This afternoon I watched Made Over, a documentary that lays bare all manner of cosmetic surgeries in exhaustive detail: liposuction, double-eyelid surgery, all kinds of reshaping. Maybe because I’m so far removed from the culture of people who remake their bodies this way, even someone like me who enjoys gory, violent films found this one fairly jarring to watch.

Some of the questions the film raises: is cosmetic surgery really “fixing” the body, or “destroying” it? How should the law treat it (after all, it could be seen as a form of injury)? Does it run against certain beliefs? Made Over’s approach to these questions is direct and unadorned — interviewing the people involved and the doctors themselves, without any so-called experts or authorities stepping forward to weigh in. Maybe precisely because of this, some viewers feel the film offers nothing particularly novel. I’d say it’s precisely because cosmetic surgery is such an awkward subject that the film struggles to go very deep, and so it turns instead to another angle (including some rather taboo footage, which is also why I didn’t take any screenshots).

It reminds me of a story from Mandalas in Thangka Paintings: Tibetan Buddhist monks, after painstakingly painting an elaborate mandala, destroy it without the slightest hesitation, letting it vanish completely. But what about our bodies? Are they flawless mandalas, complete in themselves — or scattered, unfinished materials still waiting to be assembled?