Abstract:

In Good For Her, Elizabeth E. Lee looks at the heavily controversial issues surrounding the cosmetic surgery boom in Seoul, Korea. She explores, through a collection of personal narration, nostalgic images of Korean beauty standards, contemporary news clips and direct interviews with Korean youngsters and university professors, the intense pressures on Korean youth to undergo cosmetic surgery. As an Asian American pursuing this culturally-delicate topic, the filmmaker exposes her own western eye looking at the highly-sensationalized issue, deconstructing the fantasy that many foreigners have about the Asian woman as a passive victim and ignorant perpetrator of her own powerlessness. As interviewees share their personal accounts about cosmetic surgery, a disparate gap between the Western director and Korean subject emerges, and definitions of individual, choice and power are questioned.