Made Over in America (Transcription)

 

 

Voice Over: Yes, science has entered every field of beauty today. No matter what the problem or what type of face we have, advice is available to us, so that in a highly competitive world where appearance counts for so much, each of us can always look his best.  

 

Dr. Stephen Marquardt: Beauty is defined as those…that quality or combination of qualities in something that evokes in the perceiver, the person viewing it, a high degree of attraction and a positive emotional response.

 

Dr. Pamela Orosan-Weine: Being bombarded with images of bodies constantly changes the way we think of our body. And I think this just to be an alienation from one’s self to one’s own body. 

 

Donald Bull: It’s a validation of who you are in our culture.  If you are on TV, then therefore you exist.  You are…you are not invisible any longer.

 

Student.  Human beings, I think, have always had an issue with what they look like.  I think that’s our weakness.

 

Cindy Ingle: People just don’t understand what it feels like to feel ugly, unattractive.  

 

-----I had my eyes done, I had my nose done, my lips, my cheeks, my chin, and then I had the breast augmentation, the tummy tuck, and I had liposuctions on my thighs.

 

Prof. Mark Poster: What’s happening to us now with the media and with the makeover is that we’re beginning to approach what it means to be human, that we’re beginning to approach the problem of the human, which is that we can define ourselves in different ways.

 

Dr. Randal Haworth: We live in a customizable age now.  Isn’t the mind supposed to be happy, and our body is our vessel, so we can customize it the way we choose? 

 

Nely Galán:  The goal for all of us, particularly women, is to find ourselves comfortable in our own skin, whatever it takes. 

 

Voice Over:  Ladies, science has done alright by you.  You sure look swell!  Uh-oh! Now she’s gone and ruined everything, but beauty science could have helped her here, too.  Let’s go to beauty headquarters…Yes…Hollywood.

 

Donald Bull: If you put something on television, people, because of the nature of…because of human nature and the power of television, it becomes acceptable.

 

Dr. Linda Li: We like the volume of your breasts, so we’re not going to change the volume of them.  We’re just going to put everything back to where it’s supposed to be.

 

Donald Bull:  …and it becomes something that people think, because it’s on television, and television is powerful, that it must be good.

 

Dr. Linda Li: All the stretch marks from your belly button down to your bikini line: all gone.

 

Donald Bull:  …and therefore television often starts as a reflection of what’s going on, but it then becomes a leading indicator, I suppose, of what people want.

 

Hard Copy Anchorwoman:  What makes a perfect face?  A Los Angeles surgeon says he’s discovered the scientific secret behind beauty.  It’s as easy as connecting the dots.

 

Dr. Stephen Marquardt:   The mask is really the perfect configuration of the face.  The more your face approaches the structures on this mask, the more attractive your face will be.

 

Hard Copy Anchorwoman:  For twenty years, Dr. Stephen Marquardt has been trying to crack the code of beauty, the perfect proportions that, when put together, spell awesome.

 

Dr. Stephen Marquardt: My research involves studying the form of human attractiveness. 

 

------I don’t want to be too overbearing, but I know more about human attractiveness than anybody in the world.  It…sometimes it’s bullshit when people say that, but in this case it’s not.  

 

------I’d spend hours and weeks and sometimes months before I did a surgery trying to decide exactly what to do, and it was agonizing.  So I started studying information from all over the world, and throughout history—what people thought that beauty was—and it seemed like we haven’t really advanced at all in our understanding of human attractiveness, particularly facial attractiveness, so I thought, you know, with my background in math an physics, I wonder if it’s quantifiable.

 

Voice Over:  Stephen Marquardt combined pentagons and triangles, all with a 1.618 ratio, and built a mask.  He claims that the closer a face conforms to his mask, the more beautiful it is.  

 

Dr. Stephen Marquardt: Let’s take and we’ll measure the width of the two front teeth and so the front tooth times 1.618 equals the lateral incisor plus the cusped.

 

Cindy Ingle:   I was one of the contestants on The Swan, and The Swan was kind of like an extreme makeover show, and it gave me the opportunity to have all the…all the cosmetic surgery that I wanted.

 

Swan Announcer:  In the most unique competition ever… 

 

Swan Host: The woman who has earned a place in the pageant tonight is…

 

Swan Announcer: …a group of ordinary women…

 

Swan Host: You’re going to be a Swan

 

Contestant 1: Oh, I’m so excited!

 

Swan Announcer:  …will hand over their lives to a team of cosmetic and plastic surgeons…

 

Surgeon: We have to be a little more dramatic to her face…

 

Swan Announcer:  They will be put through a brutal three-month makeover.  And they will do all this without ever seeing their reflections…

 

Contestant 2: Oh my goodness! No mirror! 

 

Contestant 3: No mirrors

 

Contestant 4: No mirrors!

 

Swan Announcer:  …until the final reveal.

 

Contestant 5:  Oh my God!

 

Contestant 6: I’m so beautiful!

 

Swan Announcer:  …all in the quest to be crowned The Swan.

 

Stephen Marquardt:  I love the fact that you were on that show, okay, because I’ve met a bunch of different people—doctors and stuff like that—and they’re so cocky.  With my research I feel it’s kind of…I have a spiritual mission. I would like to have people understand what beauty really is and to be able to control it.

 

Cindy: My own personal answer as to what feeds my ideas of what beauty is and what beauty should be…it’s society.  Society makes us feel that we should look like this.  It’s movies, it’s media.  I watch Discovery.  Beauty goes way, way back.  Everyone from since the beginning has had to have a certain level of beauty or attraction in order to procreate.  To say today that we’re only like this, we’re only obsessed with beauty because, because TV, because media, movie stars and all that—magazines…I don’t think so.  I mean, it may have a small part, but I mean, we’ve always been that way. 

 

Survivor:  

1: Burn, baby burn!

2: Just little blow, just a little.  Gently, gently

3.  I knew we’d get it. Here…keep it going.

 

Prof. Mark Poster:  One interesting thing that emerges through the media is that there is a very sharp disjunction between what we think we are, as physical beings, and what our actual bodies are.  And so that discordance allows us to play with the possibilities of change.  We’re not hiding behind fixed positions that are imposed upon us because and through the media and through the possibility of encountering many different kinds of experiences, throwing ourselves into that and exploring other possibilities.  This is an entirely new aspect of what it means to be human.

 

Nely Galán: When a woman walks into a room like she owns the room, she attracts men, women, everything to her like a magnet.  It’s an incredible power.

 

Swan Host:  Here’s the person who’s been the motivating force for all sixteen women in the program during the past four months.  It is, of course, our Swan coach, Nely Galán.  

 

Nely Gálan:  I’ve gotten a lot of criticism on this show.  You know, even my own therapist is like “How can you make that show?”  She took it like it’s very anti-women.  If you’ve had three children, and your stomach, genetically, is hanging down, and you’re complaining every day that you can’t have sex with your husband because you’re not happy with your body, well that’s ridiculous.  Go fix it.  Life is too short to let anything rain on your parade.  

 

Swan Announcer:  Tonight, on The Swan:

 

Swan Host (voice over):  Cindy’s plan features several procedures, starting with her face.  She will have a nose job, brow and mid-face lift, cheek refinement and fat removal below the eye, lip augmentation, liposuction and shortening of the chin, fotofacial, hair removal, collagen, and laser eye surgery.  For her body, Cindy will have breast augmentation, liposuction of the inner thighs, as well as a tummy tuck.

 

Student 1:  What would make you want to do that to yourself?  

 

Moderator: Because it’s painful or because it’s permanent, or…

 

Student 1: Because…what…

 

Moderator: … because it’s painful or it’s because it’s permanent or because they look funny or…?

 

Student 1: …what makes you look in the mirror and think, “I need to change everything about myself”?

 

Student 2:  You want to look like that Barbie-doll princess on TV, those characters we find that we are…we want to be, the TV characters.  

 

Moderator:  Well, then doesn’t that sort of send the message that it’s okay to do this, it’s okay to make yourself

 

Student 3: I think it is okay…I mean, if they’re…if  you have the means to fix it, then why not?  If it’ll make you feel better?  If it feels good, do it, you know?  Why not do it?

 

Student 4:  We’re saying that it’s o…that if it makes them happy, then it’s okay and things like that, which I think is…which I kind of understand that point of view, but I don’t think that’s the problem.  The problem to me is that we have a society that tells that this is the standard of beauty…this is priority in your life.  That’s the problem.

 

Student 5:  This is something across the whole globe.  We’re evolutionarily wired to…for women to want to look good because men want…it’s instinctive of man to want to mate with a partner with high genetics.  And women want to mate with men who are very secure.  So it’s like something people are conscious of even without the media there.  We’re just wired this way as humans.

 

Voice Over:  Spring!  When a young man’s fancy likely turns to…thought.  What’s the matter?  Exam week getting you down?  What you need is to put down that notebook and take in some of the beauties of nature.  See what I mean?  But wait a minute, young lady.  How did you get into this picture?  You see, we’re trying to prove a point about nature and beauty, and you’re not exactly helping, you know.  Look at your hair.  Look at that blouse.  And the way that skirt hangs.  And those socks.  Sorry, there must have been a mistake.  You don’t seem to be exactly the type to make this guy behave like a human being.

 

Bernadette Wegenstein: So what’s the body in relation to the body image?

 

Dr. Pamela Orosan-Weine:  The body, of course, is the physical, our physical self, and then the body image is our mental representation of our physical self.  So it doesn’t…it’s not necessarily the same thing.  Our internal mental representation may or may not be accurate.   The body image can be off, it can be inaccurate, and we consider it a disorder when it gets inaccurate enough to cause distress or impairment in a person.  When you think about a world like ours that has images reflected everywhere, all these images that come back at us through television, print media, mirrors, does our sense of our self, then our body self, become more, dependent on this external gaze.  We see ourselves through an external feedback loop.  We go from a sense of our body from what it does, from how we feel and how it effectively moves us through the world, shifts more to a sense of what it looks like on the outside, how is it perceived through mirror, the media, the other.  

 

Lyrics:  In the streets the lights burn low, and children scream as they’re held high above the sea in Farris carts their eyes alive with mirrored hallways done with creepy laughter ride the carousel

 

Dr. Stephen Marquardt:  Okay…beautiful, attractive, slight…cute, attractively neutral.  In medicine, generally, the people that are more attractive tend to be…or less attractive tend to be less healthy in a lot of ways.  I did a study where I took eighteen faces and had people rank them according to attractiveness, and as far as unattractive, it would be slightly unattractive, very unattractive, slightly deformed, moderately deformed, severely deformed, and then slightly grotesque, very grotesque, and extraordinarily grotesque.  These are all living human beings, and I wanted to find out how attractive…is there anybody in the world who found the last one on the right attractive, and there wasn’t, to any degree.

 

Bernadette Wegenstein:  Can you tell me where…where the eye is?

 

Dr. Stephen Marquardt:  Sure.  The eye here, the eye here, and the nose there.  

 

Dr. Pamela Orosan-Weine:  I think to the degree that we all are driven by the desire to belong, we…we try to make ourselves fit, we try to make ourselves fit what we see.

 

Student 2:  You know how you always wished to have that perfect body?  Yeah…I had that when I was younger, and then I got into a car accident, and gained sixty pounds since high school, three years ago.  So…there’s always stuff you want to fix.  I went to Cancun over Spring Break, and everyone had these skimpy little bathing suits that didn’t really cover much. Never feel comfortable doing that.  I’m just…not…

 

Dr. Pamela Orosan-Weine:  So you can imagine a person who moves through the world who doesn’t find their…theirphysical self reflected, say, in the media images of beauty, and what happens to them when they…every time they look in the mirror or pass a mirror, and what they see reflected back to them is this, you know, this vision of otherness.

 

Kathleen McDonald:  I think everything started happening when I was around twelve years old, and people started to tease me more about my looks.  I don’t know if it’s just the age the kids get to, but they start to comment on what people look like.  So I became very, very self-conscious about not looking pretty.  I knew that I was ugly because of my nose.  I used to walk around in school with my hair over my face so nobody could see me.  Then I would cry most every day that I went home after school.  What I figured out was, “Okay, I’m ugly. I’m like this freak of nature that everybody makes fun of.”  Since I couldn’t change what my nose looked like, I thought, “Well, at least I’ll never get fat, because I know that being fat and ugly is just not going to cut it in this society.” So that’s when I went on my first diet.  I went into school one day and threw away my lunch for the first time, and then that started something that destroyed my entire life.  Everything, everything became about whether or not I was fat.  If I could go out in public because I was so fat.  I stopped going to church because I thought I was too fat to go to church.  I missed doctor’s appointments.  I’d miss a lot of school.  Am I telling too much?  [Bernadette (in background): No…no please go on] Okay, okay.  Because it was like eighteen years.

 

Damien:  I’m really interested in beauty because for a number of years, I did not feel handsome as a man. [Lyrics: For once in my life, I found someone who needs me, someone I needed to love.] Today I’m showing up as Damien, Mr. Damien but in reality there are two personas that live inside one body, here.  And I’m best known as Ivana Tramp.  [So the Bible says any deal is new].  Ivana was kind of born out of a need to feel beautiful.  I’m more Ivana than I am me.  People don’t view her as a man in a dress because she’s not a man in a dress.  She is a female persona that just happens to live in a house with a male persona, and the house just happens to have male plumbing.

 

Taunee Grant:  I started wearing men’s underwear when I was in fifth grade, on the sly.  My transition is, already, and has been for many years, but at this point I am beginning to medically transition.  I’ve made the decision to start hormones and am planning to surgically alter my body.  As a child, as I developed into a woman, and got my period and started getting boobs and the whole thing, and my body started looking more like my mom, I felt a…a sense of betrayal.  I’m really anxious to have top surgery, which is tranny-speak for having your breasts removed.  Personally and spiritually, it’s something that I want.  It’s a risk, but it…I think that it will be worth it.  

 

 

Dr. Pamela Orosan-Weine:  You know, we are first and foremost a body self.  This is what Freud says:  that our sense of our self as a human being…it begins with a sense of our body sense.  So when an infant is born, at first they have no sense of themselves as a physical whole body self.  They are fragmented in their…they look at their hands and their feet and they don’t know that these are their hands or their feet.  Or they look at a mirror and they don’t know that that’s their face in the mirror.  And then, slowly over time, they get an integrated sense of themselves, and there’s such a beaming sense of pleasure or joy.  In some ways that’s…at the moment where I think the mirror acts like a reflective other.  They joy that they see in their mother’s face when they’re recognized by the mother, I think is that same joy that they see when they recognize themselves in the mirror, like, “Heh!  That’s me!”  You know?  “That’s me!”  

            Then as they get older, and they’re more aware of the outside world, when they’re school children, or they become people who watch TV, or compare themselves to their peers, other images get reflected back in them, like the television, or magazines.  So it becomes like a mirror back to them.  How do they compare to those images.

 

Hannah:  Let’s pretend she’s going to be on a magazine.

 

Alexander:  Yeah!

 

Olivia:  Let’s make her really pretty.

 

Hannah:  What do you think of that?

 

Alexander:  Oh, that’s good!

 

Hannah:  Do you like that?

 

Alexander:  Yeah.

 

Hannah:  Pretty?

 

Olivia:  It’s okay.

 

Alexander:  Okay.  Can we do blonde?

 

Olivia:  You like blonde?

 

Alexander:  Yeah.

 

Olivia:  Yeah?  Okay.  I think blondes are really pretty.  

 

Alexander:  Skinny.

 

Olivia:  This is skinny.  

 

Alexander:  I want skinny.  That’s too fat. That’s too fat!

 

Hannah:  The bigger one is…

 

Alexander:  Let’s do skinny!  I like the skinny one more.  

 

 

Mark Poster:  Well, certainly the process of younger generations being born into a world where these media technologies exist expands the possibilities for what they can be and how they can relate to what they can be.

 

Alexander:  Okay now, let’s try that one.  

 

Olivia:  What do you think?

 

[incomprehensible noise]

 

Alexander:  No, no.  Do the perfect nose now.

 

Hannah: That?

 

Olivia:  Yeah, that’s perfect.

 

Hannah:  Yeah, but why does her mouth look so weird?  I think her lips need to be bigger. 

 

Olivia: Okay.

 

Alexander:  Don’t do that!  Just normal, normal.  

 

Hannah:  There.  That looks more normal.

 

Alexander:  Oh that’s good.  That looks good.

 

Olivia:  What do you think?  Do you think she’s pretty? Do you like her?

 

Alexander:  Yeah.  

 

Mark Poster:  Psychologists have talked about the way in which our own relation to our body is formed by what we see in front of us such as in a mirror.  This is used metaphorically, in the sense not of…necessarily of a literal mirror, but that what we see before us is what we take ourselves to be, and this is accentuated by much more complicated technologies than the mirror, such as television and the internet.  This is a form of experience that’s again adding to the repertoire of aspects of our identity.  As these kinds of experiences become more and more characteristic of who we are, the basic parameters of what a self is change.

 

Clown Boy:  Throw it to me!  Throw it to me!

 

Girl:  You tripped me!

 

Clown Boy:  No I didn’t!

 

Girl:  You play dirty!  I don’t want to play with you any more!

 

Clown Boy:  See if I care!

 

Song Lyrics:  Sag’ es dir auch das Wort, das weit in dich reicht. Sprich es nach, wenn es sein Aeusseres zeigt. […] Wer sprach das Wort in dich, vor so langer Zeit. Sprich’ es aus, heraus…

 

Cathy:  Here we are in my extremely messy bedroom.   This is one of the magazines I subscribe to.  This is Cosmo.  This is Jessica Alba on the cover.  I don’t think she’s that pretty.  I think she looks like she has mannish hands; I think better-looking hands are long and skinny.  These are key thighs I wouldn’t mind having.  My thighs kind of look like that.  Not really, but hers are nice and tan.  I know a lot of this has to do with makeup.  

 

------I’m trying to get a six-pack, and I have a definite two-pack, and I have a four-pack coming, but it’s just…I get so sick of doing crunches every night, and I kind of want that little head-start with a little liposuction, just to build up muscle, and…and that’s why I would get it.

 

Other Girl:  So…I guess the first thing I’d do about myself is probably get this—my mole—removed.  Maybe liposuction, maybe a boob job.  I think personally—yeah—it’d help me feel more feminine.  

 

Other Girl 2:  I would do my nose and my breasts, and actually, I already have considered having both of those done.  And the thing is, is it’s not even about changing how I—because I’m happy with how I look.  But it’s just looking in the mirror every morning…It’s just those two things bother me to the point where I feel like I’ll feel so much happier about myself.

 

Other Girl 3:  I would change my nose.  I don’t like it and people are always commenting on it.  They ask me what ethnicity I am because I have a flatter nose.

 

Cathy:  I like my nose…but maybe a little smaller.  Probably thin it out a little bit here…

 

Other Girl 4:  You know, all my friends joke that after they have kids they’re all going to get boob jobs, and I think that’s conceivable to do.  I mean, I don’t think that’s unrealistic.  But then, I mean, in other cases…my friend’s mom did have a boob job, and everyone was talking about her and making a big deal.  I think it’s one thing to talk about doing it, and then to actually do it.

 

Cindy:  I’d always had a complex with my nose, since early years…probably, I mean junior high school is when it was kind of more apparent.  And everyone was having boyfriends except for me, so I figured, “Okay, it’s my nose.”  After having two children, my stomach, my body just totally got distorted and I breastfed both of them for a long time.  And then I started thinking more seriously about having a tummy tuck, breast augmentation, and a nose job.  But Ken has been pretty much the main provider for our family.  I’ve worked off and on…

 

Ken:  We’ve talked about it a couple times. You know, “We can save our income tax, we’ll save money, we put savings and we’ll do a little bit at a time.”

 

Cindy:  Yeah…Like, “Maybe we’ll start with a nose job”.

 

Ken:  She did a lot of research, and she’d say, “Hey, what do you think?”  And I said “Let’s do it if we can do it.”  But…

 

Cindy:  It wasn’t something that I just jumped into.  I have always wanted it…

 

Cathy:  Mmkay…there we go.  This is a picture of my roommate, Dominique, and I.  This is what we were like for Halloween.  I like this picture because I think I look skinny in it.  I like how my legs look, I like how my hair looks.  My boobs and natural and they look…huge.   This was my backdrop for the longest time.  This is a picture of all of my roommates and I.  I think my roommate, Dominique, looks pretty, I think my roommate Tara looks pretty.  I don’t think Amy looks that great. She has fat right here that I’d get liposuctioned, if I were her.  I would get a nose job.  This:  I think her back looks fat.  I think her arm looks kind of heavy.  I definitely…she doesn’t have…she has okay legs.  I’d take some of the fat off of there.  Here’s another picture of Amy.  She looks absolutely fat in here.  Her back, her arms, the butt.  It’s…she’s definitely heavy.  You can see it in her face a little bit.  And then her nose could be chopped up.  She could just cut that in half.

 

Dr. Stephen Marquardt:  I can take your pictures real quickly if you like, and put them with the mask so you can see it the real way.  

 

Bernadette Wegenstein:  Yeah, that’d be cool!

 

Dr. Stephen Marquardt:  Look straight ahead.  One nice smile.  Big eyes, big eyes wide open. Not so big.  

 

Bernadette: What do you mean by big eyes?

 

Dr. Stephen Marquardt:  Shush!  Just…okay…

 

Bernadette:  Please…please don’t touch me.  This is too much!

 

Dr. Stephen Marquardt:  Okay…okay…This is for you, this is for you, it’s not for me. It’s for you, so you can get the face on the mask, okay.  Lets’ just…right here…finish.  

 

Bernadette: Maybe Allen can take the picture?

 

Dr. Stephen Marquardt:  Sh!  Just be quiet, be quiet! No…just quiet down.  I’ll get you something to eat in a minute.  That’s it.  Okay.  Get out of there.  Jesus!  What a…God!  It’s like trying to work with a three-year-old.  

 

-----People started calling me after I did television programs.  “I want to do…I want to have my face done, but I don’t know what to do.  I’m afraid to do it.  I can’t find anybody I really like.  Do you do consultations?  Could you take a look at my face and see what I need?”  And I said, “Well, yeah.  I guess I could.”  And almost all the time it was because they wanted surgery, so I said, “Well, let’s see what we can do.”  Your nose is a little short, your upper lip’s a little long.  Okay.  And your chin is a little back.

 

Bernadette Wegenstein:  Okay.

 

Dr. Stephen Marquardt:  Okay.  Do you want me to modify it real quick, or not?  Do you want to see what it’ll look like?

 

Bernadette Wegenstein:  Yeah!

 

Dr. Stephen Marquardt:  We’ll take this forward.  Okay, well, there you go.  Okay.  Before.  After.  Before.  It’s not hard to do, you know.  This is very realistic.  I’m in love with you.  You want to get married?

 

Bernadette Wegenstein:  If you’re only in love with me after you’ve altered me…

 

Dr. Stephen Marquardt:  Well …I mean… you know, what do you want?

 

Dr. Jason Diamond:  Television is a very powerful tool to get your message across.  There’s no question about it.  

 

---You are a perfect candidate for a deep-plane facelift.  You can expect to have a home run.  

 

---You can’t buy better promotion, that’s for sure.  I definitely feel fortunate to have had the opportunity to display my work, which I’m very proud of, and I think is world-class—I think it stands up to anybody’s work in the entire world.  For me, the important thing was to pretty much let the country know that you can get natural-looking facelifts, natural looking facial surgery without looking pulled and done.  

 

Bernadette Wegenstein:  She says she doesn’t like her nose.

 

Dr. Jason Diamond:  To me, her nose appears to look very nice.  There are some slight things that aren’t perfect, and I’m just looking at her nose in relation to her eyes, in relation to her mouth, and I don’t see a wide nose.  Your average guy would sit and stare at a pair of breasts that are perfect.  I would probably be more inclined to stare at a perfect nose and just admire the beauty of it.  But that’s coming from a very keen sense of what a perfect nose looks like.  To you, you might be like, “Eh, it doesn’t look like…no big deal.”  But if you were walking down the street, I might check out your nose and say, “oh…check that out,” But I might not.  I mean, it’s not a bad.

 

Bernadette Wegenstein:  What do you…what…what is it with my nose?

 

Dr. Jason Diamond:  Okay, take off your glasses for a minute.  What I’m seeing is, I’m seeing asymmetry to your tip, okay, so I’m looking at the tip, and I’m seeing you’ve just…you’ve got asymmetry to your tip, you’ve got some bulbousness to your tip.  This is big and bulbous, this is big and bulbous.  It’s not very well defined, and I can see the underlying cartilages.  Turn sideways for me.  There’s certainly a bump right here on the nose that could be improved, and I can see the bulbous lower lateral cartilages right here.

 

Bernadette Wegenstein:  Do you think there is something like a cosmetic gaze? You know, girls, I think, are starting to see specifically what could be done to a nose, for example.  How do you feel about that?  

 

Dr. Jason Diamond:  I don’t see what the…I don’t see any harm or danger in that at all.

 

Pat:  If you see someone and they’ve got a thread on their shoulder, some people would never do anything.  No, I’m going to go over there, and I’m going to take that off.  I consider that an act of kindness because if that was me, I would want someone to come in and kind of take care of me, so it’s a real thing.  Women want to look beautiful, and if you have a house that’s kind of falling apart and needs painting, you paint a house.  And a woman, there’s…there comes a time that they decide that they want to improve their looks.  I wasn’t in a situation that I badly needed cosmetic surgery.  I just felt that at sixty, when I turned sixty, which was a few years ago, that I just wanted to look my very best at that age.  

 

Susan:  We want to feel good…take care of ourselves, and respect our bodies.  It’s nothing really vanity-oriented, because we don’t want to have that look here.  We just want to look subtly refreshed, we don’t want to look like an entirely different person.  

 

Pat:  I think the mirror kind of…finds the flaw.  As you sit in front of a mirror, you realize what is happening: where you get deeper lines…And you go to the doctor and you go, “Uh…I think I need some work here.”  And he’ll go, “Yes, you do.”  

 

Voice over song lyrics:  Why can’t I be the girl that I want to be?  Why can’t I be the girl that I’m not?  Why do men always look as they look when they look at me?  I must have something, but what have I got?  Femininity, femininity.  I guess I’m over-blessed with femininity.  I want the family life--“woman’s career”--but all that I get is a pinch on the rear.  What’s the point of femininity?

 

Dr. Stephen Marquardt:  I have a theory on high heels, though, why high heels are more attractive, make one more attractive.  Everybody says it’s because they make the legs look longer, and that may be part of it.  If you’ll notice, any time in a  movie, or any time girls are really excited, they jump, and they’re up on their toes.  Whey they see something they really like, they’re like…this.  They’re always standing on their toes.  It’s an excitement.  It’s “Oh my God! Isn’t that fabulous!  Oh my God!  They’re movie stars! Oh my God!

 

Nely Galán:  I’m very lucky, again, because I’m Latin, so I have a real clear vision of femininity, you know, I couldn’t be more of a business person, and more manly in so many ways, but I never lose my femininity because it’s very clear to me that it is really owning the fact that you’re a receiver in life.  And I also have to allow things to come to me, and that’s a certain energy that manifests in the way you walk, the way you bounce your hair, the way you put lip-gloss on,  the way you touch a child, the way you kiss a man, whatever it is…

 

Susan:  She must feel so happy.  She lost a lot of weight…

 

Pat:  Isnt’ that amazing?  She’s become glamorous.

 

Susan:  …and all she did was put on eye-lashes and do her eyebrows, and put some makeup on, lipstick, lose weight, implants…

 

Pat:  She’s had something…she had her nose done. She had her nose done…yeah, she did.

 

Susan: …hair extensions… nose done, teeth done. 

 

Pat:  Why wouldn’t any woman feel happy about that?

 

Susan:  I know…look at her.  

 

Donald Bull:  Plastic surgery, in the culture, is presented as cosmetic, and therefore it is a cosmetic, like a lipstick.  That’s how it’s being sold.  It’s not just the media that’s doing this.  The industry itself presents it this way.  It’s like its…its like, if  you want to get your teeth whitened, or you want to get your acne taken care of, you want to get a facial, these are all small cosmetic things that you can do.  Or you can get a facelift, and the facelift is just part of that whole process.  

 

Announcer: Please come on down if you want to have a seat.  Relax.  Any questions you have about the procedure, the doctor will be more than happy to answer.  We will do procedures. It’ll be very fascinating, so come on down, have a seat, and learn all about the Botox.

 

Doctor:  So you see some product on the side of her face…

 

Doctor 2:  Here we go then.  You ready? 

 

Model:  I…I like it.  And when you’re a model, it’s free.  

 

Dr. 2:  My hand was just covering it.  That line.  So I bring out the lips now and I take the rest away now, and I’ll start filling in these lines for her.  

 

Model:  There’s so many young people!  There was hardly anybody my age.  You’d think that’s the age you really need to start doing things.  I met a girl in the washroom with no marks.  She says, “I’m thinking about that”, but her face was perfect.

 

Young Woman:  How old am I?  I’m twenty-eight.  I’m young, but you know, you’re never too young to start.  I’ve had the lines in here filled, I’ve had my lips done.  It’s something you can start off doing in your late twenties, early thirties, and continue on into your forties and fifties. 

 

Doctor 1:  Now, even up to two years ago, I would just inject lines.  This is totally different.  As you can see, this is sculpting what nature has taken away.  Now, like all injectable fillers, there’s always risks:  lumpiness, hardness, not done well and it looks bad, allergic reaction, infection, all those things are possibilities.  They’re just fortunately extraordinarily rare.  I’m going to hang around after I finish here, and if you want a little five- or ten-minute curbside consult, then I’ll stay and talk to people until the next demonstration, and we’re going to talk about how to make lines look better.

 

Doctor 3: See, esthetic surgery, cosmetic surgery nowadays is driven by the industry, if you will.  And the media plays a big part with that; the makeover shows and all that kind of…that’s the best marketing that we can get.  These are salines.  They’re old-fashioned.  This thing shows you everything bad about a saline-filled implant.  This is an over-filled implant and when it sits in the body, it does that, so again, you don’t get volume on top where most women want it.  It ripples and folds, there’s scallops like this around the edge.  This is just a bad product.  This is a cohesive gel implant.  They’re durable as heck.  It’s like a gummy bear.  You know, people produce another laser that you’ve got to have, they produce another type of liposuction.  You’ve sort of got to be the first of the mark in your area to have that, you know.  Otherwise you’re yesterday’s plastic surgeon.  

 

Voice over:  For the next few minutes, you will be introduced to a new, state-of-the-art 3-D medical imaging solution applied for plastic surgery.  The BFD captures the 3-D shape and color of the patient’s body by projecting a light pattern on it.  The natural curves of the body deform the pattern and enable the system to reproduce a 3-D model identical to the patient’s body.  

 

Marco Estrela: The BFD is the Breast and Face Digitizer.  When we developed the BFD three years ago, we were partnered with plastic surgeons, and they came here, they said what they wanted, and they saw what it was in the early stages, and basically what we have here is a product of our research and their know-how,  medical know-how, to create a tool that will be benefit…be useful for them, basically.    So right now, we’re still in the early stages and commercialization—the real commercialization—will be coming soon, and then that’s when we expect the boom.  

 

Technician:  Would you mind leaning…move your chair a bit back?

 

Bernadette Wegenstein: For…back.

 

Marco Estrela:  Everything will be captured here, and you will have your 3-D representation.  

 

Bernadette Wegenstein:  Okay.

 

Marco Estrela:  And that’s it.  

 

Mark Poster:  Well, one of the things that I find very important is the relationship of our real life to our media life.  

 

Marco Estrela: So there you go.

 

Bernadette Wegenstein:  Okay.

 

Marco Estrela:  That’s you, right there, in 3D.

 

Bernadette Wegenstein:  Are you able to alter my nose?

 

Marco Estrela:  He’s going to sculpt it with the sculpt tool, he’s going take a little bit off.  

 

Prof. Mark Poster: So…the whole process of our visual appearance, through the media, through these various media technologies, enables us to see ourselves in ways that were impossible in the past.

 

Laser Whitening Commercial:  …soda fountain reaction, breaking down the stain’s double bonds in just forty-five minutes.

 

Mark Poster:  Fifties beauty, I think, is very different, I think, from contemporary make-over beauty, if you want to call it that, in the sense that in the fifties, the sense was that the images of beauty were fixed, actually.  There was a lot of pressure to conform to a relatively narrow repertoire of possibilities of beauty.

 

Commercial heroine: Dreamy body! 

 

Commercial Bride:  Looks like you’re next!

 

Mark Poster:  There are still norms, but because the possibilities are so much greater, the norms are much more defined by the individual’s sense of aesthetics and imagination than they were in the fifties.  

 

Commercial Announcer:  I’m going to show you a new, antiseptic skin cleanser that works when it’s on, and keeps working for twelve hours after you wash it off.  

 

Dr. Randal Haworth:  Cindy represents the ideal plastic surgical patient.  She realizes that her nose is droopy and she also has a pointy chin.  In her own words, she looked like a witch.  She just needs some breast enhancement, as well as a small abdominoplasty.  

 

-----.  Plastic surgery…people say it’s an art.  Well…certain parts of plastic surgery are an art. Believe it or not, liposuction probably has got…there’s a lot of expression in that.  I see a lot of people that do “good” liposuction, but the results are not just that…they don’t have the pizzazz as really sculpting it deeper.  So there is a bit more wiggle room in terms of bringing out a sexy buttock that emerges, that’s more like sculpting.  I think it was Rodin, but he said, basically, the form is in the block, and I am here to just expose it.  

 

----Okay, so you’ve lost a lot of volume here from the nursing.  And you need improvement of your abdomen.  You’ve got stretch-marks here and a little bit of overhang.  We can cut all this out.

 

----.  I was always wanting to be an artist.  So I did bring some pieces.  Plastic surgery does provide an outlet for me.  This art, though, is not really an expression of my plastic surgery.  I think this art is something—I’m saying something completely different.  And a lot of people do, if they see my other pieces, too, realize that there is a wry look and take on body modification.  What’s important is that you have to analyze the face instinctually.  I’m a very instinctual surgeon.  I’m from a very artistic background, and I just feel what’s right, what looks good.  And then I know how to translate the vision that I have for the patient, surgically, into a reality.  From the mid-face to the jaw line, that is probably the most artistic area in plastic surgery.  It has a profound, subliminal effect in terms of youth and how it reinvents the face at times.   

 

Voice Over Lyrics:  Shaving legs some days.  Friday night isn’t every day.  Make-up all day long. Long the years.    

 

Dr. Jason Diamond:   I think it’s important for people to know that plastic surgery is still surgery.  And any surgery is…has its risks.  However, the risks are very well calculated.  They’re very well described.  The statistics are very clear about how many negative outcomes there might be in a certain amount of patients done. 

 

Cindy:  Before I pass out, take good care of me.  Make me beautiful.

 

Nurse: We will.

 

Dr. Randal Haworth:  We’ve got our work cut out, here.  

 

Voice Over Lyrics:  Your face, when sleeping, is sublime.  And then you open up your eyes.  Then comes pancake factor number one, eye-liner, rose hips, and lip gloss, such fun.  You’re a slick little girl.  You’re a slick little girl.

 

Voice Over:  Her appearance has improved dramatically, and where once her beauty was hidden by an unattractive feature, she now presents a pleasing and attractive appearance. 

 

Cindy:  You know, when I first saw this statue…you know, it has memories.  It’s me.  It’s what I looked like two, almost three, years ago, in 2004.  It’s what I looked like after giving birth to my babies.  I have no regrets at all of having my children.  I have no regrets of breastfeeding, even though it did this.  It’s just memories.  And my stomach…my stomach’s like this because for eighteen months out of my life I had two living beings inside me.  I didn’t do it for social standards, or for…or to be that trophy wife or to get a part in a play or a part in a movie or something like that.  There were just changes that I wanted.  I wanted to better myself, I wanted to better my body.  But you know, it was…it’s a personal decision, and it’s my own feelings and no one knows how I felt before, during and after, and sometimes it’s hard for me to put that in words.  

 

Cathy:  This is Andrea, and I think she looks kind of disgusting in the first picture.  She just looks sweaty and wears, like…she just got done doing something and that’s why she’s a mess.  And here she’s all cleaned up.  

 

Student 2:  I mean, if it makes her feel better, then I guess she did what she needed to do for herself.  I just think society looks down at people who try and change themselves because it’s not natural, the natural thing to do.  

 

Student 3:   She looks like a down-to-earth mom, here, and they…it looks like they tried to make her look twenty years younger, but I think it looks horrible.  She’s not twenty years old, and she doesn’t work as a Vegas stripper, which is what it looks like.

 

Student 4: You wouldn’t even think it was the same person, to be honest with you.  And I’m not going to lie;  I like her eyebrows.  They’re nice!

 

Dr. Pamela Orosan-Weine: When you see these women as the curtains part, in the moment of the reveal and they have this revelation of these dramatic changes—it’s all come together and this is actually real—is a very overwhelming moment.  

 

Prof. Mark Poster:  When they see themselves in the made-over form, they do not recognize themselves, and they are really overcome.  Some of them are frightened, some of them are ecstatic, but they’re really all very deeply affected by the fact that they don’t recognize themselves.  

 

Dr. Pamela Orosan-Weine:  The mind can’t accept that information that quickly.  It has to slowly, gradually come to observe it.  And also they’re losing a sense of self they’ve had for a very long time.   As much as they’ve dreamed about this change, there’s still something sad about letting go of an old identity.  I mean, it’s so familiar, it’s so comfortable, it’s who they know.  

 

Prof. Mark Poster:  Seeing themselves as this different person is an example of how we are other to ourselves, and people who’ve had this experience have to then assimilate the new image into themselves as part of the process of the makeover.  

 

Dr. Pamela Orosan-Weine: They realize in that moment their life has changed, forever.  So that I think the moment of this change has many mixed emotions in it, both pleasure, excitement.  A sense of letting go and loss.   

 

Prof. Mark Poster:  It’s this experiment with throwing ourselves into something that we’re not.  And becoming that…what we’re not, that other, is increasingly a normal part of our media ecology, part of our environment. 

 

Cindy:  Well, I definitely like the new better.  Seeing the old…I’m glad the old is there too, because it was…it’s still me, and it was me for 33 years, 32 years.  It was a part of my life.  The reason my stomach is like that is giving birth to Devon and Jayden, and I’d never change that, I’d never trade that for anything, I’d never trade that for any flat stomach in the world.  You know, the same with the changes in my breasts, and stuff, was from breastfeeding, and I’d never change that for anything.  I still would breastfeed them.  It was just a special bond, and you know, it was just…it was me.  And I can’t forget that.  I shouldn’t forget that.    

 

-----And I get to my mark, and I meet Amanda.

 

Amanda (Swan hostess):  My goodness gracious!  Hey, hey you.  You look amazing.  When you’re ready, the curtain will be drawn back, and you will see yourself for the first time in three months.  

 

Cindy:  There was this huge, dark, red, burgundy-type curtain and it’s the only thing that’s between me and the mirror, the only thing between the last Cindy I saw and the new Cindy I’m going to see.  And then finally she says, “Cindy, 

 

Amanda:  Cindy, are you ready? 

 

Cindy:  “…are you…are you ready?” And I said, 

 

----Yes, I’m ready.  

 

----And then the curtains open.  And then I see myself for the first time, and I’m kind of doing what I’m doing now.  But I just…you know, I’m surprised, and I immediately put my hands over my face,  and I’m not real sure that it’s me, and it looks like me, but I’m not real sure.  And so, and then I was like ”I have to know for sure if it was me”, so I walk up to the mirror, I get closer, and I touch it, and I…know that it’s me, and there wasn’t something fake on the other side, and that it’s really me.   And then I start crying, and I’m trying to stay calm.  Amanda’s talking to me; she’s asking me what parts do I like, and everything was just so new.  And so I think it was just…at the same time…it kind of seemed drastic, the changes. You know, now that I’m thinking about it—because I’ve never said this before—but I think the changes seemed drastic, which is why I didn’t recognize myself.  And…and if you can’t recognize yourself, of course that’s scary.  It would scare anyone.  I’m…I’m not sure what I was scared of.    I think I was just scared of change, maybe.  I’ve got everything that I’ve wanted and all the changes that I wanted.  But I wouldn’t change anything.  I would do it all over again.  

 

Dr. Jason Diamond:  Do I think I need anything?  Well, I probably could use a couple things, but nothing major.  But not right now, no, I don’t think.

 

Nely Galán:  What I intended to say with The Swan was not that you should change yourself and not like yourself, and be someone else, but rather, by not being a victim, and if something bothers you, fix it, and don’t look twice at it.  

 

Kathleen McDonald: I guess I would encourage people who are thinking of plastic surgery:  it’s not going to make you happy.  That’s the thing that I can’t emphasize enough to people, it’s not going make you happy.  Eventually you’re going to have to deal with all the crap that’s in your head.  It’s not going to take away the negative thoughts.  It’s just going to make you look different.  

 

Pat:  You can refine this just a little bit, and just narrow this…Take this down just a little bit.  Well, I think it’s wonderful, giving women an opportunity that they may not have otherwise to become beautiful women.  I think that’s every woman’s dream and desire.

 

Taunee:  It would be nice to be so…perhaps…spiritually comfortable with myself that I don’t want surgery, but I do. And I don’t see a reason to be apologetic about that.

 

Dr. Stephen Marquardt:  This is important to me, and it’s too big, and I feel I’m way bigger than any TV show. I mean, the research I do.  I guess it’s not me personally, but what I’m doing is…

 

Donald Bull:  I do think that television has made plastic surgery more acceptable, much more acceptable.  I think that’s an okay thing; people can do what they want with their money.

 

Student:  And I’m a firm believer in the fact that it’s not really physical features that make someone beautiful.  It’s confidence.  It’s confidence and personality.

 

Damien:  When you look good, you feel good.  When you feel good, you act good.  You can’t help growing older.  If you’re going to be sixty, you’re going to be sixty and fabulous.  So this philosophy of “just accept it the way it is”?  No. That’s okay for you.  That’s not okay for me. 

 

Dr. Pamela Orosan-Weiner:  You know, one of the basic human struggles, I think, is to feel a sense of belonging.  And unfortunately, one way we usually try to accomplish that is to wipe out difference.  What is beauty if everyone is beautiful? Its rarity is what makes it precious.  Whereas when, over and over and over and over, we’re bombarded, say, with the same standard, it becomes almost nothing.  

 

Prof. Mark Poster:  I’m not sure that praise or blame is an adequate way of judging the experience.  I think the makeover illustrates the self as becoming, as process, as a continuing set of transformations, and should be seen in that context: of a new kind of cultural figure of a self in which life is understood as a series of transformations whose outcomes are uncertain and whose process is risky.  And if we recognize that, maybe, perhaps, we would become more tolerant towards people who strike us as being different.