Maybe Lindsay Lohan Should Just Retire From Talk Shows

Exactly one year ago last night, Lindsay Lohan visited The Late Show With David Letterman. She had a film to promote -- remember Scary Movie 5? She was in it -- but the real project for which she was trying to attract positive attention was her actual life which then, as now, was in a precarious state. She'd just been accused of stealing items from the wardrobe of Anger Management, on which she'd just guest-starred, and in less than a month, she was to report to court-ordered rehab (and not for the first time). Lohan tried to take control of her own bad press by making self-deprecating jokes about it and then steering the discussion toward the movie, but Letterman, being Letterman, didn't play along with the usual media-management script and pressed her with so many questions about her legal issues and sobriety that he made her cry. It was rough.

Maybe Lohan's return to the show on the anniversary of her last bad experience there is a coincidence: she has, after all, recorded a guest shot on 2 Broke Girls that will air on Monday (and which, by the way, apparently did not go so well, though that report is from Radar, so who really knows). But given that the other project that Lohan is best known for these days is her eponymous OWN reality show, one can pretty easily imagine a situation in which her benefactress, Oprah Winfrey, arranged for this interview, on this very symbolic date, to show off how far Lohan has come in a year. ...And maybe Lohan needed another year to prepare.

I, like you, don't enjoy thinking of Letterman as someone who will sell out to shore up a manufactured media narrative, AND YET it's hard not to watch this sequence of Lohan suggesting that she and Letterman call Winfrey from the desk without feeling its total lack of spontaneity.

For God's sake, are we really supposed to believe that Oprah Winfrey picks up her phone on what sounds like the second or third ring without knowing who's on the other end? Are we supposed to believe she picks up her own phone ever? Or, if she has a super-secret private cell phone that bypasses what must be a phalanx of handlers, would she really give that number to Lindsay Lohan? And yet, even through all of this pretty obvious phoniness, Winfrey can't manage anything more than a tepid endorsement of Lohan's professionalism and sobriety. "I think she's doing okay!" Winfrey says, her voice rising precipitously so we can hear all the hesitation and equivocation beneath it. "I think she's doing really okay....I think she's really making some progress." I mean, if you overheard your boss describing you that way in a performance review, you might fear you were about to be put on probation, and you'd probably be right.

Winfrey's cameo aside: even grading on the Lohan curve, it would be hard to say that the interview is a success. For one thing, she doesn't really look much better than she did last year: there's a visible line along the side of her head where I assume her extensions are sewn in, and the garish red lipstick makes her look like a toddler who got into Mommy's makeup bag. I know her voice has always been kind of gravelly, but it's clearly gotten a lot rougher even since Georgia Rule, never mind Mean Girls or The Parent Trap. And while I'm not qualified to say whether her behaviour proves that she's using again -- maybe she's just a marblemouth now, and her slurry speech doesn't mean anything -- the weird, unfunny "jokes" she makes that don't even kind of land sure reminds me of the sort of thing drunk people mistake for humour. Witness her karaoke "bit" about 2/3 of the way through this chunk.

But maybe Lohan is just weird in person like some celebrities are, particularly ones who grew up famous and never learned how to act normal/relatable/down-to-earth; maybe it's unfair of me to chalk her awkwardness up to substance abuse when it could just as easily be the natural result of a lifetime of isolation. Whatever the reason, though, I feel like what this Late Show do-over mostly proves is that the talk show is not her ideal milieu -- or, at least, that she might have an easier time opposite a suckup like Jimmy Fallon. Now that he's announced his retirement, Letterman may not get another chance to have Lohan on -- and though she tried valiantly to get Winfrey agree to bring Lohan along whenever Winfrey returns to The Late Show, Winfrey didn't even acknowledge that so she must not have heard it, it's strange!!! -- so if this is Lohan's last time submitting to his brand of prickly/paternal interaction with her, it's probably just as well.