As I sat in the theater watching Lindsay Lohan’s Freakier Friday early this week, I felt overcome by a feeling I hadn’t experienced since I was approximately 14 years old: genuine fandom.
We all have those celebrities who became the object of our obsession from a young age and for me, during the late 90s, it was Lindsay Lohan.
On my ninth birthday, I went to see the Lindsay-led The Parent Trap remake in theaters, and instantly I was hooked. I’ve seen that movie so many times I can recite it word for word, from the opening sequences at Camp Walden for girls (“I’m from Napa, that’s northern California”) to the Natalie Cole-scored happy ending montage. From then on, I was devoted to Lindsay, watching every movie she appeared in from Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen to Freaky Friday and of course, Mean Girls.
That may be why, as I watched Lindsay in Freakier Friday, the sequel to the 2003 film Freaky Friday, one thought continuously crossed my mind: nature is healing. Or, perhaps, millennial girlhood is healing, finally.
It’s become common to look back on the era in which both Lindsay and I grew up, the early 2000s, and hang our heads in regret when revisiting how young starlets of the era were treated. You couldn’t be famous back then and not face a crushing amount of scrutiny, from being asked continuously if you were a virgin (and you better say yes) to actually being physically violated (remember up-skirt paparazzi pics?)
As we all know, Lindsay was among the young stars who were treated with particular venom. Once praised for her adorable demeanor and better-than-good acting skills, she soon became the butt of nearly every joke, abused and harassed by a tabloid press corp who derided her as trashy, slutty, and very, very messy. As her personal demons spiraled out of control, the world watched and judged, and by the time I was in my 20s, I could only look at her with sadness every time she showed up in the latest US Weekly.
Sitting in the theater, I began to wonder what this degradation of so many of the women myself and my generation idolized as tweens did to us collectively. Because when the press lashed heaps of trauma onto Lindsay, Amanda Bynes, Britney Spears, and so many of the others we adored, it stung. It was as if the entire world was collectively saying that these girls whose photos we had once tacked on our bedroom walls were unworthy and disgusting; women who we should feel ashamed for ever looking to as role models. It was a judgement on them, but also, a judgement on us.
It’s not surprising that this trauma had lasting effects. After making it through years of relentless tabloid scrutiny, Lindsay Lohan effectively vanished. In 2014 at age 27, she moved to London and then to Dubai—about as far away as you could get from Hollywood—and stopped acting entirely. There she met a local businessman, Bader Shammas, got married, and had a son. One of the greatest benefits of living there, she said, is that paparazzi aren’t legal.
