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"Few recipes for cultural anxiety could be more inspired than the marriage of two of the most inflammatory contemporary phenomena: cosmetic surgery and reality TV," writes Gaby Wood in her article "Meet Marnie . . ."1 The article includes interviews with both Marnie Rygiewicz, a former contestant on FOX's reality TV series The Swan, and one of the plastic surgeons on the show, Terry Dubrow. While many television critics shudder at the "sick glory of the concept," 2 commenting that the show is "obscene" and that "its tastelessness is so over-the-top,"3 the popularity of The Swan among television viewers is undeniable: its premiere attracted some 15 million viewers, placing it in the running with many of the mostwatched programs on TV.
The popularity and proliferation of reality television shows-in the form of docudramas, talk shows, competitive versions like Survivor, and most recently, makeover shows-has allowed for the creation of a new genre in popular culture studies. As different forms emerge, the implications of the genre as a whole for an understanding of the current vicissitudes of Western culture also proliferate. In this regard, the increasing popularity of the most recent trend in reality TV, the makeover show, calls for its own study, not only to highlight the specificities of this particular branch of the genre, but also to describe its unique relation to the culture of which it is a part.
Through an analysis of one of the most radical of the reality TV makeover shows, FOX's The Swan, I wish to illuminate the West's newest relation to a feminine compulsion toward imitation whose mythos, as I develop below, began with the figure of the goddess, and which has always been intimately connected to technologies of mass production-from the proliferation of copies of the same divine statues in ancient Greece to the current obsession with plastic surgeries intent on mimicking "ideal" forms. As a medium for demonstration, I call upon the mythic scenarios expounded in Roberto Calasso's Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, which intimately link the "origin" of ideal beauty with narrative proliferation and repetition, two of the most obvious traits of The Swan. In addition, mythic scenario, as Calasso presents it, stages the struggle between the aesthetic and the symbolic, between experience and meaning-a...