Lindsay Episode 2 Recap
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Lindsay Episode 2 Recap

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LIndsay Lohan reality showAt one point during the second episode of Lindsay, Lindsay Lohan is asked by AJ Johnson, her new celebrity fitness coach, “How’s it smell in here?” I wanted LL to answer, “Okay, apart from the stink of manipulation.” But of course no one’s allowed to mention the elephant in the room—and I never thought I’d say that about Oprah. (By the way, if I’m found dead tomorrow, please look for Gayle’s fingerprints on my esophagus. Which reminds me: Has anyone seen Steadman since 1997?)

Ads for the Lindsay show tout the eight-week doc as a “master class in reality television” and they’re not kidding. If you’re hungry for some blatantly staged drama, the kind of subtle background music that used to accompany Erica Kane’s divorces and insight into how the celebs live dysfunctional celeb lives, Lindsay’s got it for you.

Still Don’t Feel Sorry for Her

The problem is that the producers have something much more interesting on their hands and they seem either too insecure or too contemptuous of us to bother focusing on it. Throughout Sunday’s episode, we were subjected to interstitial screen notes, the kind that docs used to use to show us life-threatening developments that had occurred off camera. In documentaries like Hoop Dreams, we’d learn that a kid’s father had gone to prison or died. Here, the dark sounds of Notre Dame ringing midnight accompany words like, “Lindsay’s been living in a hotel for 46 days.”

It doesn’t really make the heart melt in cathartic sympathy.

And I even kind of like Lindsay Lohan; it’s so logical that she is the way she is. Slightly paranoid and mistrustful, apt to check out when drama threatens (unless she creates it herself), lazy and willing to slough off life’s basics onto the increasingly taut shoulders of her wee assistant. As every person coming out of rehab would—if they were lucky enough to have Oprah bankrolling their sobriety.

“Lindsay’s been living in a hotel for 49 days,” the titles darkly chime again. It turns out that this is because the documentary’s production company pulled a check back from the realtor, thereby slowing down Lindsay’s move into an apartment, which naturally sets her off. As her sobriety instructor notes, “When Lindsay feels like she’s been tricked, it’s really intensely triggering for her.”

But instead of focusing on who installed these buttons (family), the episode imposed the externally shaped plot wherein the apartment was withheld—cue the darkly chiming bells—until the final few minutes, when Lindsay strolled through her enviable new space to the sounds of plucked string instrumentals.

Family Matters

I hate to beat a dead horse, or a Lohan, but the real drama should be with the family. And what a set the Lohans are! Promising $40,000 to teenage boys when no one but Lindsay seems able to pay for it! Mom getting a DUI and landing on the cover of the tabloids! Dad having another set of kids he’s happy to marginalize if it pleases his little moneymaker! Why isn’t this the center of the drama? God knows the apartment bullshit is way less interesting than the good old twisty dance of the addicts—as old as Greek theatre and twice as compelling.

But we do get AJ Celebrity Fitness Coach, who has a pack of word cards like a junior high guidance counselor and a laugh like a sycophantic foghorn. Now, I’m not going to slam AJ as much as she deserves because she has a daunting set of shoulders and scary intense eyes but when she tells Lindsay to pray “because we’re mighty and we’re great,” the lack of true help anywhere for this girl was palpable.

Lindsay’s Life Motto

So naturally the star of the show is all over the place. At moments, she’s remarkably cogent about her patterns of self-destructiveness but at others she says things like, “Until I show up, you can’t assume I’m going to.” If that’s not a perfect phrase for any addict’s business card, I don’t know what is.

Next week, we’re promised, the big O really will come to town, earnestly swearing that the cameras will go away if Lindsay so chooses. Clearly the production company has just paid for her new apartment and she’d lose it if she ended the filming. But we need our drama, don’t we?

Photo courtesy of avrilllllla via Flickr (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/) (resized and cropped)

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About Author

Dana Burnell has written for The London Times Sunday Magazine, The Guardian Weekend Magazine, Inside New York and Time Out New York. A former Editorial Assistant at Harvard Review, she’s the received Mellon Foundation Grant and two Fiction Fellowship Grants from Columbia University. She’s written two novels, Mistaken Nonentity and The Tame Man.