It was in 2003, while listening to country radio, that Kelly first heard the casting call: “Have you dreamed about plastic surgery but never thought you could afford it?” She immediately turned up the volume. The pitch sounded too good to be true: free cosmetic procedures, a nutritionist, self-esteem work – one “life-changing opportunity” that “could transform everything”. Kristy, Cindy, Tawnya and Beth heard the call, too: the chance to overhaul oneself from the outside in, fulfilling the implicit but omnipresent promise that if you just lost a little weight and just tweaked your face a bit, your whole life would open up.
You, too, could be an ugly duckling transfigured into a swan. It would all be filmed for television, of course, for a short-lived show that some have called one of the most sadistic of all time: The Swan. The Fox reality program, which ran for two seasons in 2004, brought the spectacle of intensive plastic surgery – the endurance of extreme pain and humiliation in pursuit of a narrow beauty ideal – to US living rooms with shocking bluntness: bandages and bruises, surgical cannulas pounding into flesh, curt assessments of lumps and bumps and “masculine” teeth that must be corrected in pursuit of a better you.
Even among similarly thin-obsessed programs from the infamously ruthless Wild West of early reality television – America’s Next Top Model and The Biggest Loser, to name a few – The Swan stands out as especially cruel, at once hopelessly bought into punitive beauty standards on-screen and shamelessly manipulative off it. It’s the “XXL version” of the many issues endemic to reality television, said Erin Lee Carr, the director of The Swan: Behind the Mirror, a new Hulu retrospective on the infamous series. The show, developed by former Telemundo executive and “life coach” Nely Galán, was in some ways a natural, if extreme, outgrowth of growing fascination with, and exposure to, celebrities under a tightening microscope.
Carr, the director of 2021 Netflix film Britney vs Spears, is somewhat of an expert on the aughts’ relentless pressure on women to stay tight, taut and sexual. An early montage rips through a horrifying array of the period’s worst impulses: Lindsay Lohan’s figure analyzed on the evening news, celebrities hospitalized for “exhaustion,” Anna Nicole Smith bragging about diet pills on a late-show couch. But the 100-minute film is less an examination of the extreme diet culture that begat something like The Swan – for many, we know it all too well – than a more truthful accounting of what the 32 women who went on the show endured.
As numerous contestants and a handful of producers reveal, very little of what was shown on TV in 2004 was accurate or truthful, beyond the physical pain and discomfort of its contestants. (Galán, the show’s creator, on-screen judge and off-screen “mentor”, declined to participate.) As several attest, the initial appeal of the series was, yes, possibly some “free boobs”, but also a genuine chance to improve their self-esteem through fitness, therapy and scarce personal time. While “the original concept of The Swan, as it was told to me, was transforming women’s lives”, a producer named Julee recalls, the entertainment dictates of reality TV (as another producer put it: “we’re gonna take ugly chicks and make them hot”) demanded otherwise. Contestants were isolated from friends, family and themselves – there were no mirrors present for the duration of filming – lest they gain any outside perspective.
Nurses or other caretakers were so infrequent the women resorted to changing each other’s bandages, preparing each other’s liquid foods or helping to clean up when, say, one’s lipo continuously leaked on the bed. The women maintained their own scrapbooks and calendars, and agreed to a series of rules familiar to any diet culture survivor’s delusional plan for total metamorphosis: “I am solely responsible for ensuring my time here is a success; I will not see my family or friends; I will follow the plan provided by the swan team of experts; I will go to therapy once a week; I will stick to a strict diet; I will work out six days a week sometimes twice a day; I will work with the swan coach to stay motivated; and I will not see myself in a mirror so I can focus on my internal transformation.” The women were given little choice in what procedures they had done – everything from rhinoplasties to breast augmentation to veneers, as many as six surgeries in 10 hours of anesthesia. Cameras rolled as they woke up from surgery, still groggy from anesthesia, swollen and heavily bandaged. (That is, if they woke up – one second-season contestant whose oxygen levels plummeted after surgery, ending filming, says she still does not know if she underwent chest compressions to survive.) Such grotesque footage, which Carr used judiciously, “hurt my heart, on a human level”, she said.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
