The Swan: Behind the Mirror centers the people and their scars

One of The Swan’s plastic surgeons, Dr. Randal Haworth, may not be the villain of Hulu’s The Swan: Behind the Mirror. But he’s the most high-profile person on the production side of the documentary to be interviewed about the Fox show, and he’s constantly infuriating.

Haworth describes his work as “surgical psychiatry,” and then uses a metaphor: he’s an “interior designer” who moves around furniture. The Swan’s producers, he says with glee, “wanted to know who would make good TV—not in terms of their backstory. I’m just looking at their face. And my goal, as a plumber: Can I perform early hyper-aesthetic surgery on these people?”

That’s when director Erin Lee Carr interrupts: “But plumber’s weird—because you’re literally talking about toilets. And women.”

“That was not intended,” he says, looking like a child with paint on his hands who insists he was not painting. Haworth’s metaphor is apt because, as its participants tell us in The Swan: Behind the Mirror’s 90 minutes, the plastic surgery is not the issue. It’s how they were treated behind the scenes.

How could anyone agree to go on this show? you might ask. The Swan: Behind the Mirror has an answer: they were sold a lie.

The doc briefly but crucially frames The Swan as part of a larger cultural obsession with thinness, beauty, and weight loss, which exploded as an industry in the 1990s. Faced with pressure to lose weight or look like supermodels, women signed up for free therapy and life coaching and surgery.

The Swan was created by Nely Galán, and one Swan cast member, Kristi, says, “I like to tell myself that when Nely had this idea, she did want to help us get over our self-esteem issues. She did want to help us overcome past traumas. But she fucking sold us out, is what she did.”

The women Carr interviews and focuses on show us why they were selected for a reality TV show—they’re great TV, even when reflecting on a traumatic time. Looking at footage of her reveal, Kristi says, “That hair though—the fuck? I’ve seen better ballgowns at Billy Dale and Bubb Earl’s Used Car Lot Beauty Review that they have twice a year, you know what I mean?”

At another point, Kristi says, “They didn’t look at us and see us. They saw dollar signs.”Galán didn’t agree to an interview. Neither did Fox’s reality TV executive Mike Darnell, nor plastic surgeon Dr. Terry Dubrow. So this is not a documentary that is going to whiff on accountability, like Netflix’s look at America’s Next Top Model did.

Instead, Carr keeps the focus on cast members, who take us chronologically through the show’s two seasons. That produces some behind-the-scenes revelations, such as:

• the season-one participants were never told the show would end in a beauty pageant. That was especially horrifying because the women bonded and then, as Kristi says, “immediately pit them against the very women that they bonded with this whole time to go to your backwoods beauty pageant.”
• after an intense day during which all surgery was performed at once, the cast spend months recovering alone, with just one rotating nurse to help all of them—and were not allowed contact with friends or family.
• the sequester was overseen by coordinating producer Laurz, who describes it as “prison with some freedom” and herself as “the gestapo.”
• the cast was forced to work out, Biggest Loser-style, while still recovering from surgery and on extreme diets. On-screen trainer Debbie Siebers says that when she was pushed to have them work out more, she said, “that’s impossible, they’re not on enough calories, and they’re still healing.” (Yet: she kept participating.)
• implants ruptured and new teeth fell out after the show ended. In possibly related news, we learn dental surgeon Dr. Sherri Worth later surrendered her license after being accused of negligence and fraud.
• the show offered no follow-up or aftercare. (The History Channel’s Alone offers aftercare in the form of psychologist and doctor visits, while A&E’s Hoarders paid for further therapy and work with an organizer after cameras left.)

Beth tells us “I went home feeling emotionally scarred,” in part because “I participated in and fed into the world’s view of beauty.”

“I feel like I gave up so much just to look like that, and I don’t know if it was worth it,” she adds, saying she was embarrassed that she gained some weight back. “I was so obsessed to living up to the expectations of Nely and her show that I would try to make myself puke just to lose 10 pounds. For a show. For TV. Why?”

Season two got worse, with participant Kari—whose sister was secretly also on the season—saying, “I think they saw an opportunity to fuck with a family.”

Not everyone’s entire experience on The Swan was bad. Tawnya tells us her “real motivation” was to see a therapist two or three times a week, and says the doctor “was awesome. I really liked her.”

And there’s a surprise ending, kind of, to The Swan: Behind the Mirror. Many of the reality show’s cast members have stayed connected, and reunite on camera to drink and laugh. One credits this found family with helping her escape an abusive relationship.

The Swan season one senior producer Carl tells us, “That’s why I want to do shows like that. If you can have an impact, to help—I mean, that’s just human compassion. And then, in Beth’s case, holy moly, what a transformation.”

And that’s when Carr steps in again. “She’s one of the ones that feels really victimized by the show.” Carl is stunned. “I—wow. Yeah,” he says. “How, and why?”

Good question—and here’s where I wish Carr would use her willingness to push back against her subjects to really interrogate the producers’ participation. None of them are responsible for the creative decisions, but did what they were told.

A producer, identified as Jenna, said that, because of the “bubble” the show puts them in, the cast “just go along with the flow.” But why do those who had doubts while working on the show? The Swan: Behind the Mirror doesn’t go there, but it still succeeds in helping us understand what happened in that bubble, and what a group of women went through to produce a reveal on television.

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