When examining just how arbitrary “destiny” can be, it’s easy to retrospectively remark upon how Britney Spears was a victim not just of her own family, but the unfortunate circumstances that led them to be able to capitalize on her vulnerability throughout 2007 and 2008. Yet, as any 00s pop culture connoisseur is aware, Britney wasn’t the only “troubled young woman” during this era. She also vied for tabloid space most frequently with Lindsay Lohan and Amy Winehouse (themselves ironically linked by the track “Rehab”).
While we all know how it ended for Winehouse, Lohan seems to be doing her best to make good on the recent bout of 00s nostalgia that has been overtaking the 90s, slowly edging her way back (once again) into the limelight. An announcement from Netflix that she’ll be starring in one of their “coveted” Christmas movies has proved to many that she was serious when she told Anderson Cooper and Andy Cohen on New Year’s Eve of 2019 that she was determined to “take back the life that [she] worked so hard for.” And yet, it was also the life she so desperately wanted to run away from by the time the media was through with her, hence ending up in Dubai. Or maybe she just ended up there, as some realists might posit, because Hollywood had turned into a dead end with no job leads.
As Lohan would go on to Anderson and Cohen about “togetherness” and “being one” in the New Year without realizing 2020 would establish the year of divide and being apart, one was disinclined to believe her intentions until that Netflix announcement. After all, Lohan has made a supposed “comeback” too many times to count ever since her own public setbacks reached a crescendo in, of course, 2007 after she drunkenly (and coked up’ly) commandeered a vehicle at a party to chase after her assistant, who was so over it she had asked her mom to come and pick her up from the place and save her from this Miranda Priestly type (at least acting that way when coked out of her mind).
While Lohan commenced what would become a series of out-of-control car moments, she reportedly told her unwitting passengers while chasing her assistant down PCH, “I can’t get in trouble. I’m a celebrity! I can do whatever the fuck I want!” But Spears is here to tell Lohan and anyone else that such a philosophy patently isn’t the case. It all really depends on luck of the draw (one in which being a woman automatically starts you out at a disadvantage). And Britney’s draw was “bum,” to say the least. So, too, was Winehouse’s, stalked mercilessly by the even more relentless British tabloid press. An apex of that stalking being a front-page cover of Winehouse smoking crack with the headline, “Amy on Crack: Nosedive to Oblivion.” Later, after her death, The Sun would also feature a cover with the title, “‘Quitting Booze Killed Our Amy’: Body Couldn’t Take Withdrawal, Say Family.” What a crock of shit. But, at the same time, Amy was “lucky” (cue “She’s so lucky/She’s a star/But she cry cry cries in her lonely heart”) not to be taken advantage of to quite the same level as Spears.
Her father, Mitch Winehouse, who still tries to make money off his daughter when and where he can under the guise of “honoring” her, would likely not have been able to capitalize as much on what’s called a deputyship in the UK. In short, he had more of a chance of profiting from her while she was working in a non-“incapacitated” fashion than if he had tried to deem her unfit to handle her own affairs. Mainly because, per a comparison between US and UK law “unlike a conservatorship, any expenses exceeding £500 must be explained… Britney’s conservators have been able to take a percentage of her income, which would not be considered as being in the best interests of the individual under UK jurisdiction.” So yes, being slapped on the wrist and told to keep working despite any emotional issues was the tack Mitch and co. took with Amy. Something that became most apparent when they sat her down before she was set to appear on the Grammys and told her she needed to go to rehab if she was going to be fit to perform in time for it again. Nowhere, at least as shown by Asif Kapadia’s documentary, did it seem like there was much concern for Amy the person as opposed Amy the career. Which is probably why Mitch brushed off the record label’s suggestion of the singer going to rehab in ’05 (“my daddy thinks I’m fine”). He wanted her to keep touring, to keep staying in the spotlight. Living his own dreams of musical fame (and fortune) through her.
Lohan, despite constantly touting a close relationship with her family (maybe too close, as a certain immortalized photo with Dina Lohan indicates), is perhaps too enmeshed with them to see the potential for being taken advantage of. Like Spears, she never had that great of a relationship with her father (hear: “Confessions of a Broken Heart [Daughter to Father]).” Yet if Lohan had just gone slightly further “off the rails,” Michael Lohan might have been “concerned” (read: enterprising) enough to step in and “help” his longstanding cash cow. But Lohan, whether by chance or not, saw through his fair-weather love enough times to cut off communication, repeatedly telling the press from 2007 to 2009 that she was not in contact with him. And still isn’t.
Describing her youth as “very unpredictable,” Lohan would add that she and her family never knew “what he would be like; we didn’t know what to expect from him, which was difficult.” The erratic nature of her father, alas, would seem to be a genetic trait based on Lindsay’s own “party girl” antics throughout the 00s and 10s. But, at the bare minimum, at least her various “rock bottoms”—declared during different car accidents and rehab stints by tabloids—never incited Michael Lohan’s unpredictable temperament in a manner that would prompt him to take any kind of page from the Jamie Spears playbook of how to “manage” his “disturbed” daughter. Which is all to invoke the Southern-esque, God-fearing mantra (as Britney iterated in her testimony, she still prefers to “take it to God” over dealing with the therapy scene), “There but for the grace of God go I.” Winehouse and Lohan surely could have gone the Britney route (something Amanda Bynes didn’t avoid) if fate had decided on other whimsical plans, proving once more, we’re absolutely not in control. Which is perhaps why some of us need to get so out of control as a means of defiance in order to cope with that reality.
For all things about the absurdity of the 00s, check out Lindsay Lohan Stole My Life.
