Once upon a time, Mean Girls was the movie that was supposed to kick-start the hell out of Lindsay Lohan's enormously promising career. Today, she's so unmarketable and worrisome that Nintendo wouldn't even put her on the cover of the Mean Girls video game. That's about the definition of box-office, or big-box-store, poison.
There's no particular reason I should like Lindsay Lohan. She's an extremely unappealing celebrity. She doesn't seem to take sobriety particularly seriously (I recognition addiction is a disease, and that the people intervening with her are pretty toxic in their own rights). She appears to have terrible relationships with former friends and lovers. She behaves unprofessionally when she does get work. She appears to think celebrity means you get to make off with someone else's coat at a club. And I realize that the final, definitive indication that all of those things have rendered her permanently unfit to work in entertainment shouldn't be that important to me.
But I cannot shake the potential. I just can't. With that red hair, and those freckles, and that fantastic, relaxed smile, she was, in the parlance of Julia Quinn, An Original. I really liked the idea, at least, of her relationship with Samantha Ronson. And she was so incredibly funny in Mean Girls, plausibly tense, sweet, and eager in the early sections, inhabiting the falseness of the Plastics even as she made it clear how much of a creation that version of female beauty was. I think that's part of the irrational power of that movie; Lohan, who is gorgeous, even amidst the wreckage, still managed to plausibly on the side of girls like me, women like the woman Tina Fey was then, in her character's heart.
It's entirely possibly that I view the movie, nostalgically, as a premature memento mori, not necessarily of Lindsay's life, but of her career. I don't believe she'll ever work again. If it was hard for Corey Haim, it's going to be even harder for her, because even if she does get sober, sane, and reasonable, the evidence of this awful period in her life is going to be inescapable. That's unfair, and dreadfully sad. But I would rather have Lindsay Lohan alive, and healthy, and a million miles from Hollywood, if she can find a way to get there.