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ABSTRACT
This article deals with the rise and fall of the Israeli television show The Mirror, which focused on a physical transformation, implemented by a series of plastic surgeries, that provided the participants-mainly working-class Mizrachi women-with a new visibility. The show and its controversial reception raise questions regarding the aesthetic criteria of physical beauty in Israeli culture, and their political-, ethnic-, religious-, and class-related dimensions. By following one participant in the show, we examine how the visual narrative of The Mirror constructs the formation of the "beautiful body" through popular media, and its political complexity within Israeli culture.
A woman wishes to change her looks, both her body and her face, and the process is flaunted on the Israeli television screen. This metamorphosis unfolded throughout all the episodes of the Israeli reality show The Mirror, hosted by Orna Datz and broadcast on Channel 10 in the fall of 2006. The program offered a filmed journey during which the participants, most of them female, underwent a series of plastic surgeries meant to embellish their appearance, boost their self-confidence, and, as stated in the program's opening, "launch them on a new path."
What is The Mirror's significance in Israeli media, and what Israeli aesthetic values does it tout? Who can be recreated through the television on the wall as "the fairest of them all," and what is the significance of documenting the ugly duckling's metamorphosis into a gorgeous swan? In other words, how do aesthetic terms of physical beauty and ugliness interact with political and emotional questions typical of Israeli culture, and what happens when the coveted metamorphosis, apparently the province of fairy tales only, barges into reality?
Like other popular spectacles, this television program thrives on technological, physical, and emotional manipulation in order to validate conventional knowledge and to steer and regulate the collective constitution of the gaze at and from the Israeli body. To the participants it offers a coveted model of legitimate physical appearance that promises access to resources of public visibility-not only because they appear on television but also because plastic surgery sparks in them a visual narrative of success, acceptance, and legitimacy. By the standards of the program's underlying visual values, their beauty is enhanced. Yet this system of values,...