We’re onto you, Amanda Bynes. This whole crazy lady thing you have going on — with the cheek piercings and the Drake tweets and 25 wackadoo facts you told Us Weekly — we know it’s fake. You’re just Joaquin Phoenix-ing us. Like Joaquin, your overabundance of hair and your crazy diatribes are all part of a master plan. A year from now you will release a movie chronicling your hijinks and pronounce it a commentary on the state of popular culture and the media’s portrayal of celebrity — and we’ll be able to sit back, cross our arms, and smugly say, “We told you so.”
Let’s think about this for a minute. Bynes was a breakout comedy sensation when she was barely a decade old. Back when she was just 10, Bynes became a fan favorite on Nickelodeon’s sketch comedy show All That. And after three seasons, Nickelodeon gave her a giant pat on the back in the form of her very own sketch comedy show, The Amanda Show. She had barely reached puberty, and she had a hit television comedy named after her.
Bynes worked steadily until 2010 — snagging her own sitcom with Jennie Garth (What I Like About You), an endlessly quotable teen comedy starring Channing Tatum as her love interest (She’s the Man), and scene-stealing roles in hits Hairspray and Easy A — and has only really began unraveling in the past two years. How did she manage to survive her rebellious teen years only to go off the deep end in her early 20s? Something doesn’t add up.
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Granted, Bynes did face some very real legal trouble in early 2012. I don’t mean to imply that her DUI was a ruse (although, her father did tell People that his daughter “doesn’t drink” and Bynes tweeted “I was not in any hit and runs. I don’t drink so the DUI is false,” MTV reports…). She did, after all, submit to booking and get a lovely mug shot taken. But the many license suspensions, fender benders, and sightings of marijuana behind the wheel did all become a bit comical. While everyone was quick to label Bynes as a Lindsay Lohan copycat, maybe in reality she was fooling the lot of us.
Bynes’ most recent antics are the most laughable — and, oddly enough, lovable — yet. Let’s go back to that Us Weekly “25 Things You Didn’t Know About Me” article written by Bynes. The items on this list — from her grandparents’ hometown to her hurricane survival skills and goal weight — are so irreverent, so bizarre, that they can only be calculated.
Then, the cheek piercing. How handy that Bynes chose a form of badass body decorating that is still entirely reversible. If Bynes were really, truly losing her mind, she would have gotten a face tat. The cheek studs are strange enough to raise eyebrows, but, much like that fried curly wig or Joaquin’s scraggly beard, can be removed once she’s had her fun.
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And that brings us to the tweeting. Oh Lordy, the tweeting. Bynes’ request for rapper Drake to “murder her vagina” was only the most recent in a string of strange tweets. How about the photo she tweeted of her “SoCks,” or the time she tweeted that Drake was “rocking that incest face”? Or, my personal favorites, her thoughts on love. “If it is meant to be, our hearts will find each other when we meet. And if our hearts melt together so will our bodies and souls,” Bynes tweeted. And, “When someone loves you, the way they say your name is different. You know that your name is safe in their mouth.” A Google search makes it unclear to me whether Bynes is quoting author Jess C. Scott here or Billy, age 4, but it’s beautiful stuff either way.
The Amanda Bynes “meltdown” we are currently witnessing is strange and slightly upsetting, but with no more trouble with the law or obvious health problems, it is also wildly entertaining. Like the proverbial trainwreck, we don’t want to see the grisly consequences… and yet we can’t look away. We can’t wait to see Bynes rise, like Phoenix, from the ashes of her own creation — it’s going to be a flippin’ great movie.
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[Photo Credit: Splash News]
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