After years of being the most desperate cast member–despite being the film’s “star” (though we all know it was Rachel McAdams)–to finagle a Mean Girls remake and/or reunion, Lindsay Lohan, Dubai resident not-so-extraordinaire, has instead settled for a Zoom call with The Parent Trap cast, as well as its writer-director, Nancy Meyers, and producer/co-writer, Charles Sheyer (who has worked with Meyers on the majority of her films). As part of some bootleg interview with Katie Couric on her Instagram account, the concept heavily rips off what Josh Gad has been doing with Reunited Apart, its last summer episode being the dicey choice of the cast from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (a film that touts white male privilege in an especially unique way at a time when blancos are being asked to confront the implications of that privilege amid the Black Lives Matter movement).
For millennials, the film was just as much of a classic as the original 1961 one was for boomers (just another reason millennials can be called “echo boomers” one supposes), and Lohan herself was, for an all too brief moment in time, the poster child for Disney’s brand of wholesomeness starting with this movie, her debut, and going into the 00s with her final film for them, 2005’s Herbie: Fully Loaded–providing tabloids with many jokes to play up the “star’s” partying reputation at the time (which only escalated in the peak years of 2007-2009), adding to Lohan’s increasingly sullied image from the girl who played impish twins Hallie and Annie James to the girl more likely to be captured having a threesome with twins. With the first couple of minutes being an urge to donate to World Central Kitchen, there wasn’t a lot of time in the fourteen-minute span to “delve into” too much, though, at the bare minimum, Elaine Hendrix got to talk up Meredith Blake’s vindication as “#goals” for millennials who suddenly realized she was twenty-six when she had accomplished her ruthless career objectives, plus the fact that she was unafraid to stand up and say that kids are bullshit.
Indeed, Hendrix is the main highlight of the “interview,” with Lohan still doing what she does best: feigning relevancy in not acknowledging much of what she’s “doing now.” After all, this is a puff piece about the past, her glory days when it was all still ahead of her. Meyers and Shyer are the most game to help foster Lindsay’s persistent Norma Desmond delusions of grandeur–to perpetuate her obvious belief that anyone still gives a shit, particularly after all the chances she’s blown (not a coke pun)–with Couric asking, “What was it about Lindsay that made you think ‘this is the one’–or ‘this is the two’ [haha]?” Meyers replies, “Putting aside how adorable she looked, you know, she had that quality that just sort of leapt up at you and pulled you in, and I think to be a movie star, to be the lead of a movie you need to have that ‘connect’ with the camera that’s very present.” Little did Nancy know, she’d be connecting to it best as a stripper in I Know Who Killed Me. Star quality, to be sure.
Dennis Quaid is also quick to lick Lindsay’s dried out asshole with his false memory, “The first thing I remember was meeting Lindsay. I remember thinking, ‘Oh my god, she’s one of the most talented people I’ve ever met, period.’” Elsewhere, Lohan gushes, “I was so young… it was my first movie audition, my first screen test… I was just like a… pig in shit.” Yeah, she said that. Apart from Quaid and Hendrix, the two other members of the cast that joined in were Lisa Ann Walter, who played Chessy a.k.a. Hallie’s “butler,” and Simon Hunz, who played Martin, Annie’s butler. Of course, they get lost quickly in the aggrandizement of Lohan, who insists of the movie’s clout, “Even still, younger generations and kids that go to camp, they even know it now.” If you say so, doll. She also does her best to lend depth to the nature of playing two characters (as if she’s on Kim Novak and Melanie Griffith’s level in Vertigo and Body Double, respectively) by reminiscing, “Once the long hair was on, it felt very different for me. And I feel like, and I don’t know if this goes for all actors, but once you put a wig on someone, you feel different. You’re stepping out of your comfort zone and you kind of become the other character and I feel like people almost treated me differently when I was Annie, because Annie was so much nicer and Hallie was…kinda like me.” So… a conniving little traitor, as Paris Hilton might proffer. Re: the wig factor, yeah, one imagines Britney Spears would agree based on her own pink wig phase after shaving her head.
Being that the root of many of Lohan’s woes have stemmed from Daddy issues, it was only right that she should re-enact a Daddy-celebratory scene with Quaid (this, too, is a staple of the aforementioned Reunited Apart). Lohan also noted she was making the film at a time when her own parents were splitting up, which speaks to Shyer’s comment on the film’s endurance being because it presents “the fantasy of getting your parents back together. So many people come from broken homes, and I think it fulfilled that dream for kids.” Ah, but that’s the thing about fantasy, it can make reality seem all the more depressing–just ask Lohan. At the very least, they found a few moments to pay their respect to Natasha Richardson, who died in 2009, suffering the effects of an epidural hematoma after taking a beginner’s ski lesson and sustaining a head injury.
Commenting further on what she liked about the movie, Meyers stated, “What if there’s another you somewhere? It was like magic.” Hence, the meme about wanting to imagine that the British version of Lindsay Lohan is out there somewhere managing to live a more “stable life”–or at least one in which she still isn’t clinging to notions of her “stardom.” No one will deny that The Parent Trap is a classic of late 90s cinema, especially for those who grew up with the Disney Channel, but let’s not pretend that anyone was clamoring for a reunion. It’s simply that Lohan couldn’t secure one that would be more “relevant” in the form of Mean Girls, one of the only other movies she can grasp at to prove her worth as an actress (because not enough people saw Georgia Rule to know that was her pièce de résistance).
