At Flavorwire, we often pay attention to the new, but we make sure to do so not at the expense of what’s come before it. In “Seminal,” a bi-weekly column, we examine earlier, under-acknowledged exemplars of dramatic and conceptual mastery from revered performers’ careers — moments that should be described as, dare I say, seminal. This week, we’re investigating how Lindsay Lohan’s unflinching performance in her activist musical documentary, Rumors, and how Lohan was clearly, even at a young age, looking towards her future as a humanitarian nightclub proprietor with a politically charged, unplaceable accent.
When Lindsay Lohan dropped her folk protest anthem, “Rumors,” and the documentary film that accompanied it, the only “rumor” that should’ve been spread about the philanthropist was that, someday, she’d save the world. Because in case you’ve been keeping up with recent news, both Greece’s economic turmoil and the Syrian Refugee Crisis have been put in the capable hands of the unstoppable force whose breakout role saw her shaking hands with a British version of herself (ooh, complicated) and whose follow-up role saw her possessing the body of Jamie Lee Curtis and forcing her hollowed soul to sing Britney Spears, because Lindsay Lohan doesn’t let the laws of physics get in her way, nor does she let the press tell her who she can and can’t give energy drinks to in order to make refugees feel a bit jittery for a few hours and thereby end mass suffering in the region.
In order to understand what’s currently going on in Lindsay Lohan’s life — and, really, to understand what’s going on in the Middle East — it’s necessary to look back towards the musical documentary, “Rumors,” and to Lohan’s slaying performance as a woman/warrior who will not accept people spreading rumors about what she does at the club. In the documentary, Lohan asserts the potent political/personal mantra, “I just want to get all over the floor/And throw my hands up in the air to the beat like [what],” a political ideology that’s been shared by other leading philanthropists, like Miley Cyrus in her musical documentary “We Can’t Stop,” where she preached, “So la da da di we like to party” (which famously ended the war on drugs) or Pink, who it’s been speculated truly pioneered the sentiment with her eye-opening documentary “Get the Party Started,” (which was an effective call for renewable energy.)
The certainty with which Lohan stares down the camera in the doc, the candor with which she addresses all the things that people rumor to happen on a “Saturday [when you’re] steppin’ into the club,” the vividness with which she describes that club (“somebody wanna tell DJ to turn it up/I feel the energy all around/And my body can’t stop moving to the sound”) continue to pack an emotional punch especially when you see how Lohan, in her electric defiance of the violence of rumors, was actually foreshadowing rumors that’d befall her in her own club later on, surrounding her accent, and what people’d perceive to be potential ties to Turkish President Erdoğan. What’s more, the musical documentary is clearly — like Lohan’s new nightclub (named Lohan) in Greece itself — only on the surface about clubbing. What it’s really about, subtextually, is helping refugees. When she says, “Why can’t you just let me/Do the things I wanna do” the implication is that, years down the line, the parasitic press will make fun of her for donating German lemonade blue energy drinks called Mintanine (whose powerful slogan is “Blue tastes woohoo”) to Syrian refugees and thereby saving the world:
Yet, as the prophetic musical documentary “Rumors” suggested, Lohan would still get flack from the press. Following an interview outside her eponymous nightclub in Greece, all anyone could talk about were rumors about her accent — not all the good that the philanthropist behind the accent had done, not the fact that she wanted to continue to branch out to opening both spas and refugee camps under the Lohan brand, thereby curing every single ethnic/religious/ideological tension in Syria, but rather what the accent’s origins were. And honestly, you don’t need half a mind to figure out that it’s just your common combination of Russian, Turkish, Arabic, Italian, and French.
What’s more is that the ungrateful press began rumoring that perhaps, because of her casual repetition of Erdoğan’s “the world is bigger than five” expression in the interview and on Instagram, and because of her previous comments praising the way the attempted military coup had been handled, Lohan was being paid to be a celebrity propagandist by the Erdoğan regime.
But thankfully, Lohan’s indomitable activism continues despite the rumors. Rumor (whoops!) has it that she’s developing a Cold Brew for Leukemia Patients program back in her own nation — the world — and her Mr. Pibb for the Polar Bears initiative has already reversed most ecological crises. It’s like, do you even need to vote today? Seems like we’re in good enough shape. #Imwithher #BlueTastesWoohoo