"The Makeover and Other Consumerist Narratives" is an interdisciplinary work in both approach and scope, and reads the construction of feminine desire and identity through what is popularly known as the makeover. Bringing together such diverse areas as film, literature, women's magazines, psychoanalysis, historical analysis and cultural theory, this research is particularly concerned with visual communications media (mostly film and advertising) and spectatorship. Of central import is the relationship of consumerism to feminine identity, desire, and the historical emergence of popular entertainments aimed directly at women. / The narrative of the makeover---so prevalent in women's magazines and advertising---works to effectively orient women's desires in a consumerist direction through product promotion and self-commodification. In addition, the makeover is explored in terms of how it might be seen to provide a model by which to understand the workings of late consumer capitalism as a whole. From an excavation of the official commodity-oriented origins of the makeover in the history of women's magazines, the project then moves through a reading of several print advertisements and the phenomenon of the consumer tie-in, and finally to what I call the "Transformation Film." Questions of narrative, desire and class are key here, especially insofar as these films make explicit the connection between self-transformation, commodity consumption, feminine desire and the promise of identity in consumer culture. / At issue is the peculiar problematic of feminine desire as negotiated by Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, as well as the historical implications of female identity as explainable by Marxian commodity theory. It is only by means of examining the objects which cater to feminine desire that we may be able to understand this "culture of the makeover" and women's identity therein.

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This thesis features a qualitative analysis of eight Korean media products — both fiction and nonfiction. For many years, South Korea (hereafter also called Korea) has been called the "world's plastic surgery capital" by many publications, such as Business Insider and The New Yorker. Although Business Insider considers the United States the "vainest country in the world," the numbers of cosmetic surgeries, percentage wise, per person in Korea still outnumber those in the United States, with 20 procedures per 1,000 persons. In this thesis, I argue by using the cultivation theory that Korean television, such as K-Dramas, talk shows and films, which celebrate transformations and feature makeovers and thus normalize cosmetic surgery, create a fantastic space for viewers where the viewers are compelled to act on a media-generated desire to undergo cosmetic surgery in the belief that doing so will also transform or better their lives in the same way it does for the characters in these Korean television productions.