Welcome to the bizarre world of Mike and Matt Schlepp. The 20-year-old twins from Arizona would die to look like Brad Pitt. Aspiring actors, the boys are confident they could make it big in Hollywood — if only they could do something about their crooked teeth, weak chins, beaky noses and acne-pocked skin.
Enter MTV, the U.S. music-video cable network that unleashed Janet Jackson's nipple onto the world. Never having met a Jackass it couldn't exploit, the network has now launched I Want A Famous Face, a new cosmetic-surgery reality show that cuts through the cartilage of celebrity obsession. The six-part series will begin airing on MTV Canada next month.
In the first episode, the MTV crew follows Mike and Matt through their painful transformation. Two months, countless surgeries and $37,000 (U.S.) of their own money later, the brothers emerge looking, well, definitely more handsome, but nothing like Brad Pitt.
They nevertheless claim to be delighted with the results. "I never knew I could be as happy as I am right now," Mike explains to the producers in a postoperative interview.
"It has definitely helped me get more girls," adds Matt. "Girlfriends I hadn't seen in a while couldn't stop staring. They said they wanted to cry. If that doesn't make you feel good, then what would?"
I Want a Famous Face is just one of numerous radical-makeover TV shows that vow to reinvent the destinies of ordinary Americans with surgical augmentation and a wardrobe coach. The phenomenon, which includes the Canadian Life Network's Skin Deep and TLC's A Personal Story, has become hugely popular.
Take Extreme Makeover, for example. The somewhat maudlin ABC reality series whisks its wannabe Cinderellas off to L.A., follows the patients around on shopping sprees while still wrapped in facial bandages, then unveils the "new and improved" person at a teary reunion with families and friends
Over the last year, the show has nearly doubled its ratings in its 9 p.m. weeknight time slot.
Not bad for a show that prompted The New York Times to call it "mutilation as entertainment" when it first aired as a two-part series a year ago last December.
Irvin Wolkoff, a Toronto-based psychiatrist, says the whole ghastly trend is reprehensibly sick. "It's pathetic and it makes me angry," says Wolkoff. "I am deeply resentful of any game show or scheme that presents itself as an alternative to actually trying to live a life. The awful implication of all these shows is that people are supposed to believe that dramatic change, based on trivial interventions, is somehow possible. If you can't make a life for yourself, just get on a TV show, cut your face, win a million dollars and everything will be fine."
Distasteful as it might be to some, the trend is soaring. On April 7, the Fox Network presents The Swan, produced by Freemantle Media, the company that first brought you American Idol. The show, which will be aired in Canada on Global TV, takes 18 women, all self-described ugly ducklings, sequesters them in a house without mirrors for three months, and offers each an individualized team of therapist, trainer, surgeon and dentist to help turn their fairy tale into reality.
Each week, two women are featured. The one who flourishes the most — in terms of work ethic, personal growth and physical achievement — is selected to move on to the final pageant, during which one woman will be crowned the Ultimate Swan.
"Women are always saying 'Oh, if I had a personal trainer and a chef like Oprah, or liposuction like actresses do .....' Well, we're going to give them that," Nely Galan, creator of The Swan, recently told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
"But I'm also going to coach them," adds Galan, who says the show was inspired by her own experience with psychotherapy after her marriage fell apart four years ago. "I'm going to help them figure out what they want out of life and how to get it. And they're going to have to work very hard at it."
Reinvention is the classic American dream, albeit all part of a myth that's been told since ancient times. "The radical-makeover story has always been popular," says Wolkoff. "In the past, it often took the form of the romantic ideal — if I find the one person out there who's perfect for me, my life will be complete. At other times, it has had more to do with material wealth. Nowadays, in keeping with the culture at large, we believe that attractiveness can change everything."
It's no wonder these shows are popular, he adds. "It's getting harder to achieve ordinary gratification — to get a meaningful job and pay the bills, or have what used to be called a marriage, one that you could expect to last and be reasonably satisfying until one of the partners dies. Offspring aren't the source of gratification they were 30 or 40 years ago. Now you have to worry if they're ever going to move out and work for a living.
"It's easy to get people to invest in these crappy TV shows," he continues, "because it's just so hard to get anywhere these days. But the problem with this spate of so-called reality TV is that it deliberately blurs the idea that this is fiction. Some people can watch these shows and be amused and go back to living their own life in the morning. But my concern is that some people are in danger of actually believing these shows can actually teach you something about how to pursue a life."
Even evolutionary biologists have shown that broader shoulders and higher cheekbones help win a mate. And with the spread of day clinics, computer imaging, shorter-acting anesthetics and less-invasive procedures, plastic surgery has become much more accessible.
Jean Carruthers is the Vancouver-based plastic surgeon who first discovered the cosmetic use of botulinum toxin A, now commonly known as Botox. She calls it "penicillin for self-esteem."
But for all her confidence in modern cosmetic applications, Carruthers has "steadfastly declined" the many invitations she has received from TV producers asking her to participate on their reality surgery shows. "I don't think people react all that well to sudden, extreme change," says Carruthers, explaining her rationale. "I want to make my patients look and feel their best over a long period of time.
"I know it makes great TV and it's very popular, but in my corner of the real world, my patients are very involved people — not just with their families, but in their community and with social work. If they went out and got everything done at once, a lot of people would notice."
Still, freaks of one sort or another have always held our fascination. Take Jacko. The most disturbing image in Michael Jackson's Face, a British documentary that aired on CBC Newsworld last weekend, was a computer-generated photo of what he could have looked like had he not had so much surgery. The image showed a handsome, bearded man with dark brown skin, a far cry from the pale, distorted, effeminate creature he has become.
But still we watch. Nip/Tuck, the FX drama about two Miami plastic surgeons going through midlife crises, was the most popular new show on U.S. cable last year — so successful that the U.S. Bravo network has now scheduled a six-part documentary series for next year called Miami Slice, which will follow five real surgeons in the city.
Carruthers agrees with the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, which says the show — with all its sex, butchered body parts and oozy gobs of fat — sensationalizes their profession. "Plastic surgeons are very serious people," says Carruthers. "It's not like you're a ringmaster in a circus. If you're a really good cosmetic surgeon, you're absorbing all the concerns of your patient and doing your best to give them what they want."
And that's exactly the point of all the gore says Nip/Tuck creator Ryan Murphy, who sees his series as a counterpoint to the puffed-lips boosterism of Extreme Makeover and their ilk. "These shows are very disturbing to me," Murphy told Time magazine. "There's usually a one-minute interlude where the patients question, 'Did I do the right thing?' but they're groggy and on painkillers. Then the bandages come off and they're transformed.
"All I want to do is explore the reasons you would dislike yourself so much that you would have plastic dress shields shoved up your butt."
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