This Notorious Plastic Surgeon Slices and Dices on Instagram
The discovery+ doc “They Call Me Dr. Miami” trails plastic surgeon Michael Salzhauer (aka Dr. Miami), a shameless self-promoter who broadcasts his gruesome procedures to millions.
In the 1992 black comedy Death Becomes Her, Meryl Streep plays an actress on the verge of aging out of Hollywood who chances upon the elixir of youth. Streep unlocks the ability to live forever and never age, but that doesn’t spare her body from other indignities. As she and her also-immortal rival, played by Goldie Hawn, fight against time, they break their necks, decimate their fingers, shoot perfect circles through their stomachs—only to get patched back up by their reconstructive-mortician lover. By the end, the two women are rotting effigies of their former selves, their body parts breaking off at the slightest provocation. The moral is fairly straightforward: sometimes the underside of beauty is disgusting.
If the message had gotten lost in the last 30-odd years, Canadian director Jean-Simon Chartier’s documentary, They Call Me Dr. Miami, which is now streaming on discovery+, is a pretty effective reminder. The 80-minute feature follows the life of Michael Salzhauer, a plastic surgeon better known as Dr. Miami, who’s built a following for himself by livestreaming his cosmetic procedures on social media. Salzhauer is a plastic surgery evangelist—dedicated, he says, to making the world more beautiful inside and out and using the tools of the internet to spread his gospel. But the central paradox of his online presence is that it’s very much not beautiful, so much as wholly revolting. The Snapchat feed that made him famous is a jarring blend of ecstatic group choreography and close-ups of bloodied butts halfway through a silicone implant surgery.
Salzhauer, who grew up in New York City, opened his Miami practice in 2003. There are more than a few plastic surgery clinics in the area, to put it mildly, and to compete, Salzhauer decided to go wild on advertising. (“Marketing makes the world go ‘round,” he told Miami New Times in 2012). For him, that meant bringing people behind the scenes of surgeries—offering free procedures in exchange for publicity. Salzhauer has a manic, Mad Hatter energy and his videos are impossible to tear your eyes away from, in part because they’re so disgusting.