In the last couple of years, you can’t deny that Y2K (the year 2000) is definitely coming back into vogue. My Chemical Romance toured again; Aly & AJ staged a comeback; Bennifer is all loved up; everyone’s rocking double denim, and we’re all excitedly awaiting a new iCarly season.
But for a long time, something has been missing. I don’t mean Ugg boots (they’re ugly, why are you wearing slippers outside?), but the queen of the Y2K era and ‘2000s movies, Lindsay Lohan.
From the moment we realized she was, in fact, one person and not twins like the ones she played in the Disney movie The Parent Trap, Lohan became the indisputable queen of teen movies and noughties culture as a whole.
Although she had a rockstar phase in live-action Disney remake Freaky Friday, it was in poised, polished, hyper-femininity that she truly found her niche. Whether she was facing off against Queen Bee Regina George in Mean Girls or pottering her way through mishaps in Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen, it was clear from the outset that Lohan thrived as a comedy movie actor: especially in roles which, at the time, replicated her IRL experiences.
Along with heiress-turned-DJ Paris Hilton and pop star Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan was part of the ‘Holy Trinity’ of noughties ‘It Girls. But shortly after that infamous photo of the trio was taken in 2006, things started to fall apart.
Hilton’s popularity faded while her former best friend Kim Kardashian shot to fame; Britney had her breakdown and was the victim of a restrictive conservatorship, while Lohan faced a string of legal troubles and scandals that meant her once-lucrative career as the star of various cosy rom-coms like Just My Luck finished just as quickly as it started.
While Lohan spent the last decade in Dubai having a considerably quieter, headline-free life, everything kind of went to shit with the whole global pandemic thing. It led to us craving familiarity, nostalgia, and comfort: and this is something Hollywood certainly delivered on. Long-cherished ‘80s movies and ‘90s movies were getting sequels and reboots — from Hocus Pocus 2, to Halloween, Top Gun: Maverick and Coming to America. Adventure movie heartthrobs like Brendan Fraser also experienced a renaissance.
Even the recent Marvel movie, Spider-Man: No Way Home, not only reunited several members of the 2002 Spider-Man cast but saw Tobey Maguire don his Spidey suit as Peter Parker for the first time in fifteen years. This all leads us to February 2022, when Lindsay re-emerged into the public eye after starring in a Super Bowl halftime commercial that not only poked fun at her past, but also showed that her comedic prowess was as sharp as ever.
This ‘soft-launch’ back into the public domain captured the public’s renewed love for a simpler time and laid the perfect foundation for her recent Netflix Christmas movie, Falling for Christmas. Let’s be real, the film is no work of art. It has a fairly contrived plot that involves Lohan’s character quite literally “falling” in the run-up to Christmas and bumping her head, which leads to her developing amnesia and relying on the hospitality of a handsome, small-town, rustic ski slopes owner.
But the good thing about Christmas movies is that they’re allowed to exist in this purgatory between objectively good and bad filmmaking because, at the end of the day, we know what we’re getting into. We know full well that a film like Falling for Christmas isn’t going to win any Oscars.
But it’s precisely because they’re not very good that we can’t get enough of them. There’s nothing more comforting than the predictable and easy-to-follow nature of a festive Hallmark romance movie, which makes it the perfect vehicle for an actor like Lindsay Lohan to make a comeback.
She knows full well that her movies have stood the test of time because her comedy style and characters make her not an Oscar winner, perhaps, but something arguably better: a certified ‘hun’. As defined by GQ, a hun describes someone who is “relatable, ever so slightly out of touch […] or funny in a way that’s completely unintentional.”
Given that ‘hun’ culture is widely intertwined with Y2K nostalgia and celebrity tabloid gossip, there’s no better embodiment of the self-aware hun than Lindsay Lohan — and that’s what makes her character in Falling for Christmas so entertaining.
As spoilt hotel heiress Sierra Belmont, Lohan said herself that she “wanted to do something where people felt like I hadn’t left.” And from watching the movie myself, I can confirm that she achieved that and more.
So, welcome back, Lindsay Lohan. We missed you.