ABSTRACT
There’s something deliciously enticing about watching someone get a makeover. You see the “before” shot, either as a photograph in its daytime television incarnation, or perhaps as a bedraggled, downtrodden fi gure whose mundane life occupies the screen behind the opening credits of a movieand you see the “after” shot, too, when the beaming make-over recipient steps out to model her new look, or the bedraggled lady turns out to be drop-dead gorgeous after all. You always see the “after” shot-it’s the payoff-but its revelation is deferred. You don’t get the climatic “after” until you’ve seen, in the most gloriously minute detail, the “during.” What occupies most of the make-over narrative is describing the mechanisms which effect the make-over, the critical change from bad (or less preferred) to good. How does someone make change happen? What mysterious mechanism allows a prostitute to become a millionaire’s wife, a “heartless guttersnipe” to turn into a lady, or a lowly farmer to transform into an inter-galactic Jedi knight? Judging by the prevalence of these narratives in popular U.S. media, we really want to know.
