It was in 2003, while listening to country radio, that Kelly first heard the casting call: \u201cHave you dreamed about plastic surgery but never thought you could afford it?\u201d She immediately turned up the volume. The pitch sounded too good to be true: free cosmetic procedures, a nutritionist, self-esteem work \u2013 one \u201clife-changing opportunity\u201d that \u201ccould transform everything\u201d. 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.<\/p>\n
The catch? 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 \u2013 the endurance of extreme pain and humiliation in pursuit of a narrow beauty ideal \u2013 to US living rooms with shocking bluntness: bandages and bruises, surgical cannulas pounding into flesh, curt assessments of lumps and bumps and \u201cmasculine\u201d 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 \u2013 America\u2019s Next Top Model<\/a> and The Biggest Loser<\/a>, to name a few \u2013 The Swan stands out as especially cruel, at once hopelessly bought into punitive beauty standards on-screen and shamelessly manipulative off it.<\/p>\n It\u2019s the \u201cXXL version\u201d of the many issues endemic to reality television, said Erin Lee Carr, the director of The Swan: Behind the Mirror<\/a>, a new Hulu retrospective on the infamous series. \u201cUnconscious people, secret pageants, sunk-cost principle, people having to leave, teeth coming out even if you might not need it\u201d \u2013 if there were ever a reality series deserving of a second critical look, it would be The Swan.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n The show, developed by former Telemundo executive and \u201clife coach\u201d Nely Gal\u00e1n, 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<\/a>, is somewhat of an expert on the aughts\u2019 relentless pressure on women to stay tight, taut and sexual. An early montage rips through a horrifying array of the period\u2019s worst impulses: Lindsay Lohan<\/a>\u2019s figure analyzed on the evening news, celebrities hospitalized for \u201cexhaustion\u201d, Anna Nicole Smith<\/a> bragging about diet pills on a late-show couch.<\/p>\n But the 100-minute film is less an examination of the extreme diet culture that begat something like The Swan \u2013 for many, we know it all too well \u2013 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. (Gal\u00e1n, the show\u2019s creator, on-screen judge and off-screen \u201cmentor\u201d, declined to participate.) As several attest, the initial appeal of the series was, yes, possibly some \u201cfree boobs\u201d, but also a genuine chance to improve their self-esteem through fitness, therapy and scarce personal time. \u201cI was juggling it all, taking care of my family financially,\u201d says Beth, a first season participant, in the film. \u201cI was dealing with a lot of emotional baggage at the time, and I needed a change.\u201d<\/p>\n Dr Terry Dubrow prepares a contestant for plastic surgery in a 2004 episode of The Swan. Photograph: Robert Voets\/Fox<\/p>\n The reality was, of course, more complicated and less altruistic. While \u201cthe original concept of The Swan, as it was told to me, was transforming women\u2019s lives\u201d, a producer named Julee recalls, the entertainment dictates of reality TV (as another producer put it: \u201cwe\u2019re gonna take ugly chicks and make them hot\u201d) demanded otherwise. Contestants were isolated from friends, family and themselves \u2013 there were no mirrors present for the duration of filming \u2013 lest they gain any outside perspective. Nurses or other caretakers were so infrequent the women resorted to changing each other\u2019s bandages, preparing each other\u2019s liquid foods or helping to clean up when, say, one\u2019s lipo continuously leaked on the bed.<\/p>\n The women maintained their own scrapbooks and calendars, and agreed to a series of rules familiar to any diet culture survivor\u2019s delusional plan for total metamorphosis: \u201cI 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.\u201d<\/p>\n The women were given little choice in what procedures they had done \u2013 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 \u2013 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, \u201churt my heart, on a human level\u201d, she said. \u201cI don\u2019t think anybody that is coming off of anesthesia who barely knows that they\u2019re conscious could consent to being filmed.\u201d<\/p>\n There was virtually no recovery time; within days, the women were required to be in the gym, berated as their post-procedure faces burned, on a strict diet of no more than 1,200 calories a day; by the second season, that allowance was halved, putting the participants in a dangerous and unsustainable calorie deficit. \u201cI think they had to dehumanize us because, ultimately, we were just a job,\u201d says Beth, next to old footage of her giving a thumbs up while completely obscured by medical bandages.<\/p>\n Former contestant Kristy Garza in The Swan: Behind the Mirror. Photograph: Courtesy of Hulu<\/p>\n Perhaps most egregiously \u2013 at least, according to the participants \u2013 the women were not informed until post-surgery that there would be a pageant, including a lingerie portion and swimsuit competition, that would pit the women against each other. Or, as the show more bluntly put it to viewers, \u201ctwo average-looking women\u201d face off to survive another week as The Swan.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t think the pageant was ever a part of the original format. I think it was a discussion at Fox that was: \u2018What\u2019s the craziest thing we could cook up?\u2019\u201d Carr said, reflecting on the shift from \u201clife transformation\u201d show to post-surgery onstage parade. \u201cIt felt like everybody was flinging things at the wall to see how they could get people to react.\u201d As Dr Randal Haworth, one of the show\u2019s designated plastic surgeons, put it when selecting the best candidates for the most intensive surgeries: \u201cyou want to see drama\u201d.<\/p>\n Even in an era saturated with fatphobia, fad diets and laxatives, The Swan engendered intense backlash as a new low for reality TV. Its staying power was limited \u2013 while the first season premiered to 10 million people, making it America\u2019s self-proclaimed \u201cNo 1 makeover show\u201d \u2013 viewership fell off precipitously in the second season, which killed the show before it could even see 2005. But it lives on as \u201ca harbinger of what\u2019s to come for our future \u2013 in terms of thinness, mental health and basically trying to evaporate\u201d, said Carr. Much of what was said on the show \u2013 that physical beauty is power worth sacrificing for, that a few nips and tucks will change your life, that plastic surgery is a form of psychiatry practiced by \u201cinterior designers\u201d of the body \u2013 has been recycled into our present plastic surgery nightmare<\/a> of procedures ever more invisible, insidious and extreme, though in sleeker, more humanist-sounding terms. What is the assertion from many an influencer that being thinner just ups your quality of life, if not \u201cnothing tastes as good as skinny feels\u201d by another name? Now, as then, \u201ceveryone is quite sadistic when it comes to other people\u2019s looks,\u201d said Carr. \u201cAnd everybody forgets that the other person is a human being.\u201d<\/p>\n Given all that, it is perhaps surprising that almost all of the women say they do not regret participating in The Swan \u2013 if only to meet each other. The film ends with \u201cthe flock\u201d gathering for a long-overdue reunion that Carr called \u201cone of the greatest days of my life\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cThe healing and the joy that comes from a group of women understanding each other is profound,\u201d she said. \u201cYou don\u2019t have to change the way you look for somebody else to think you\u2019re beautiful.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It was in 2003, while listening to country radio, that Kelly first heard the casting call: \u201cHave you…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":911294,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[64,63,134],"class_list":["post-911293","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/911293","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=911293"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/911293\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/911294"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=911293"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=911293"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=911293"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}