'I'm literally falling apart," Lindsay Lohan is quoted as saying in the sensationalistic lead story in the new Vanity Fair with the cover lines, "From It Girl to Jailbird: Lindsay Lohan -What Went So Wrong ..." (the breathless, pulp-novel ellipses polish the overall scandal-mag aesthetic.)
This hardly provocative question uses a large, red font. Trailing after it, like a line of ants is the demure, black-type remark, "And How She Can Right Herself."
Well, posing on the cover and inside the magazine on a yacht, styled to look like an earthier, freckled Grace Kelly, is the first step. As is the spinning and damage control flaring throughout the article, where a number of unnamed "friends" and "sources" are cited, wantonly, in the manner of the so-often-reviled National Enquirer.
From the outset, Lohan presents herself to the interviewer looking "fatigued and drawn, stunned and maybe a little scared." She is, further, "a little raw," tastelessly spray-tanned, and too thin, but she shines, she just shines.
Having just finished a brief stint in jail (where a prisoner "nightmarishly" yelled at her, à la feckless millionaire fatso Brandon Davis a few years ago, "fire crotch!"), Lohan is also fresh out of rehab, and the news this week is swirling with stories about her. She may appear on Oprah! She wants a child; her lamentable father is getting a reality show; the star has dyed her hair to its true red and, at the MTV Video Music Awards on Sunday, she mocked her alcoholism and SCRAM bracelet in a skit with host Chelsea Handler.
Even Jersey Shore's Snooki just called out a judge (sentencing her for disturbing the peace) for deeming her a "Lindsay Lohan wannabe."
"That's harsh," exclaimed the tiny, boozy harridan.
When Snooki recoils from being compared to you, things truly have gone so wrong.
But Lohan's big shot at a PR comeback - this Vanity Fair interview - is so flagrantly dishonest, so frangible, it is doomed to be undone by its own subject.
Leaving aside the profile's tidy little errors (designed to make Lohan seem less sluttish or, frankly, drug-addicted), the article's most shocking untruths conspire to reveal, rather than conceal Lohan's genuinely disquieting predicament.
First, she is cited as saying she is bored with the club scene: "It's not fun ... it's always the same." (But this week, according to one tabloid, she celebrated leaving rehab by hitting the Chateau Marmont hotel bar and closing the place.)
Then, the usual stations of the cross: "I went through a really rocky patch"; "I'm not making excuses"; and 'I'm a different person now."
Galvanized by her remorse and luminous fatigue, the VF reporter builds a case for Lohan's talent, which is fair enough. Lohan was the millennial Molly Ringwald, and truly radiant in her early, or teen films, most notably 2004's Mean Girls.
Her follow-up roles, in 2006's The Prairie Home Companion and 2007's Georgia Rule, are cited in this story, as they often are, as striking examples of her vast talent, of her "command of the art form," marred only by her outrageous nightlife. But as she fraternized with the Evil Girls she unfairly calls "the Britneys" (Spears was, in fact, pulled only briefly and late in the game into the dark orbit of back-stabbers Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie, who mocked and derided her, nicknaming her "Animal'), producers bemoaned her lack of professionalism and she had to be replaced in her next project.
Some of her moves at the time displayed a certain savvy, however: The project she was replaced in was a crime caper (called Poor Things) starring Olympia Dukakis and Shirley MacLaine! Has anyone stopped to consider that Lohan was making an astute choice at this time, in pulling out of a sentimental old-lady movie, starring unconscionable, scenery-gumming hams?
Her decision to make the unforgettable I Know Who Killed Me, in 2007, was intriguing and on point with her altogether hot and damaged public persona. (In the film, Lohan leaves her vibrating prosthetic leg plugged into an outlet during a key sex scene.) And could the "embarrassment" (according to Women's Wear Daily) of mistakes she made with the Ungaro line (when she briefly worked as an artistic adviser in 2009) have been calculated to highlight the inherent flaws in this beloved-strictly-by-tasteless-dowagers brand? Or, possibly, to call attention to her own, far better 6126 line, which actually reflects her unimpeachable style?
One is tempted to admonish others: She is only 24! One wants to hope that she will be okay if she takes the "baby steps" she announced this week that she intended to make, if her turn playing Linda Lovelace in Inferno succeeds.
Then again, she keeps getting busted for DUIs or suspicion of DUIs. That means that she has recklessly endangered people's lives.
Addicts don't change because they are told to. However trashy-gorgeous and shrewd she is (her dirty photo-shoot for fashion art magazine MUSE earlier this year revealed no frailty, just sexual cunning and cool authority), she is a convicted criminal who also neglects to mention, in her meretricious interview, how easily she might have murdered someone (anyone!) far more innocent than she.
Lohan (who has tattooed the following fatuity on herself) ultimately asks only for her "right to twinkle."
In America, someone is killed by a drunk driver every 45 minutes.
What was it that they dreamed of? How brightly did they shine?