Leave Lindsay Alone

Lindsay Lohan's plights have been a media fixation for a while now and have come to a head this week as the actress was finally sentenced to jail time and then promptly bailed out. The girl has undergone a whole lot of hell under public scrutiny, and the continued coverage of her arrests and court drama and rejection from many Hollywood parties has been the fodder of plenty of gossip.

But why do we care about this? What does Lindsay Lohan's jail time have anything to do with her acting? Sure, her drug and alcohol habits may play some role in the actress's career but since when is that a new thing? Celebrities and artists (can they possibly be one in the same?) have been suffering from addiction for years of recorded history.

Lohan is not the only celebrity to be in trouble with the law, not even in the past couple weeks. But when Nicholas Cage was arrested on a domestic abuse call, the media barely made a dent in discussing this issue. Doesn't it seem important that a major Hollywood actor is hurting someone other than himself (cause Lohan appears to be mostly in the business of self-destruction).

Lohan fell early, and she's wasting the fame and sex appeal she cultivated on mind-numbing partying which can only be symptomatic of an actual problem. There's no way she's happy. And the media frenzy certainly isn't helping her. But part of Lohan's appeal as a paparazzi magnet is that she is young and female and not so hopeless as Charlie Sheen and other older male celebrities (like Russel Crowe) who famously lose their shit over small details.

Think back several years ago to when Lohan was being compared to Hilary Duff in their fight over Aron Carter. She was disney-fied and safe like her untarnished counterpart whose hair color is the most contested aspect of her public personality at present. Back in the day, Lohan starred in the 1998 remake of The Parent Trap, coasted along the Disney star track for a while. Then she made Freaky Friday with Jamie Lee Curtis in and most winningly as the protagonist of Tina Fey's generation-defining Mean Girls. Lohan had a lot of promise. And then she started making horror movies about dead teen strippers and garnered attention for her questionable lifestyle and arrest record.

Maybe Lohan will go the way of Winona Ryder who did not completely disappear but continues to act even though her career suffered a blow from her shoplifting scandal. Ryder's relevance to the public and the movies she's in suggest that she's a fallen star, but at least she's working. Still I'd like to think that there's hope for yet another of Hollywood's headcases and that maybe Lohan could by the end of all the drama, become a better actress and actually succeed even though so few seem to be rooting for her.