There’s a lot that could be said about Lindsay Lohan’s “performance” as Marilyn Monroe in this mostly-nude photo shoot for New York Magazine, aping the latter’s stars famous champagne-fueled “Last Sitting” with photographer Bert Stern from 1962. Just the frame-by-frame contrast above says a lot about how Marilyn and Lindsay approached the, um, role. Where Marilyn seems caught in a moment of abandon, Lindsay’s frozen in rabbit-toothed defiance, her wig shalacked into the antithesis of bedhead, nostrils flared as though she’s holding her breath. We could go through each of the pictures and talk about all that stuff, but that would seem to be giving the endeavor more credit than it deserves. As Perez Hilton so astutely notes (no, that’s not a typo), “She has no movie coming out. That new album won’t be released for a while. Lindsay has NOTHING to promote, other than herself.”

So you have to wonder what the Lohan camp sees as the endgame of this.

Defamer puts the shoot in line with Drew Barrymore’s post-rehab sleaze-fest comeback, Poison Ivy, but this is simultaneously more and less than that. At least Drew was getting movie work, and I don’t know if you’ve seen Poison Ivy recently, but bad as it is, Barrymore’s totally fun to watch in it, because she seems to know she’s mocking the very idea that even as our culture shames young girls who behave badly, skeevy older dudes find that bad behavior irresistable.

But there’s no indication that Lindsay is rolling in movie offers, even bad ones; there’s also no indication that she has any sort of sense of humor about her image or how it’s used and consumed, nor that she gets the irony of trying to rehab her image by mimicking the final photo shoot of the most famous dead starlet of all time. The Marilyn images are exciting to look at because they seem like such genuine evidence of a woman on an emotional rollercoaster. Lindsay can’t replicate that, and doesn’t even seem to try, so the question becomes this: to what end does this even qualify as self-promotion? Is she looking for work  in an old-Hollywood themed burlesque show?

Maybe there’s something there. After all, the inevitable I Know Who Killed Me midnight revival tour could use an opening act…