Lilo Is No Monroe

I originally wrote this article about Lindsay Lohan posing nude and recreating Marilyn Monroe's final photo shoot on February 19th for another of my writing receptacles. I was furious about it. I still am. But I thought I turned it into an admittedly angry, yet reasonably restrained and informational editorial piece. After about a week, it was deemed "overboard" and a "diatribe," and it was removed.

If I had wanted to write a diatribe about Lindsay Lohan, I would have done it here, where I can express myself more candidly, and I would have ranted and raved until my fingers cramped up from typing. I could still do that, but I won't. I won't upload any of Lohan's photos from the shoot or any other pictures of her. Nudity isn't really allowed on here anyway, but if it was, I still wouldn't. I refuse to have her face, or any other part of her, on my blog. I'm just including the article, exactly as I originally published it:

Title: Lindsay Lohan Bares All

Subtitle: Struggling Starlet Tries to Channel Marilyn Monroe

Summary: For their 2008 spring fashion salute, New York Magazine features Lindsay Lohan, nude or close to it, recreating Marilyn Monroe's last and most famous photo shoot.

"Lindsay Lohan's career has been kaput lately. She's been in and out of rehab and has one of the worst reputations in Hollywood. Her life is a never-ending string of bad decisions. Her latest error was deciding to play dress-up (or dress-down, more accurately) as Marilyn Monroe for New York Magazine. As if Monroe's memory hasn't been dragged through the mud enough over the years, now Lindsay Lohan turns something beautiful into a shameless publicity stunt.

It's blatantly insulting to Marilyn Monroe and her leagues of fans (the true fans that empathize with her tragic life and love her for more than her pretty face) that Lohan had the nerve to do this shoot. Monroe had more class, beauty, and grace in one strand of her glistening blonde hair than Lohan could ever hope to have. After all her social gaffs and drug issues, does Lohan really think this, simultaneously posing nude and brazenly comparing herself to one of the biggest pop culture icons in history, would bring her respect? Is this seriously the next best move for her? The magazine calls her "The Modern-Day Marilyn." What a sick joke. Even more outrageous is the fact that the same photographer, Bert Stern, took the Lohan gig.

Lohan doesn't hold a candle to Monroe's fresh, natural loveliness. Monroe was well into her 30s when these photos were taken, but she looks younger than Lohan does in the same shots. Lohan appears ravaged by her life of poisonous partying. It's a travesty that these pictures exist, but all effrontery and insults aside, the photos just seem sad and desperate. Some people call them empowering, but they just come off trashy and self-absorbed.

"The Last Sitting," as it has since been called, was Monroe's last photo shoot before she died, and it was a doozy. There are over two thousand pictures that capture her as a human being and display all the intricacies of her personality, raw and real, that most people never cared that she had. The photographs radiate with her ethereal beauty.

There's something very eerie about Lohan miming these particular photographs. The similarities between Lohan and Monroe are striking: deeply troubled personal lives, drug problems, and both victims of a parasitic media watching every move and waiting for them to fail or screw up, or even to die. Obviously, Monroe's story is much more complicated. Still, Lindsay Lohan should be pitied, not ridiculed. The way things are going with her life at the moment, though, here's hoping this photo shoot isn't foreshadowing the horrible fate that befell Marilyn Monroe."

Diatribe? You decide.