Is Lindsay Lohan Playing Us?

The latest entry in the What’s Really Wrong With Lindsay Sweepstakes: she’s a fame-whore who’s abusing the court system to generate publicity.

Despite earlier reports that she wasn’t really an addict at all and just had some trouble with her prescriptions, Lohan failed a drug test last week and could end up back in jail. The proverbial source-close-to-the-star told TMZ, “People with addiction problems don’t get better magically, and she’s really been making an effort to make herself better.” But Dr. Keith Ablow, writing for Fox News, thinks addiction isn’t the whole story. He says,

It would be irrational to believe that the only thing afflicting Lohan is substance abuse. Most substance abusers don’t end up in court. They don’t snub their noses at the law. They don’t-as Lohan did-show up in court with obscenities scrawled on their fingernails.

As we’ve said, many factors may contribute to Lohan’s problems. But don’t plenty of addicts violate the law with little regard for consequences? In fact, “recurrent substance-related legal problems” is one of the symptoms of substance abuse listed in the DSM-IV. Regardless of this, Ablow presses on to offer his own Theory of Lohan:

It is not beyond the realm of possibility that Lohan, et. al. have assessed the California judicial system and ‘judged’ it so broken that the most she is likely to be given is a few days here and there in jail, in exchange for millions and millions of dollars worth of attention from the media. And if that is the case, she is more like the perpetrator of the Balloon Boy hoax than Marilyn Monroe-commandeering not only the media, but the California courts, and casting them in her own reality TV show, at the state’s expense, making unscripted fools of the judge, prosecutor, court officers and the rest of us.

So according to Ablow, Lohan is just milking the courts for publicity. And the fact that she can do this is a sign of the End Times: “Lindsay Lohan is a symptom, ultimately, of something very dark and foreboding afflicting the rest of us.” If that dark something is our continued morbid fascination with the downward spiral of a once-promising talent, then okay. But the relapse-as-publicity-stunt strategy wouldn’t be smart even in our fallen world. That’s because her constant court appearances and perceived unreliability make it difficult or impossible to do the thing that has actually brought her money and praise in the past: being in movies. Her current brush with the law could conceivably jeopardize her role in Linda Lovelace biopic, which is supposed to start filming in the next 45 days. And her friends are apparently telling her to “put her career on the backburner for the next 9-12 months, at least, so she can focus on getting control over her disease” — which would keep her from hosting SNL, among other things.

Maybe the courts aren’t dealing with Lohan as harshly as some would like — and given the fact that she left rehab early the last time around, it seems unlikely that she’s going to take her concerned friends’ advice. But one thing her repeated relapses definitely damage is her ability to work, and if that’s a publicity stunt, then she needs to ditch her publicist along with her habit.