When a friend sent me the trailer for "Bama Rush," Max's documentary about Greek life at the University of Alabama, I watched with an outcast's perverse need to glimpse a world from which I'd been excluded. Opening credits roll over a dizzying mash-up of TikTok videos, bronzy, blonde girls sharing the secrets of how to be yourself but also just like everyone else, and grim, gossipy warnings that this documentary would "change Greek life as we know it."
The film follows four PNMs (potential new members) as they navigate rush in the summer of 2022. The young women are forthcoming and vulnerable about their desire to fit in, to find community and belonging, a need I understood deeply, especially when I thought back to my own experience.
