EA spoiled hotel heiress loses her memory after a skiing accident; she is taken in by a poor but kind-hearted pensioner – and then experiences true Christmas and love happiness in an American winter sports resort that looks as if Mariah Carey had bought all the decorations from Käthe Wohlfahrt. This is the rather meager plot of the Netflix film “Falling for Christmas”, which has currently started with a lot of marketing hype.
Because Lindsay Lohan has taken on the leading role, she is trying her comeback as an actress with this film. After all, it’s almost forgotten, the real job of the 36-year-old. She rose to fame as an eleven-year-old with her dual roles in The Parent Trap, the Disney version of Double Lottie; a glittering career as a teen movie star followed, until, well, the noughties hit and Lohan, with too much partying and not enough good movies, ruined her acting career.
In any case, for a long time tabloids were more interested in Lohan than Hollywood bosses: Her private life was so eventful with suspended sentences after driving under the influence of drugs, a move to Dubai, a conversion to the Islamic faith and several failed nightclub openings that this, in addition to a general entry on her person, nor is a separate Wikipedia article devoted to it: “Lindsay Lohan’s personal life”.
You have to do that first. But 2022 is supposed to be the year in which Lindsay Lohan reflects on her real talents. For her, it’s back to the roots, in the truest sense of the word: In the new film, her hair curls back into the natural red color that gave her her breakthrough. Around 2004, she wasn’t one of the other interchangeable, super-blonde-streaked Disney girls, exuding freckled “Girl Next Door” charm. None could play the nice girl next door as believably as she experienced a few high school trials and tribulations, but then always found her way back to the path of niceness with integrity.
As if it were yesterday: Lindsay Lohan in 2004 in “Mean Girls”
Quelle: CBS via Getty Images/CBS Photo Archive
And it is precisely this image of the good-humored, capable soul that Lindsay Lohan finally wants to serve again with her Netflix role as a Christmas romantic. Away from the reputation of the eternal scandal noodle. Clear the stage for the appearance as a grown woman who has finally found her way back, which always seemed destined for her since her first TV appearances as a child: everybody’s on-screen darling.
Surprisingly, no one bothers that Lohan chose the most unmotivated Christmas film that ever flickered through the pre-Christmas streaming program for this career turnaround after ten years of acting abstinence. On the contrary: Lohan trudges with a straight back and sparkling eyes through an outrageous artificial snow story that doesn’t even have the consistency for really honestly meant kitsch – “Falling for Christmas” has to be washed down with a lot of benevolence and hut magic tea. But she actually manages to conjure up a veritable media comeback from this appearance – incidentally, only the start of a Netflix deal that includes several productions.
Linking to times past
She is currently adorning the cover of the American “Cosmopolitan”. She zips from American talk show after talk show to have sympathetic conversations about Christmas cheer in movies (“It’s so important to focus on the simple things in life”) and smug glimpses of her current life (“I go every day to bed at 9:30 p.m.”). For weeks she has been publicly sharing non-knowledge, all of which are presented with the typical professionalism of former American child stars: always friendly, always in a good mood, but also calculated down to the last detail.
She talks about how much she missed acting, gives hope for sequels to the films that made her famous (“Freaky Friday 2? If Jamie Lee Curtis is in it, so am I!”) and tells umpteen times the same self-deprecating attitude that brought her to re-record the song “Jingle Bell Rock” for the promotion of the Netflix quark movie: a song that her fans from a famous scene in the film “Mean Girls” have been hearing about for almost 20 years memory is (“I wish I had never suggested that to the producers, hehe!”).
Lindsay Lohan’s strategy: She doesn’t deliver anything new, she doesn’t show an unprecedented, drastically new acting side, she doesn’t fab about personal catharsis, she doesn’t resort to any of the tricks that are supposedly necessary to transform a person from the status “what does she do?” actually now?” to get publicity again. No, Lohan seems to seamlessly connect to times long past. She does what actors are never in the mood for, because it is actually part of the job to constantly reinvent oneself and not to remain tied to old roles: she constantly refers to the same ones that fans consider “iconic”. Moments of her career – and is rewarded in the media with a wave of nostalgic enthusiasm.
The tenor: It doesn’t matter which film Lohan is shooting. It’s the story that fits perfectly into the grand digital reappraisal of noughties pop culture, steadfastly driven by the generation that grew up with Lohan and her films: promising youth, roaring 20s, time out from everything and now, thanks to meditation, back on track . A more contemporary “personal brand” is hardly possible.
It’s no wonder, then, that “Lilo,” Lohan’s tabloid nickname, is a millennial hero who deserves a solid comeback, given that her teen film heritage has been mememed up and down on social media for years. There’s no pink Instagram outfit without the caption, “on wednesdays, we wear pink” — a fashion verdict from Mean Girls (2004) that Lohan even quoted in a promotional clip for sporting goods manufacturer Allbirds this summer.
Admittedly, to keep up with this wild maelstrom of pop culture references, you probably have to be born between 1987 and 1992, got drunk for the first time in hip jeans and a pink polo shirt at a party around the turn of the millennium, and now have trouble sleeping with the endless scrolling through the noughties. Fight memory Instagram accounts (best example: @iamthiirtyaf). Otherwise, it might be difficult to understand why the greatest thing for millennials is to go into a digital rabbit hole of memories again and again with the prominent heroines and heroines of their early youth: ah, you remember, back then, crass, how how cool that we can watch all this on the internet over and over again!
The pure joy of Christmas and love: Lindsay Lohan as Sierra in “Falling for Christmas”
Quelle: Scott Everett White/© 2022 Netflix, Inc.
It’s like this: Even if, in the age of mindfulness, a few dutiful comments about not-so-comfortable aspects of the past cannot be entirely avoided (“Well, the way the paparazzi used to follow young female stars, that was really bad!” ), it’s always the smoothed-out version of the past that Millennials cling to. In the noughties the world might not have been in order, but at least it was colorful! There were funny clamshell phones and you couldn’t imagine anything more strenuous in life than the next math test.
The recent hype surrounding Lindsay Lohan is above all a reflection of contemporary culture that is no longer quite so young, which is characterized by the constant re-digging of hits and trends from one’s own teenage years: on the Internet one can feel like 13 forever.
Lindsay Lohan’s comeback is little more than cleverly marketed nostalgia. You can hardly blame her for that – even if you wish her that the next film would pay a little more attention to her acting talent. Until then, seeing her again on the TV screen feels a bit like a class reunion: you already know that the nice phrases exchanged in the dimly lit hometown pub are not meant to be entirely honest – after all, they found Vanessa the 11b used to be totally stupid. And yet, for this one evening, everyone agrees to pretend that there is nothing sweeter than remembering “the past”.