The Swan: Behind the Mirror Revisits the Rock Bottom of Reality TV—and Makeover Culture

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There is a debate among scientists. Actually, more of a problem. How can we tell people of the future not to go into nuclear waste sites? How do we know our sign will last? How do we know that in the future people will be able to read English? Or read at all? What if they wander in 200,000 years from now and inadvertently wipe out their species?

The people in charge of the Waste Isolation Pilot Project settled on a warning that reads: "This place is not a place of honor. No highly esteemed deed is commemorated here… nothing valued is here. What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger."

So far anyway, that's the best we've got.

But nuclear waste won't be the only thing we leave behind. Future humans could unearth Rumi, Goethe, Bernini, Maya Angelou, Alexandre Dumas and think: Amazing. These people were beautiful, thoughtful, wondrous creatures, capable of depth and consciousness and profound beauty .

Or they could find a season of The Swan . And think: Well, that explains the warning.

We know a bit about what future people will think because a new documentary, The Swan: Behind the Mirror , turns us into the future people.

If you didn't watch The Swan when it aired in 2004, buckle up: This was a reality show in which a few dozen women were sent to Los Angeles to undergo…you name it. Facelifts , tummy tucks, nose jobs , whatever it's called when you take fat from here and inject it there, breast implants, intense exercise, calorie-restrictive diets, new hair, new teeth, new everything. They couldn't see their friends, family, or a reflective surface for three months.

In 2004, at the end of the show's first season, this publication called it the "surgical interpretation of Cinderella," which is definitely one way to describe cutting up a woman until the prince thinks she's cute.

"They weren't women whose faces and bodies had betrayed them. They were women whose faces and bodies had barely had time to form."

Yes, it sounds like madness now, but back then, people ate it up. If you were too young or too not-born to know it, some context: In the early 2000s, we were crazed for makeovers. This publication created an ongoing franchise called Total Makeover that lasted for years. The world was a makeover. We were making over women, men, little girls. We had gay men making over straight men–and would do so for a couple of decades. We made over brides. We made over bedrooms, living rooms, entire homes. You could not simply own a kitchen. Your kitchen had to have a journey. Nothing—not a human, not a cheese tray—was meeting its potential. We became so mad for makeovers that we created makeunders. Now we were trapped in a cycle of improve, reverse; do it all, take it all away. We were Goldilocks on Adderall. A zeitgeist in which "just right" could use some tinkering.

That was the world that spawned The Swan . And twenty plus years later, our world—the one that gave us #metoo, mermaid thighs , and body positivity—is the one that created The Swan: Behind The Mirror . It's a documentary of a reality show (wrap your head around that) that shows the other side—the one full of tears (not of happiness) and horror stories (one woman almost died in surgery).

First of all, the shots in the operating room make The Pitt look like an afternoon at Malibu Barbie's Beach House. But even more troublingly, there is the panel of, I guess "experts"? I'm going with "people." (One is a cosmetic dentist who has since had her license suspended.) They sit at a conference table cataloguing each woman's defects. One suffers from an affliction called "masculine teeth." Another could stand to "take some fat out of her face." A nose is "too long and too droopy." And then, remarkable for its bald villainy: "She doesn't have the greatest genetics."

In the world of The Swan , a 28-year-old needs a brow lift. Healthy teeth are ground down to nubs to make room for veneers . Almost no nose goes untouched. The mandate wasn't to make these women feel better. It was to find as many things wrong with them as possible.

And this is where the documentary starts to hurt. These women were young. Most were in their twenties; one was just 22. Some just had babies. They weren't women whose faces and bodies had betrayed them. They were women whose faces and bodies had barely had time to form. That was the saddest part: They didn't even know what they were going to look like when they grew up.

Almost without exception the women interviewed for the documentary talk about the low self-esteem they suffered from when they were young. Add to that a team of doctors, a mandate to change as much as possible as dramatically as possible, a network production budget, and the authority of prime time to confirm their worst fears: Yes. There is something wrong with you.

You have to tip your hat to the makers of the documentary for getting Dr. Randal Haworth to speak on camera. Looking back over his career, Haworth actually says, with words, out loud: "I've become more empathetic because I have a dog."

We are told by a former "Swan" that the producers did all they could to get "the money shot," that is, one of the women crying on camera. They found the deepest wound they could and rotated the blade. They asked one woman why she was unable to get pregnant. They pitted two sisters against each other. In one instance, and—you might want to sit down for this—the surgeons had found cancer in one of the women while operating on her, and the producers were reportedly "giddy." Cancer! Yay! Finally, some good news!

"Yes, these women volunteered for a makeover show. They did not volunteer to have their infertility discussed for B-roll."

Haworth, meanwhile, gives us his own philosophy: "There are no victims in life…only volunteers." Let's set aside the "volunteers" of disease, famine, war, and natural disaster for a minute. Yes, these women volunteered for a makeover show. They did not volunteer to have their infertility discussed for B-roll.

The Swan had to keep turning up the dial until we gasped. A makeover wasn't enough; it needed surgery. Surgery wasn't enough; it needed twelve procedures. Insecurity wasn't enough; it needed tears. The documentary claims the high moral ground but faces the same problem: It needs us to gasp.

You have to wonder if anyone caught the irony when they were making it. The documentary condemns The Swan for manufacturing reality, while offering its own more morally satisfying reality. And both want you to cry.

In the final scene of the documentary, we are brought into a Swan reunion. A lovely dinner party of former Swans, looking lovely and happy and healed. It's the end to a warts-and-all narrative but without any warts. Or at least warts that had been covered up by the flattering glow of dim lighting, flowers, champagne toasts, and laughter. The narrative is complete. The story is wrapped up.

Honestly, it could almost be a scene from The Swan .

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