“The Swan” Gets a Superficial Reckoning
Ever since I was a young girl, I’ve adored a good makeover montage. There was Disney’s Cinderella, transformed, by a pixie-dust-wielding fairy godmother, from a rags-wearing drudge into a glimmering, glass-slippered beauty; or poor Meg March, in Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women,” who, before attending her first society party, was led by her wealthier friends to toss away her “dowdy tarlatan” and lace up instead in a “sky-blue dress . . . so tight she could hardly breathe” (perhaps a worthy trade-off, since, afterward, Meg “felt as if her ‘fun’ had really begun at last, for the mirror had plainly told her that she was a ‘little beauty’ ”). And, of course, there was the goth weirdo Allison, played by Ally Sheedy, in John Hughes’s “The Breakfast Club,” encouraged to wipe off “all that black shit” from her eyes to reveal, underneath, the delicate beauty of a popular girl.
My love of makeovers is hardly rare: Americans are obsessed with them. There’s nothing more optimistically self-reliant than this type of near-instant conversion. (If you won’t make the most of what you have, who will—big government?) And yet, I’ve always wondered, too, if there wasn’t something deceptively easy about the whole thing. By focussing on the skin-deep, were we overlooking more tenable, longer-lasting change? Were we somehow retarding or even impeding more worthwhile kinds of inner transformation, or levelling out the different inimitable paths that women could take? Would Allison—probably my closest comp in the Hughes universe—truly be happier now that she could date a jock and wear a frilly white camisole instead of a shapeless black sack? Or was she betraying her true self, what made her “her” all along?
These questions troubled me as a teen, and they continued to nag at me as I watched the new Hulu documentary “The Swan: Behind the Mirror.” The film, directed by Erin Lee Carr, traces the history of the short-lived but memorable reality show “The Swan,” which ran on Fox in 2004, and which offered women the opportunity to undergo an extreme makeover and subsequently compete in a televised beauty pageant. The series purported to transform its contestants “inside out,” a process that involved not just a physical makeover but the chance to meet with a therapist and discuss one’s insecurities. (Inner beauty!) Still, the single weekly counselling session each participant attended paled in comparison to the enormous external changes the women went through: crash diets, gruelling workouts, and, most notably, multiple plastic-surgery procedures, parts of which were shown on the series, in graphic detail. For her Hulu documentary, Carr interviewed many of the show’s contestants, in addition to some of the producers, and even one of the plastic surgeons who operated on the women.
“Behind the Mirror” is the latest in a slew of documentaries that have gone rummaging through the graveyard of aughts pop culture, dredging up brands, shows, and personalities, and investigating them with the gusto of a forensic pathologist.
In 2021, the series “Von Dutch: A Brand to Die For”—a deep dive on the maker of mesh trucker hats beloved by Britney Spears and Paris Hilton—premièred on Hulu, and a year later Netflix released “White Hot: The Rise and Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch.” In 2025 came “Fit for TV: the Reality of the Biggest Loser,” also on Netflix, and, earlier this year, the platform streamed “Reality Check,” which examined Tyra Banks’s competition show “America’s Next Top Model.” What these efforts all seem to share is a desire to reckon, some more thoughtfully than others, with the toxicity of the two-thousands, an era rife with body-shaming, sexism, and racism—not even lurking below the surface but resting right there on top. Thinking about it now, it seems almost crazy: how we were coerced into submission against our own best interests every time we turned on the TV or stepped into a mall, how much we were taught to hate ourselves if we didn’t exactly align, particularly as women, with the very narrow beauty standard of skinny, sexy, young, white.
“The Swan” offered an extreme display—perhaps the most extreme display—of the era’s reigning ideology. Cameras followed contestants as they were locked in virtual isolation for ninety days, in a mirror-less apartment complex in Marina Del Ray; over that span of time, they were surgically reconstructed, seemingly in the mold of a Y2K lad-mag cover girl. (Dr. Randal Haworth, one of the two plastic surgeons who worked on the women, “was into big boobs, big lips,” one former contestant tells the camera.) The women sweated for hours and hours at the gym, pushed to work out to the point of exhaustion, while their faces and bodies were still ghoulishly bruised and bandaged from their surgeries; they were captured screaming and crying with theatrical excitement as they finally saw their new and improved selves during a dramatic “reveal,” and were later paraded around scantily clad onstage, pitted against one another in a beauty competition, because, as the show’s creator, Nely Galán, explained, “I wanted to give the women such a big motivator so they would do the work. What is a bigger motivator than being in front of thirty million people in a beauty pageant in your bathing suit and in lingerie? It’s enough to kill yourself.”
Carr presents all this information in the documentary, but it seems she doesn’t entirely know what to do with it. She gestures at the American cultural climate of the era (I nodded along when the culture writer Scaachi Koul told the camera that the pressures women had to withstand back then made them “braver than the troops”), but, for the most part, the events of “The Swan” are presented as an anomaly, one-bad-apple style, even as the show aired concurrently with programs such as MTV’s “I Want a Famous Face” and E!’s “Dr. 90210.”
What’s more, the documentary doesn’t really question the concept of “The Swan” itself: not only were numerous “ugly ducklings” tasked with getting a bunch of cosmetic surgeries for our entertainment pleasure, they were then judged in a final beauty pageant, which concluded with most of them being sent home because they still weren’t beautiful enough, post-surgery. Instead of grappling with the insanity of this conceit, however, “Behind the Mirror” mostly limits itself to critiquing the specific tactics of the series’ producers and its creator, Galán, as recounted by the women who were subjected to those tactics directly. (“It could have been a beautiful story, but it turned into a reality nightmare,” one of the women says.) The participants were made to wear large, shapeless gray underwear for their before pictures, to look as unattractive as possible; producers needed to get an emotional reaction from one woman, so they asked her about her miscarriage; they punished a contestant who refused to get a nose job, by threatening not to choose her as a pageant contestant; they did one contestant’s hair in ringlets for the big reveal, which she would never have done herself. “[Galán] fucking sold us out,” one woman offers. Of the producers, she adds, “They didn’t look at us and see us. They saw dollar signs.”
All of this seems, at this point, a little “no duh”: definitely unpleasant, but also, with what we now know about reality television, pretty par for the course. As I watched, it struck me that it would have been much more interesting to examine how our obsession with makeovers—and I count myself, as I’ve noted, squarely among the obsessed—led us to women breaking and rebuilding their faces and bodies on national TV while still thinking of it as a purely individual choice. (That question would be no less relevant today, in the age of facelifts at forty.) As I watched the women of “The Swan”—average, perhaps, but perfectly lovely in their humanness—still unquestioningly speak of what they hated about themselves (one wanted to change everything except what’s “from my ankles down”) and how they were eager to alter it, I found myself depressed. How and why has our value system become so limited, so restrictive? Suffice it to say, the word “feminism” isn’t mentioned once during the documentary.
The final pivot in the film, in which Carr brings together all the past contestants she’s interviewed for a group meetup in Los Angeles, forces a pat, feel-good resolution to the “Swan” saga, and makes “Behind the Mirror,” too, feel more like stunt-oriented reality television than a documentary. After the competition, the women formed a Facebook group, in which, over the years, they have offered one another support, both emotional and practical. (Information on how to fix all that has gone wrong with popped implants and broken veneers has often been traded.) They are “a sisterhood,” they agree, with one woman noting that she would “compete again . . . because [she] wouldn’t have met the people who have helped [her] survive in the last twenty-two years.” At the reunion, the women clink their champagne flutes to “tits, teeth, and trauma,” and the documentary ends with Carr asking them to sing along with the Pink song “Fuckin’ Perfect.” “Pretty pretty please, don’t you ever, ever feel / Like you’re less than fuckin’ perfect,” they croon. Even now, they were speaking “The Swan” ’s language. Who ever decided that “perfect” was the goal? ♦