The Crowd Turns Against Lindsay Lohan At BAM
On Saturday night and deep into Sunday morning, the Brooklyn Academy of Music was filled with bedraggled, bedreadlocked and bewitched Brooklynites, drunk on bohemia and Bud Lite. They were there to pay homage to perhaps the greatest actress of our day: Lindsay Lohan, a woman who not only embodies that particular craft but is the freckled and flawed mascot of our time. Laurel Ptak and I were there too.
Taken as an oeuvre entier, the four Lohan films screened run a parallel track to her life. The first film, shown to a relatively sober and sedate crowd at 9:15 p.m., was 2003's Freaky Friday. In it, Lohan is still fully encased in the tween wholesomeness of her Parent Trap days. Yet her body-switching with Jaime Lee Curtis portends a precocious and accelerated maturation that will perhaps cause Lohan's wobbles on the course to adulthood.
By 12:35 a.m., eyes had already become bloodshot after what was now three hours of all-Lohan all-the-time. The movie was I Know Who Killed Me. This perhaps was the turning point in the public's sentiment for Lohan.
In Mean Girls we laughed and cried with her. But in I Know Who Killed Me, we laughed at her pain and the crowd cried out foul and filthy things. On careful reviewing, I Know Who Killed Me ranks with The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie as a surreal and searing social commentary.
In it, Lohan is a bifurcated soul: half stripper, half amputee. Roaming the streets of New Salem, with tears streaming down her face, what's left of Lohan trots itself desperately out to the audience—but her public, much like herself, was just too drunk to care.