Lindsay Lohan, of Mean Girls and LA party scene fame, recently graced the pages of New York Magazine’s spring fashion issue in a recreation of Marilyn Monroe’s infamous last photo shoot.   Bert Stern, 79, who conducted and photographed both the Last Sitting and Lohan’s shoot, captures Lohan, donning a short, blonde wig, copious amounts of liquid eyeliner and little to no clothing.   His representation of the two troubled starlets highlights an underlying beauty, expressed not necessarily through the photographs themselves, but through the starlets: and their public dramas: themselves.
Images from the Last Sitting, as the collection has come to be known, were shot at the Hotel Bel Air in the summer 1962.   Monroe was 36 at the time, and to put it simply, she was a hot mess.   She had two failed marriages under her belt, she had just been fired from a movie set, and she had endured a stint in a mental health facility in 1961.   During the shoot, an obviously intoxicated Monroe sipped on champagne for some of the pictures.   Her flaws and pain became transparent through her own beauty.

Lindsay Lohan is a hot mess as well.   Though 15 years younger than Monroe at the time of the Last Sitting, in 2007 alone Lohan made three trips to rehab, was involved in two drunk driving incidents, and was romantically linked to a slew of hot Hollywood actors.   The former Disney star was scrutinized for every move she made: any time she went to a bathroom stall, Internet bloggers claimed she was doing lines of coke off a toilet seat; anytime she was in the same room as a male, it was assumed that she’d stolen him from his wife and having ridiculous animal sex with him 24 hours a day.

The eight photos in New York Magazine feature the nude Lohan in nearly identical poses as Monroe.   Stern’s recreation is strangely shocking: the freckled actress, whose last film, I Know Who Killed Me, earned her two Golden Raspberry Awards for worst actress, evokes a certain amount of sadness as she wistfully poses with translucent scarves and diamond chains.   Also, Lohan’s boobs are very, very big.

While Monroe, though thin in her last months, defined the “hour glass” figure in American culture, Lohan symbolizes the latest wave of the nation’s ever-changing body image: she has enormous breasts and only the vaguest impression of hips.   The once purportedly bulimia-stricken actress is no longer the emaciated orange stick she was during the summer of 2005, but she is still a far cry from the size of the average woman and the shapely figure for which Monroe was known.

Visitors to the New York Magazine Web page crashed the site.   Nymag.com receives about 1.2 million hits a day, but when Lohan’s photos debuted, it received 20 million a day.   Train wrecks are fascinating, especially hot ones with big boobs.   We want to see them fail, and mark their failure with boudoir photos.

Watch out for the barbiturates LiLo, don’t let Stern’s work become a prophecy.