Let's Talk About Lindsay Lohan in 'Mean Girls'

http://www.pajiba.com/film_reviews/lets-talk-about-lindsay-lohan-in-mean-girls.php

I think about that a lot whenever Lindsay Lohan returns to the headlines. She’s been a ‘has-been’ longer than she was ever an A-List hot property, and the media seem to delight in reminding people of that at every opportunity. She got too big for her boots, they say. She became a diva who liked to drink and snort more than act. Oh, she was never that talented to begin with. She deserves what happened to her. After all, she was a child star and that’s just how these things go. They overlook the suspect parents and the intense pressure of child-stardom. They have little understanding of that liminal period in celebrity of the mid-2000s, pre-Twitter when TMZ ruled all and the Paris Hilton party girl figure ruled all. None of them seem to want to interrogate that strange era, so near and yet so far, where it became more acceptable than ever to call women ‘stupid spoiled whores’ while obsessing over their every move for page views and tabloid sales. Nobody ever wants to talk about being complicit.

But this is not about that era. Maybe some day I’ll get into that. For now, I want to talk about the role that Lohan may forever be defined by, at least when it comes to her status as an actress.

2004’s teen comedy Mean Girls, written by SNL alum Tina Fey, never should have worked. It was an adaptation of a parental advice guide on how to deal with wayward adolescent girls. The genre had become over-saturated to the point where it had its own parody film, Not Another Teen Movie, starring baby Chris Evans. The prospect of yet another story about how horrid and borderline evil teenage girls were didn’t inspire hope, yet it worked. Mean Girls was savvy enough to keep the one-liners flying while developing its complex ecosystem of high school life. It’s heightened to a degree that’s just absurd enough yet even British teens like me could recognize many of its internal conflicts. The story of a home-schooled 16 year old who finds herself ill-prepared to cope with her new school’s intense hierarchy made stars of Rachel McAdams and Amanda Seyfried, but the name above the title is Lindsay Lohan.