on – something is really wrong, and not just with her.

Famous people exist in two worlds, though: the world of their actual work/product, and the world of their tabloid escapades. Both of those worlds were fine for a while, for Lindsay. Mean Girls was and still is awesome. Although now – frankly – who could even name the last two or three movies she’s done?

If you count the one we live in, then celebrities live in three worlds. I’m not sure that Lindsay Lohan does, though. And that, I think, is the problem. Her career: down the shitter. Her reputation in the media: see above. And the girl’s been living in this awful cage of cameras and entourages and drugs and people whispering in your ear and telling you, “Lindsay, you’re gorgeous” for years now. Plenty of drugs and plenty of money. And what else is left?

As of last week she’s back in rehab, after failing a court-ordered drug test. At this point, it is almost white noise. “Our duty as a culture?” I don’t know what it is, or if we ever had one. Maybe we can’t help her now, but we might be responsible for her. I feel responsible for her, personally. I wrote about her, but I didn’t think about her. I engaged in the dissemination of the Lindsay Lohan Product, while forgetting about the Lindsay Lohan Person, who does, I think, still exist.

via millennialsmag.com

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