So Lindsay Lohan has bared all for New York Magazine and photographer Bert Stern, who snapped the last pictures of Marilyn Monroe, six weeks before she was found dead. To that end, the shots — taken February 5, at the Hotel Bel-Air — are a recreation of those photographs, with Lohan posing with little to nothing, save see-through fabrics and strings of diamonds, like the photographs below.

In the interview accompanying the spread, penned by Amanda Fortini, Lohan dismisses talk that the pictures are part of a gambit to restore any shine to her big screen career, after last year’s lackluster grosses of Georgia Rule and I Know Who Killed Me, and a couple well-publicized run-ins with the law and stints in rehab. Rather, the actress offered a more straightforward explanation: “I didn’t have to
put much thought into it. I mean, Bert Stern? Doing a Marilyn shoot?
When is that ever going to come up? It’s really an honor,” she says.

In laying out some of the particulars of the air-quote closed-set shoot, Fortini delivers a compelling thumbnail sketch of the “celebrity industrial complex,” but also raises questions about who is giving Lohan advice, if anyone. Part of her rationalization, given the next day by phone (“Here is a woman who is giving herself to the public,” says Lohan about the Monroe photos, “she’s
saying, ‘Look, you’ve taken a lot from me, so why don’t I give it to
you myself?’ She’s taking control back”) doesn’t really pass the smell test, particularly when Lohan has to battle newly forged ridden-hard-and-put-away-wet tabloid problems largely of her own creation. It’s great for the hornball set, naturally, these pictures, but what does it accomplish, other than remind folks, “Oh yeah, I guess we haven’t really heard anything about Lohan the past eight or nine weeks?” Does it help make her one iota more bankable, or land a film of gimme-put substance, either commercially or artistically? No, it doesn’t; it merely reinforces the notion that she’s only suitable for wild-child and/or other dinged, reckless parts.