Lindsay Lohan Vehicle Has Tank Only Half Full

I feel bad for Lindsay Lohan.

Sure, she’s a bratty celebutante with minimal talent, prone to throwing narcissistic tantrums at her own movie premieres when she’s not out throwing back underage shots with the capitalistically amoral Hiltons.

But think about it from her perspective. At not quite 19, Lohan’s been in show business for a decade and a half. It’s a career she almost certainly did not elect for herself, but she’s had to deal with the consequences of her parents’ choice to take her from the cradle to a Ford commercial by the age of three.

The transition from cutesy childhood to pubescent gawk is uncomfortable enough for us non-famous people. The social warfare of “Mean Girls,” meanwhile, looks positively pleasant compared to how it must have felt when the nation’s tabloids had the poor taste (and/or ignorance of basic adolescent development) to leer at teenaged Lohan’s swelling bosom and ask if they spied the work of a surgeon. In between publicly scrutinizing the changing shape of her body, they chronicled the ins and outs of her relationship with sitcom ham Wilmer Valderrama, as if it were news that there was drama in a high-schooler’s love life.

After months of this treatment, Lohan’s dyed her hair a garish blonde and lost a frightening amount of weight, falling unconscious at the gym just last week. All of a sudden, the celeb press is full of concerned affection. Gee, they wonder in lurid typefaces, do you think she might have unhealthy body image issues?

In a time when many (rightly) pity Michael Jackson for the freakish things his early stardom has done to him, it certainly makes you think. Does our society just think it’s all right to push child stars’ emerging sexuality into a torturous spotlight when they’re teenage girls?

These were the thoughts running through my head as I recently sat down in a theater full of critics and their pint-sized companions to watch Lohan’s fifth feature, “Herbie: Fully Loaded.” Once she came on screen, I felt like I was seeing a startlingly well-fed, auburn-tressed ghost. A ghost that delivered each wooden line reading in a hoarse screech. This may be another Disney remake, but Lohan ain’t the adorable star of “The Parent Trap” anymore.

For the record, the film is not entirely awful. “Ben-Hur” had Jesus, “The Fast and the Furious” had Vin Diesel; Lohan and the apparently-possessed Volkswagen known as Herbie are, perhaps, heroes for our time. The plot, in which a disgraced Herbie is reluctantly rescued from the junk-heap and proceeds to reclaim his former glory as an unlikely racing star, is cute enough.

But, this being a kiddie flick, I couldn’t resist wondering what kind of message it’s sending to its intended audience. It’s not so complicated, actually. Lohan’s perpetually made-up character is ogled at as much as possible in a G-rated film. As if enacting an English lecture about the oppressive male gaze, the camera lingers on her mini-miniskirted frame as she climbs through a car’s driver seat window and proceeds to floor the gas, all while wearing stilettos.

At another point, Lohan’s chest has the misfortune to be splattered with oil; her dreamboat love interest tries to catch a glimpse as she changes clothes in the back seat. “You look great,” he fawningly tells Lohan in an earlier scene; “You look amazing,” he adds later. “You look good—what happened?” another character jabs upon sighting her. Listen up, kids—take extra care with your physical appearance, because everyone is watching.

Not that Lohan’s looks buy her much power in “Herbie”’s world. Check out how studiously the film denies Lohan any real agency as she takes to the racetrack over her father’s quasi-sexist objections. It’s not her making those hairpin turns past goonish rivals, or even deciding to—it’s that darned Herbie, racing off with a mind of his own every time she starts the ignition. “I’m being carjacked by my own car,” she shrieks. Girl power!

There is one way that Lohan’s character can take control of her own destiny, though. All she has to do, at film’s end, is reject her post-college job as an ESPN producer in New York City (laaaame!) and embrace NASCAR stardom. She’ll be nothing like Matt Dillon’s preening cad. No, she’ll be the kind of celebrity who uses her fame to do noble things, like wear high heels and promote sponsors with the gratuitous product-placement that saturates “Herbie.”

That’s a good way to spend your life.

Right, Lindsay?

—Staff writer Simon W. Vozick-Levinson can be reached at vozick@fas.harvard.edu.