Lindsay Lohan is beautiful.
I don’t mean that she’s exceptional within the hierarchies of Hollywood, or that she has some sort of idiosyncratic quirk that renders her astonishingly unique– it’s just obvious that through any sort of rational analysis, she’s a beauty. I mean, if she existed in the circle of our friends, she’d be the stunning one everybody gravitated to.
I’ve often wondered what it would be like to be beautiful, how that would shape the person you were to become. I’ve seen people walk into bars and restaurants and immediately had all of the eyes in the establishment trained upon them because of their utterly compelling physical charisma. What must that do to you? Everyday, wherever you go, you’re the focus of everybody’s attention.
It could certainly give rise to all sorts of horrible insecurities, but I think it would also instill in you a natural sense of entitlement. How would you feel if one day, people stopped looking, and what would you do to get them looking again?
This, I guess, is celebrity in a microcosm.
Our current cycle of celebrity immolation has been focusing on the public self-destruction of Lindsay Lohan. As you will have heard, she’s just been sentenced to 90 days in prison for failure to comply with her terms of probation. Opinions differ on whether this was an appropriate sentence or not, but what’s striking is how we, like we did with Britney Spears before her, having been following the spectacle of her demise as if it was entertainment.
Spears seemed to be a princess that floated up from the septic of a trailer park. A teasing schoolgirl, she was the taboo sex bomb that every man in the world wanted to screw, but once she realized that sexual potential and became a wife and mother instead of the forbidden fruit we dreamed about, she was brutally cast out of celebrity-Eden. And then, with a truly creepy glee, we watched as she went insane.
Lohan is following in a similar arc, although perhaps not in quite so sympathetic way. It was impossible not to see Spears’ vulnerability. She simply did not have the tools to deal with the brutal and confusing chaos her life revealed itself to be. However in Lohan you got a sense that she had the ability to control her own fate. Could you imagine Spears citing Article 5 of The Declaration of Human Rights or handing her lawyer a page of neatly printed out notes concerning her case as Lohan recently did?
Lohan, the product of an ambitious, upper, middle-class New York family was an ace student who left high school in grade 11 to maker her fame in tweener-friendly movies like Freaky Friday and Mean Girls. When she got old enough and started to realize her precocious sexuality at nightclubs and parties, things began to fall apart (as they often do for young women in Hollywood), and she became a skanky train wreck.
And last week, while listening to the judge deliver her sentence, Lohan had written out in the perfect script of Tracy Flick– Fuck U on the nail of her middle finger, which she subtly flashed at the judge.
It’s almost inconceivably childish, of course, but even more penetrating is just how much it illustrates how powerless and disconnected from the “real” world she must feel. I mean, can you think of a more impotent and pointless gesture? But still, it’s very much worth noting that the poor, little rich girl whom everybody is persecuting, never would have had this bizarre, little indulgence discovered if not for the intrusive and ever present eye of the media. They, and we, are watching every single thing she does.
But as I watched her sobbing, distraught at the unfairness of the world, all I could think about were her lips. A naturally beautiful woman, now just 24, she obviously felt the need to have plastic surgery done on them, and now they look weird, and kind of cruel. Her mouth looks like it’s in a permanent sneer, and it struck me how Hollywood has this Dorian Gray effect, compelling beautiful looking people to alter their appearance, in the hope that will change their identity and how they’re perceived, but inevitably they just create grotesqueries that reflect the arrested and terribly compromised interior of a flailing narcissist.