The nut of this episode is about Lindsay being inconsiderate and blowing off Elle Indonesia, but the part I will cherish the most is the first chunk, in which it’s revealed that I believe Dina Lohan’s ghost writer hates her with the quiet fire of a thousand burning suns and might therefore be my soulmate.

First, though, the weirdest bit: A title card tells us that Lindsay has decided to film herself as part of the show. They cut back to the footage three times in the course of the hour, all clearly taken on the same night because she’s wearing this outfit in different iterations, and the stuff they show later makes me wonder what the true order of the footage would be. Are you tantalized yet? Spoiler: It involves wine. Which, if it were consumed, I would be willing to bet was before this piece. She clearly decided to do some kind of cracked-out acting exercise, because — as the camera jumpily zooms in, in, in, in, and then out, out, out, out, about three times, she goes from looking like a spleen-snacking serial murderer…

… to a crying goon:

So I guess… if any producers out there are looking to do some kind of tear-sodden cross between The Godfather and Candyman, Lindsay Lohan has just auditioned for it.

And now for the scene that might be my spirit animal.

The woman on the left is named Pamela, and she is the ghostwriter for Dina’s autobiography; she has arrived to interview Lindsay for it, and of course, Dina is insisting upon being there the whole time, because she’s pushy and also there are cameras. Except she only wants to flip her hair on the cameras and nothing else: When Pamela starts to go over what they’re going to cover with Lindsay, Dina points to the crew and tells Pamela, “They’re rolling. It’s called reality. You can’t talk in front of them.” Dear Dina: REALITY INVOLVES TALKING IN FRONT OF PEOPLE. In a dictionary sense and in a TV sense. As much as I would cherish it if your reality involved zipping your lips in public in perpetuity, that is in fact not accurate.

Pamela has some notecards, and Dina starts looking through them to see what she’s going to ask. Pamela explains that they’re not really written-out questions; she just likes to have prompts. The two of them have an awkward conversation in which Dina tries to grasp what that means, and Pamela is patient with her in that way that suggests this working experience has been A LIVING HELL and she is concerned she soon will be wanted on murder charges.

This is the picture of mutual joy and contentment.

Dina says they were going to call the book A Parent Trapped, but that they can’t, because she’s not trapped. Pamela gently notes that they perhaps don’t want to victimize her, which makes me think Dina came in with that title and Pamela was like, “Um…” I hope other suggested titles were I Know Who Billed Me, Freaky MyDay, Confessions of A Middle-Age Drama Queen, and… well, Mean Girls.

And awesomely, this face on Dina came when Pamela said, “Everyone has an interest in Lindsay Lohan. That’s the other Lohan they’ve heard of.” THERE is your title: The Other Lohan You’ve Heard Of. Somewhere, Ali Lohan just let out a wounded yawp.

So, Dina has insisted that Pamela tell her what she’s going to ask Lindsay. Pamela says, “I might ask her, ‘Do you consider yourself to have come from a broken home?'” And Dina tells her she doesn’t like that because it’s too negative. Pamela clearly forgot that the No. 1 rule of Things That Are Real is not to talk about any of them, and the No. 1 rule of Dina Lohan’s autobiography is that it be all trophies and unicorns. And then they continue flipping through the notecards and there is this exchange:

PAMELA: I might ask her, ‘How do you describe your father’s role in your life growing up?’

DINA: Um. For me, or for her?

PAMELA (patiently): I’m asking all these questions to Lindsay.

DINA: Yeah, okay. Um. Ohhh. I don’t know.

PAMELA’S FISTS: Clench me. SWING ME. USE ME.

And in another marvelous piece:

DINA: It’s just that all my children are behind the book. And it’s quite brilliant. [pause] With… [gestures absently at Pamela] … you… helping.

PAMELA: And… you.

Every ellipsis is pregnant with triplets.

What follows is more of Dina rejecting Pamela’s questions; the other day Lindsay apparently made a comment to Pamela about the timing of this book not being ideal, and so Pamela — more honestly than she should have been — tells Dina she might ask about that, and Dina fully rejects that and then puts her hand on Pamela’s prompts and says, “Don’t give her these. She will FREAK OUT,” and Pamela tries very hard to keep her nostrils from vibrating with rage. As Pamela paces tensely — her ENTIRE body is clenched — Dina goes into Lindsay’s room (and Lindsay yelps that she can’t just come in; WHAT WERE YOU DOING, LINDS?) and helpfully tells her daughter that she hates all of Pamela’s questions. So first she’s concerned Lindsay will lose her mind, and then she goes into Lindsay’s room and tries to push the issue. I sincerely think she was trying to get Lindsay to bail because she realized Pamela wanted to know actual real information for this most likely unnecessary interview — because really, how many “autobiographies” include interviews with the person’s own relatives? This is SO Dina wanting to give herself a promotional segment on this It’s Reality Don’t Talk To Them Show, and it’s blowing up in her face, and I am TICKLED WITH GLEE. I am imagining a piece of hotel notepad paper in Dina’s purse somewhere that has all the questions she WANTED Pamela to ask Lindsay, and it includes, “What do you think of the term MILF,” “Isn’t your father THE REAL ENEMY HERE?”, “Your mom totes looks like she could be your sister,” and, “What is your other brother’s name because I can’t remember.”

Anyway, it’s great. This Pamela person is clearly a very nice lady who took a very terrible job, and I guarantee you today Dina Lohan does not know her name, and/or will blame the tanking of her book on this person who just tried to give it the gift of subject-verb agreement. By the way, the book came out in  February, it’s called Dina Lohan: My Journey, the cover looks like a pamphlet for a re-virginizing retreat, and the synopsis ends with, “This is Dina Lohan’s journey, as only she can tell it.” Translation from Pamela: I tried, guys. I really did. But she is awful and she kept changing my manuscript, so basically, I tapped out. But what’s weird is that when I was googling that, I came up with Misunderstood: A Memoir, which came out in Canada in October of 2013 — so, right around when this was FILMED — and THAT cover is her, like, sitting in the middle of the street trying to pick up the purse she dropped. Dear Canadian Fug Nationals: REPORT BACK if you’ve seen it in the wild. Because that book was allegedly published in hardcover, so… I mean, my theory is that she self-published all of them, but that one maybe she didn’t use a ghostwriter for and it was a DISASTER and so now she’s brought in Pamela for a U.S. rewrite, but I don’t know for sure.

Lindsay? Posture is your BFF.

At this point, it occurs to Dina that she has no concept of anything about the way the world works. She goes up to Amy, the director, and says, “So can we like… CUT stuff? Or do you just roll… you’re just gonna roll like real?” And Pamela belches a tiny bit of fire and says, “This is why I asked you…” So Dina has TOTALLY gotten wind of the fact that she can’t call “cut” on this crew and that Lindsay may end up talking about things she doesn’t like, and that this whole stunt here is NOT going to turn into everyone holding hands and singing a song about how Dina is a sacrificial lamb.

Even better: Dina gives Lindsay the first chapter and Lindsay starts reading it in front of her. ‘Is it kinda good?” Dina says, in the tone and with the expression of a woman who thinks it’s fabulous. Lindsay replies, “I’m going to stop there,” and hands it back to her. I can see the jacket blurb now: ‘Was it kinda good? I stopped on page two.’ – Lindsay Lohan.

And, bless, the interview does indeed yield an awkward nugget. It starts out with her rehashing how awful her father was, and how her entire youth was just waiting for her dad to fuck up again (her words), and how they couldn’t have friends over in case their dad came home and screamed at everyone. She remembers — and I had NEVER heard this before — that on the first day of shooting The Parent Trap, her dad came to visit her on set, and she ran up and hugged him and was so happy to see him… and then two feds came up and cuffed him and took him away, because he had a warrant out on him and wasn’t supposed to leave New York. HOLY COW, you guys. Why did Dennis Quaid never mention this to me? But seriously: I will give Dina that this makes me feel sorry for her, because regardless of what an awful human I believe her to be, it has to suck when you have… what, four kids? … and you’re trying to be on-set for the one raking in the cash, and your husband can’t even stay home to help with the other kids because he’s too busy doing God knows what and then getting his ass arrested. Just… a lot of ugliness in this family.

After a semi-amusing detour in which Pamela asks about her mother dropping her off “at the bar” and Lindsay is like, “BALLET BARRE, EVERYONE,” Pamela asks Lindsay about moving to L.A. on her own when she was 18. Linds remembers her father paying to put her up in the Four Seasons, and they’d have adjoining rooms, and she’d walk in on him doing drugs with people. Wonderful. Lindsay says she suspects she was not ready to live by herself, because there were a lot of choices she didn’t know or understand how to make. (And while I fully agree she was not ready and that her parents were too permissive, I also bet that at 18, legally able to do whatever she wanted, she stomped her foot and made a lot of demands about it and was hard to deal with, because we all know by now that Lindsay is revisionist when it comes to her own history and therefore is not the most reliable narrator.) She tells Dina that there were times she called and said she needed her there, and Dina said she’d come, and then didn’t, and “I think you said it because you wanted me to feel safe, and yet you knew you couldn’t be there.”  Hideous behavior. First of all, why NOT examine moving your family to Los Angeles and putting down roots there, if that’s where Lindsay needs to be? What is so off-base about that? Second, what makes a kid feel safe about her mother promising to be there for her and never showing up? That is so Lindsay parroting back some half-assed excuse Dina gave her. Pamela is probably sitting there fully aware that none of this is going into Dina’s vanity project and yet REALLY enjoying the schadenfreude. Because Lindsay ends with noting that she was very angry during this time, and, “I needed a mom.” BOOM. Dina looks embarrassed and the show goes to commercial, which tells you everything you need to know about what the producers think of her.

NEXT SEGMENT: Shenanigans.

Lindsay signed a contract to host a Halloween party at The Foxwoods Casino, which requires her to be there from 10 p.m. to midnight, for which she will be paid $100,000. That is $833 a minute. She arrives AT the hotel after 10 p.m., and here, you see #SaveMatt dressed as a police officer or one of the Village People or whatever, talking to the woman cruise-directing the event. She is super nice to them, which seems like it might be because there are cameras.

Lindsay does not meet up with her co-host, Floyd Mayweather Jr. ( SO WE ARE TOLD; as far as we know he sent down five dudes in masks and NONE of them was him), until 11:12 p.m., which is when they head down to the party. So now we’re at $2,222 a minute, because her original two-hour commitment is down to forty-five minutes.

She — as Carrie from Carrie (as opposed to Carrie from Homeland or Carrie Diaries) — screams into Floyd’s cell phone and then the two of them march through the step-and-repeat in about two seconds flat, possibly in part because they were already so late that they had to just get inside. Lindsay interviews that most events have a rundown sheet of exactly what is expected and whether the red carpet will include an interview, and she did not believe this one did, so she did not stop for the nice woman with the microphone who was probably just trying to get a quote from her about how poker is super fun.

#SaveMatt is about to lose his hashtag, y’all, because he comes on and gives us this cheeky face and says that Lindsay TOTALLY fulfilled her obligations and MAAAAYBE the hotel wanted more? ARE YOU KIDDING, MATT? GET OUT OF THERE NOW. Lindsay acted however she damn well pleased and then looked for a way to rationalize it later. I wonder where she learned that…

Side note: Dina is with her, dressed as… Masked Thigh Pirate? Can someone vanquish her, please? Where is the Dread Pirate Roberts when you need him? Also, I would just like to recall with everyone that Dina was, once upon a time, pushing for her own talk show and thought she could be the next Oprah. You can’t spell “a delusion” without “Dina.”

Michael Lohan, Jr., is there. He seems like a decent kid. A long time ago he was going to change his name to Michael Cameron because he felt like the associations with “Michael Lohan” were terrible, but I guess that went by the wayside, as apparently did Dina’s attempts to finance a movie for him. Anyhoo, Michael’s interview only barely has to do with what we’re seeing: He pays a lot of lip service to being afraid for Lindsay and says he just wants her to be happy, and that if she relapses he thinks her career will go down the tubes.  He seems well-meaning, although I also don’t see him or anyone else trying to get her downstairs in any kind of responsible rush.

And because they’re at a massive casino party and it’s full of challenges and temptations and all manner of things that might make it a really difficult evening for Lindsay, Dina spends the evening paying close attention to her beloved child.

And then of course:

Lindsay defensively insists, “You can’t change the past. It’s not my karma. My side of the street was clean.” Honey, your side of the street is only “clean” in the sense that you’ve tidied all the crap into piles. But we are told later that the Casino agreed she fulfilled her obligations, and dollars to donuts, she used the “You didn’t tell me about on-camera interviews” loophole to get herself paid in full.  Now, TMZ claims she showed up at 11:45 to this party (but gives her credit for hosting the costume contest), but this appears to show she arrived earlier than that; TMZ ALSO claims the casino wasn’t mad at Floyd’s tardiness because he hung around and took fan pictures and did interviews and signed stuff. So. There you have it. I have done my duty.

AND NOW: The Elle Indonesia malarkey.

This is Eric Silverberg, photographer, and Anindita, the stylist for Elle Indonesia. Why do they look peeved? Because they are waiting for Lindsay, who has missed her 12:30 p.m. call time. Part of the issue is that Eric prefers to use natural light, and it’s winter, so they’ll lose that earlier than they’d like. And I don’t mean to agree with Lindsay Lohan in ANY respect, but… dudes, if that’s the problem, why are you giving her a 12:30 p.m. call time? Give her a 9 a.m. call time, so she can a) run late, which you know she will, and still lave you a nice cushion, and b) drag her feet in hair and makeup, and STILL give you a nice cushion. I’m totally sympathetic to their problems with her being a crackpot, but seriously, schedule your crackpot properly. And if she won’t show up any earlier, have a contingency plan and/or another cover subject. (How much do you want to bet Big O called and begged for some help from Elle and they were like, “Well, we have a magazine in… um…no, not doing France… no, don’t give her UK… definitely not Japan… aha, Indonesia!”) Lindsay later makes a snotty comment in an interview that Eric needs to learn to shoot without just using natural light, but as Eric points out, that’s the skill set he was BOOKED on, so it’s kind of what he was expected to deliver. SCHEDULING. The end.

Anindita eats her vegetables and gives all the right bites about how Lindsay is a great star and she’s going to have a tremendous comeback, and everyone deserves a second chance. So what happens? She doesn’t show. And she tells them, not even DIRECTLY but through random “representatives” that aren’t even #SaveMatt, that “she worked really late and then needed to sleep, and it just got later and later,” and that she is so very sorry.

#SaveMatt says, yes indeed, she was working. But he can’t tell anyone what she was doing, because it’s covert. It’s a secret. But it’s not a lie. For reals. #SaveMatt, I may not want to #save you anymore. (By the way, the #SaveMatt hashtag, I thought was a random Twitter thing, but it turns out it was coined by Fug National @themrsfernandez, and credit where credit is due, milady!) Seriously, this interview feels like trying to pull teeth from a brat who keeps pretending to bite your fingers.

Listen, maybe she was working. Maybe this shoot, COINCIDENTALLY, was scheduled the day after the ONLY OTHER DAY she EVER had ANYTHING to do. You know what? Too bad. My husband worked on something recently where an actress he had to shoot was on the East Coast performing something, AND she had a cold, and yet she flew to L.A. for two very full and concentrated days of shooting, nailed it, never complained, was a total freaking pro, and then went right back. Know why? It’s right in there: BECAUSE SHE IS A TOTAL FREAKING PRO. And that is why she works. Because she understands that even when things run late, you have to set alarms. Call times are not adorable suggestions.

So, Linds sends this TOTALLY random other person we’ve never seen before, as her “representative,” to tell Elle Indonesia that she’s just really sorry and let’s just do it tomorrow. Anindita awesomely tells them that’s not going to work BECAUSE THEY HAVE LIVES TOO. And then she gets on her phone to call her boss:

!!!!!!

That is way harsh. And maybe, to be honest, not the best optics for Elle Indonesia. But the thing is, I bet you not a person alive who is reasonable saw that and felt like Anindita was unjustified. It’s a TWO-DAY FLIGHT to New York from Indonesia, and somehow THEY managed to get there on time and awake and ready to work, and Lindsay is like ten minutes from where they’re shooting and she can’t manage it, AND she strings them along all afternoon, AND she never actually talks to them in person? I am super concerned about her complete inability to set an alarm clock, or understand that the world is not made up of people who just spontaneously open their eyes and start their days at exactly the right moment. You have to DO THINGS. DO THINGS DAMMIT. If you just wait for shit to happen, then getting FIRED is what will happen.

Amen, Aminita. Amen. I may rechristen you AMENita.

Do you want to know Lindsay’s defense? Ahem: She tells us she’s a night person, and slips RIGHT into Poor Pitiful Pearl mode by pointing out that this stems from being a child who waited up all night for her ragey father to come home because she was worried about her mother, and she doesn’t like that this has made her a night person who can’t get on a normal schedule, but she can’t HELP IT. I cannot. I cannot brook with someone who takes actual very legitimate psychological scars and issues, and uses them to justify her own self-indulgent, slothy behavior. I understand that is in the definition of many a mental disease, and I’m sorry for her, but until she demonstrates an interest in owning her failings rather than simply inhabiting them, then I can’t sympathize. I can’t. She is inexcusable.

At this point, the filmmakers decide to cut to more of Lindsay’s self-shot footage. Now, a reminder: We don’t know what day this was in relation to anything else; therefore, the way they’re using it in this episode becomes manipulative in a way that is the ONLY time this show has made me uncomfortable about its process — for instance, right after she is “working” “late” and “can’t” “wake” “up” for her shoot, they show this:

See that, right there, to the right of the paper towels? That’s a corked wine bottle. As in, a wine bottle that has been opened before, and it is on Lindsay’s counter, and she is reaching for it. And she can’t pretend she was going for something else, because — ON HER OWN CAMERA, which is set up on a shelf across from her couch — she picks it up, turns around to shield it, as if she’s contemplating opening the fridge, and then meanders off-camera. The show is editorializing here in a way that’s pretty irresponsible, but also, possibly accurate, and let’s face it, she DID DO this on camera; we just don’t know when.

So. She clearly knew that Wine Swipe might BE within range of her home camera, because there’s something about the way she pretends she isn’t going to take it, then casually does, and LA LA LA LA wanders away with it, that seems like she wants people to think she isn’t going to rip that cork out with her teeth and chug. If she didn’t realize she was on her own camera, surely she’d have acted less coy. But then that brings up the question: Why not TURN OFF the camera? Why are you catching yourself doing this at all, and then why are you GIVING THAT FOOTAGE to the show? Does the show own the camera? Was there an agreement that anything she recorded automatically belonged to them? Why not erase it or record over it, secretly? There are a hundred ways that could not have ever been seen, much less put into a show, and Lindsay did none of them. Which makes me wonder what she’s up to (cry for help? messing with out heads?), and what she’s trying to say. Although I think we may know the answer:

Because right here she looks awfully upset about something, and with nothing but our imaginations and what we just saw to run wild…  For a show that is scrupulous about its use of clarifying title cards and whatnot, the use of this piece here made me … well, like I said, uncomfortable. Also, I really like her chair. Like, a lot. #SaveChair.

This stuff, the show says, DID happen the night before the rescheduled Elle Indonesia shoot. Which you think is going to portend doom, because these people are potentially An Unkindness of Asswagons, but actually it’s a red herring. Linds goes to a gigantic rave-looking club…

… while interviewing about how she COMPLETELY FINE if she’s around friends who are drinking because she can dance, and smoke, and that’s more than enough to feed her soul, and “I know what my demons are” in every place she goes. So what does she do at 7:21 a.m. the morning she’s due for a rescheduled Elle shoot?

She has A Pride of Russian Jackholes back to her place to play a game of Truth Or Dare, Except Actually Just Dare, And Using Only A Knife. So Nips McHammered up there is GETTING HIS EAR PIERCED WITH A KNIFE while Lindsay films it, and they can’t get through his ear, and he keeps asking and asking for some kind of long needle they can use instead and Lindsay’s profoundly coherent answer is, “Neeeeeeh,” and so they just punch away at this dude’s earlobe, and eventually pass him a half-empty bottle of vodka for courage and disinfecting purposes, but which…Lindsay, I don’t know how many different ways to spell BAD IDEA before you understand it. Are you allergic to vowels? Are you only seeing BD D? I’m pretty sure you just made $2,222 a minute on Halloween, which would afford you all the vowels twice, in case you lost the first set.

And then we get an ad for what I hope becomes Lindsay’s next job:

If you have never seen those ads — where judgmental talking livestock whispers about how their farmers are still single, like, you don’t know what it’s like out there, Bessie, so shut your grasshole — then you need to look it up on YouTube. And then look up Dump Cakes. You won’t be sorry.

Linds DOES make it to Elle Indonesia this time, and this time, they gave her a 1 p.m. call time. But hair and makeup takes her three and a half hours, because she’s showing everyone pictures of Knife Boy getting his ear pierced, and making sure the nail girl is putting on an extra topcoat, or whatever, so Natural Light Boy is once again going to lose all of his. Which, again, could have been avoided by making her come even a LITTLE earlier.

In a series of bites that are totally defensive in tone, Lindsay insists that doing Elle Indonesia is just for exposure — “there’s no payment in that,” as if she is justified in being unprofessional because money is not exchanging hands, AND as if she doesn’t need good press  as badly as she needs cash — and then proceeds to shit all over them by saying it was a “very strange setup” where it was never explained to her and it felt very rushed. BECAUSE THEY HAD AN HOUR OF LIGHT LEFT YOU MORON. WHAT ABOUT THAT HAIRSTYLE TOOK THREE HOURS? IT IS NOT EVEN GOOD. (Although there is a funny bit where her hair guy notices it’s a different color and he goes, “Do you… like it?” in a semi-judgy way. See, Linds? Nobody likes you blonder.)

Also, her complaints about how uncomfortable she was — and how awful and distracting it was that there were fans taking photos from the street — are completely undercut by the footage of her having a blast and shaking her butt for them in front of the window. Thou art full of it, pet.

I admit, I’m not sure how Sex Piano fits into this.

Elle Indonesia really is all or nothing: Either barely any pants, or SO MUCH PANTS.

They do five wardrobe changes, and apparently still aren’t done? How big is this spread, anyway, y’all? Sheesh.

At this point, they’re out of natural light. And Lindsay starts whining. She decides that if she walked home right there, the photographer and his flash could get stuff that’s a million times better than anything they got inside. And since she’s being a pill, they’re like, “Fine, great, let’s do that.” So she starts to walk…

… and then this fool starts taking cameraphone video of her walking down the street while being snapped by a professional photographer, and screaming, “HI TMZ! HI LINDSAY!” #SaveMatt, who is about one nugget tall, holds his coat over his head to try and block the lens, but that obviously doesn’t work; she FREAKS OUT and screams at #SaveMatt, “This whole thing is going to be on YouTube tomorrow and I’m going to deal with the wrath of all that so THANK YOU.” And as she gets into her car, she screams at #SaveMatt to get the f*cking camera. So #SaveMatt runs after this dude and offers him a grand for the phone, and the guy says yes, and then is like, “No, never mind, ten thousand,” and #SaveMatt is like, “Are you insane?” So he announces he’s going to go home and put the video online RIGHT NOW. For… no money, then? Son, if you put it online, no one will pay you for it. TAKE THE GRAND AND RUN. Also, what is the big damage? Someone got a video of Lindsay Lohan DOING AN ACTUAL JOB. She should send that thing to TMZ herself.

It ends with her running away from another fan encounter and then acting shocked SHOCKED I TELL YOU that two photographers are outside her place, and having to hustle inside her apartment. Wearing the clothes. From the shoot. Which she does not then send back downstairs for them to return to Elle. This whole thing is… I mean, Lindsay is not stupid. She knows the paparazzi knew where she was, and can always find her; she knows they will be outside her house. Why would you suggest WALKING HOME as part of a PHOTO SHOOT and then be surprised when people notice? And then get upset, when it’s actually just ONE guy, on foot, with an iPhone, who wants to tell the world that you were — for one brief blazing moment in time — employed?

My theory, which is EXTREMELY uncharitable, is that she didn’t feel like doing any more work and she kind of wanted to keep the shoes and the pants, and that this is like Advanced Masters-Level Professional Kleptomania at work here.

I don’t want to suggest that #SaveMatt agrees with me, but…

In actuality, #SaveMatt is at Lindsay’s for Day Three of this one-day Elle shoot. They’ve moved it to her place for Reasons. And even when the shoot is IN HER OWN APARTMENT, she is late for her 1:30 call time and isn’t able to shoot until 4:40.  I genuinely think Elle Indonesia needed a kick in the head about scheduling. Fool them once, shame on her. Fool them twice, shame on them. Fool them thrice, don’t even go back home.

The documentary crew ends up setting up full lighting for the photographer, who is so grateful that he offers the guys a lighting credit on the shoot. And the crew is like, “Seriously, no worries,” and he’s like, “NO REALLY,” and basically I think nobody really wants their names on whatever comes out of this. Lindsay, in her fur and bra, gives him attitude about directing her posing, which is insane.

AMENita points out that it was very helpful of Lindsay to use her own closet to flesh out the shoot,which she says is because they had to return all the borrowed Indonesian clothes to the designers because they are now finishing this up a week after the original date. A WEEK. (Four days passed between Day 2 and Day 3.) Lindsay’s take on this: “If I could list all the shoots I should get credit for as a co-stylist, you could write a full novel.” Instagram doesn’t count, sweetpea, and also, you’re only styling this because THE CLOTHES HAD TO LEAVE FOR ANOTHER JOB. THEY ARE BUSIER THAN YOU ARE.

Also, she may not want to take credit for leather overalls and a hat.

Especially not with a see-through shirt under it.

And NOBODY should want ownership of the bodystocking. That consignment store was probably like, “Please stop bringing us things. We don’t cater to deranged mimes.”

AMENita apparently failed to mention that she wanted a video interview for the website and Facebook, although, per Lindsay’s usual M.O., it’s possible this was all in the contract and she just didn’t bother to read it because she she thinks that stuff is all just a quaint, folksy list of advice. So Lindsay tells AMENita that she absolutely cannot possibly spare any time for that because she has other plans, and then sits around tapping her phone and doing nothing. AMENita tells us that Lindsay has to change: “I will give this advice to my daughter: You can do any career path you want in life, even if it’s not what I think is best, but the thing is, never waste your life.” And it’s true. It’s not even that Lindsay is not succeeding; it’s that she is wasting. Her life, her talent, her opportunities, her resources, her her youth, her stores of good will, her money, rehab stints in fancy places that elude actual desperate people who WANT to recover — all of them things that have been given to her in quantities that escape most of the rest of the world, and she’s squandering it like pennies. If Oprah and Stedman won’t adopt Lindsay, can AMENita do it?

Then Lindsay puts on a glorified shirt to go to an event for Zadig & Voltaire, and some Russian himbo comes over to be her date, and brings her some nameless, vague, non-clear liquid concoction in a mason jar to drink while she gets ready. I hope it was lemonade. I would have presented it without comment, but this is a better view of the shortness of her outfit, which is — in its own way — just as depressing.

Photographer Eric is asked how working with Lindsay compared with shooting other celebrities. He paused for a long moment and then said, “Do you want the truth, or no?” They say yes, and he thinks and then smiles and slowly ducks off-camera. Well played, Eric. He can’t go shitting all over her in an interview, but he also managed not to say anything that would be a blatant lie. He made his point.

Then ex-model Irina Lazareanu shows up to take Lindsay to the Zadig & Voltaire private dinner at the Guggenheim. Which Getty Images says happened on November 21, and it has no photos at all of either Irina or Lindsay at the party, for whatever that’s worth. Want my guess? Either they never intended to go there and it just sounded respectable for the cameras, or Irina couldn’t get Lindsay inside. Also, most of the people who went to that event were properly dressed up, rather than looking like somebody peeled them out of an old rained-on Opening Ceremony advertorial. SHE has with her a dude who has been in AA for three years but says he has not been sober for three years, and gives a rambling, shambling bite about how having friends who are sober is really good for Lindsay, because you need to have “people you don’t have to be wasted in order to level with.” Which is great, except he seems SUPER shifty, and… I don’t even know anymore. I can think of several people I know who live in New York who are the ACTUAL kinds of Get A Grip friends this girl needs, and actually, THAT would be a show, because one of them knows how to throw knives — just, you know, casually — and that would be good TV.

AND ALSO: The fact that the last day of Elle Indonesia was the same night as this party, Nov. 21, suggests that between Halloween and the week prior to this, the crew never really got to shoot Lindsay much. Think about how wasteful THAT is, or how indicative it is of what ISN’T going on in her life, and possibly what is.

And so the show cuts to Lindsay in her enviable armchair. The stuff at the top of the hour is her in this outfit minus the boots, so Lord knows in what order any of it happened, but here she sits in the chair pensively for a while and then gets up and walks over to the camera and turns it sideways and walks away. Not off; just away. It’s… well, it’s a good ending, I guess, and I think this is where the show continues to be faced with trying to present what the crew is seeing without actually having much of it on camera. As in, I suspect the crew doesn’t want to put together a rosy show about how well she’s doing, and allow Lindsay to hijack it all with her therapist-speak, when the nitty-gritty truth of dealing with her suggests she does not practice what she’s preaching. So they’re trying what they can to convey that underneath the rational-sounding surface is a whole lot of bullshit whipped into stiff peaks, spooned into a pie crust of sadness. There is a point in a documentary — and basically that’s what this is, at this point, more than a reality soap, because they are DEFINITELY not soft-scripting any of Lindsay’s B.S. — where the filmmakers are going to end up with a point of view about their subject and the project will shape itself toward that point of view, whether it wants to or not. (The beans are obsessed with a documentary about kids who play golf, called The Short Game, and there’s one kid in there who… the movie never comes down on him, at all, but simply by presenting some of the things he says, you are more than able to form a particular opinion.) This one I think is stepping into REALLY REALLY WANTING TO, and maybe that’s fine, as long as it does it without connecting dots that aren’t actually near each other. That is all I ask.

Since Lindsay is cheerfully promoting this show, which has burst the bubble of her attempts at recovery, I keep waiting for the warm resolution to come, and now I actually don’t think it is coming. I kind of hope the two-hour (!) finale next week ends in everyone agreeing that this project can’t go on, for her health or anyone else’s.

Oh, and I tried to find the Elle Indonesia pics; I couldn’t, but the show gave us the cover:

And what do you know? It’s actually pretty good — as a photo, at least, if not as a cover. And THAT is the problem with Lindsay, right there. At the end of the day, Lindsay Lohan can often give you a product that makes you think there’s still something there worth fighting for – even in Liz & Dick, there were moments where you realized that although she was NOT GOOD and HORRIBLY miscast, there was still an actress in there someplace fighting to get out —  and then at EVERY subsequent turn, she does her best to stab that realization in the back until next time. Think about the first episode, in which she came off charming and earnest, if a bit dangerously deluded about herself, and then think about where we are now. Think about her lauded appearance on Letterman, which people said was pretty good on as well, and then think about how it came sandwiched between an episode in which she shoved away her life coach and an episode in which she almost pissed away a job. She is a self-saboteur of the highest order, and the thing about that is, eventually, it’s going to work. And the sad part is, until it really does, she’ll just stay in this cycle of getting away with it.

Tags: Lindsay
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