rock bottom

Lindsay’s Choice: Sheen Can’t Save Her, So Who?

Photo: Quantrell D. Colbert/Dimension Films

Charlie Sheen wants to save Lindsay Lohan, but Lindsay Lohan doesn’t want his help. Which low is lower — being such a trainwreck that Charlie Sheen offers help, or being so toxic that Lindsay Lohan rejects your help?

“I have a kinship with somebody [Lohan] who clearly needs a mentor, whether she wants one or not,” an ominous Sheen told TMZ. “She can continue to hang out with her dress-shredding club buddies, or turn to me for some advice from a guy who’s been down that road as well as every other side trail on the journey.”

The Lohan-Sheen race to the bottom started during New York Fashion Week, when Sheen helped Lindsay acquire a gown for a red carpet event that she probably crashed. The dress “ripped” at a nightclub, prompting Lindsay to “request some scissors” and chop the designer gown in half, into a mullet hemline. Us Weekly reported that Sheen offered to “go halfsies” on the $1,750 gown, but Lindsay rejected the offer and simply returned the gown in a ruined state. This isn’t the first time Sheen has tried to be Lindsay’s white knight; after wrapping on the forthcoming Scary Movie 5he gave her $100,000 to pay her tax debt. That largess coincided with Sheen’s announcement that he would give his entire $250,000 Scary Movie paycheck to charity. Lindsay was one of many charitable causes.

The dress in question, pre-shredding. Photo: Stephen Lovekin/Getty Images

Now “sources close to LiLo” say she no longer wants Sheen’s charity because she doesn’t like the way he talks about her. As for Sheen’s claim that Lohan is in peril, “sources close to LiLo” say, “It takes one to know one.”

And so Lindsay Lohan returns to the same dilemma she’s faced all her life, that inverted Sophie’s Choice where the child must choose between horrible parent figures: Dina Lohan, Michael Lohan, and now Charlie Sheen. Though she is no longer a child, LiLo remains in desperate need of authoritative assistance. (Even her lawyer is incompetent.) She’s trapped in a perpetually teenage state, approaching adult life with the mentality of a high school truant. She believes rules don’t apply to her. She skips court dates like she’s cutting gym class and misses meetings because she slept through her alarm. Lindsay Lohan’s problem, essentially, is that she’s a giant flake.

The greatest irony about the Lohan-Sheen face-off, then, is that the skill Lindsay needs — anti-flakiness — is something Sheen is relatively good at. Though his run on Two and a Half Men ended in flames, Sheen made an astonishing 177 episodes in spite of ongoing criminality, substance abuse, and apparent mental illness. If Charlie Sheen can do that, surely the significantly more-sane Lindsay Lohan can, too. LiLo may live in a world that sets her up for failure and cheers for her demise — but that has to be better than living in a hallucinatory world that simply does not exist, as Charlie Sheen did during his “tiger blood” phase. Or is the real lesson of the Lohan-Sheen pas de deux that, for celebrities, unpopularity actually triggers lower lows than violent psychosis does?

Lindsay’s Choice: Sheen Can’t Save Her, So Who?