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Louis Theroux: Under The Knife

Louis Theroux travels out to Los Angeles to check out the world of plastic surgery, where breast enhancements, tummy tucks, muscle implants and the like are common procedures.

Spending time in the surgeries of several plastic surgeons, Louis meets the doctors who carry out the operations and the people who feel they need work – whether it is a man looking to make his muscles look larger or a woman preparing to undergo surgery as part of improving her life. On this occasion though, Louis also undergoes a procedure himself to experience it firsthand.

If anyone else decided to have surgery as part of a film about plastic surgery I would be very cynical and assume the worst but I think Louis Theroux is unlikely to be accused of cheap tricks or gimmicks. Mostly he does a good job of getting in with his subjects and bringing them out in front of the cameras; one could accuse him of manipulating them perhaps but I think that is too harsh a description.

Here he does enough away from the gimmick of having liposuction to justify it as quite a small part of the show. The rest is interesting if not fascinating. Naturally the patients make for the most interesting scenes and some of them are curious and quite sad. Some are easy targets but Theroux’s soft touch prevents it feeling like he is getting at them.

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  1. Is Dr. Linda high on something? He is acting weird.

  2. The greatest line in this whole thing has to be “Adriana’s breasts must be like old friends by now!” Amazing little insinuation.

  3. Lipo suction cos the type of poison fat we get on our stomachs these days is almost impossible to get rid of, even with exercise… fine… All the rest of this stuff… No… >_< Am I the only guy who is reaaaaaaaally turned off by fake boobs? they look so strange…

  4. omg steve looks like ventriloquist puppet

  5. Laura is SO too good for that guy!!!

  6. Her new belly button looks like a butthole.

  7. Slight air of brainwashing around Laura’s ‘fashion advisor’ she’s a little insane…

  8. What a stupid  documentary i was too embarrassed to watch the rest of it!

  9. Louis is pretty badass for asking this surgeon uncomfortable questions while he is operating on him. 😀

  10. she looked so much better with the bigger nose, as Louis said, it added some character to her face. I did not think she looked much less atractive after the nose job.

  11. WTF? She rather has a huge scar on her belly and a weird looking belly button than a little bit of fat? Which most man love actually…

  12. Laura is depressed and is looking for direction from her mommy “stylist”.  Notice how she looks at her stylist before she answers any questions.  Children do the same thing.  The stylist even claps her hands and says “yay” like you do with a small child when they put the square block in the square hole.  Steve looks like a freak and the spray tan makes him look even more “plastic”.   The plastic surgeon that does the men’s surgery gives the men “women boobs”, even the men’s nipples look like they belong to adolescent girls.   Dr. Linda is so shallow and showed his arrogance as well in the surgery room.  I think the surgeon that did the lipo on Louis is the most honest of the bunch.

  13. I really disagree with the stereotype of Los Angeles women. I was born and raised in LA; I see these types of women walking down the street and I shudder. I truly believe that every person who considers plastic surgery (for cosmetic reasons) should go to therapy prior. There is nothing more beautiful than someone is confident in his/her own skin. 

  14. “It’s so smooth Dr. Linda!”

  15. As a wise con man once said, “It’s a sin to let a fool walk around with money.”

  16. Christ on crutches…

  17. I think Louis Theroux made this documentary because he wanted a free lipo.

  18. The way Laura said that she ‘can’t wait for the surgery’ sent a chill up my spine. It was almost as if she had been advised or controlled to the point of resignation that she somehow needed plastic surgery by her fashion advisor. Creepy stuff…

    • you hit the nail on the head with that one!,…

    • exactly, i got the same feeling.  I felt like Laura just had the worst confidence and just let that fashionadvisor control her whole life. Even after the surgery, she still had the worst self-image of her self and low confidence.

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  20. What a great article, I read all of it then i am satisfied to say that It’s a terse idiom, and if you’re concerned about the performance you must not have a database or anything else that consumes resources orders of magnitude greater. Consider yourself lucky, otherwise don’t optimize at this level unless you really need to. Keep blogging.

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  21. Those are some freaky mutilations of people. They look like what the Lord of the Rings cast all turn into on shrooms.

  22. That Steve guy looks weird as fuck…Idk how these people think they look better once they get these surgeries…warped body images at best i suppose.

    • Have to agree with you on the fact that Steve guy did look awful, I think the breast surgery on men is always going to look strange and do not look as they imagined.

      Although I can understand why they do if they have such a dim view on how they look, the receptionist looked awesome when it showed her again (Although I’d have said at the start she didn’t need anything) so if she then feels great due to it, you can understand why they want it.

      Although – Its obvious that the surgeons themselves do make the most of it. As much as some can admit they are just encouraging vanity etc, they are well aware doing one surgery may make something else look odd…which then leads to more surgery.