Reality Roll Call

This week’s episode of “Living Lohan” starts pretty typically: Ali falls and hurts her ankle, and Dina is annoyed they might miss their plane. Man, this woman is so full of maternal sympathy I tear up sometimes as I remember my own childhood.

Dina, Ali, and Cody fly in to Vegas (staying at the Plams, natch), where they almost immediately go to a party with a whole slew of music executives. Everything from Dina’s poor-man’s Farrah Fawcett hair to her minidress screams of a sort of predatory sexual competition with her daughters that seems terribly disturbing.

Ali is recording at the Palms recording studio (who knew they even had one?) in her white booty shorts and whore eyemakeup. I wanted her to have a good voice, I really did, because I don’t want to have to rip on a young girls looks AND her “talent.” But despite her good intentions, Ali is terrible. Flat and awkward and trying way too hard to be sexy at an age where I doubt she even knows what sexy is.

Dina is always talking, refusing to shut her mouth in order to keep the focus on her, rather than the daughter she ostensibly represents. This includes talking over her children. While Ali is in the recording studio, Dina takes Cody into Vegas. Dina promises it’s all about what Cody wants, and he sees the New York rollercoaster and excitedly says he’d like to do that. But Dina makes an executive decision that they will instead go have lunch with a magician.

Meanwhile, back in the studio, the scene is cringe-worthy. Poor Ali is dreadful, and facing a room full of eight or so guys in their early-thirties. The producer and her vocal coach are trying to tell Ali that her problem is lack of confidence, but it isn’t. Despite the fact that the producer is sucking up like a hoover, everyone else looks bored or embarrassed. Ali isn’t suffering from lack of confidence so much as she is aware she is average, she knows everyone else knows it.

After lunch with the magician, there is a genuine moment of mothering where Dina takes Cody to Madame Tussaud’s. But when they get home and Ali hears about the fun day they had without her, she starts crying. Dude, singing is so hard, and she hasn’t been out all day. Part of the breakdown is inevitable, as Ali is a brat, but a good part of it is that she’s a kid, and she doesn’t want to be working, she wants to be having fun. After a good brow-beating from her mother, Ali decides this is totally what she wants to do. Uh-huh. To drive the point home, Dina takes Ali to The Pearl concert hall, where she makes Ali sing her new song on stage. If you watching at home noticed how Ali’s voice improved, it wasn’t because of Ali’s “newfound confidence,” but rather the result of E! producers having her sing along to the pre-recorded, ProTools-enhanced track. And thank heavens for ProTools and vocoder technology, or how would Ali ever live her dream?

And of course, the episode ends on a high note, with Ali triumphing with her new, confident voice, blushing as her final cut is played for everyone in the studio. It’s a sad state on the formulaic nature of pop music when a girl with a weak, average, and overly-breathy voice can turn out a passable dance track in a day and a half.

The most painful-yet psychologically interesting-part of this episode is watching the awkward “conversations” between Dina and whomever she can find, where she justifies her mothering and her lifestyle. These “moments” are so transparently setup after the episode has been stitched together in order to make Dina more likable, that they have the opposite effect: instead, they make her look cloying and desperate. But you know, so is this whole show.