In the realm of TikTok trends turned into mass cultural reality shows, few have captured attention quite like Alabama rush. For weeks in August 2021, TikTok was awash in content about the intense, highly scrutinized and anticipated process of sorority recruitment: daily “OOTDs” (outfits of the day), rush recap videos from freshly tanned and coiffed prospective new members (PNMs), and reactions to 18-year-old girls either elated or devastated by the high-stakes game of likability that is rush.
The same process in August 2022, referred to by many as “Bama Rush season 2”, was as much a hit as season 1 – the top 5 PNM TikTok users garnered 110m views for their videos, with individual ones surpassing even the most-watched episodes of Keeping Up With the Kardashians. But the attention had sororities wary. The New York Times reported on paranoia in Tuscaloosa over allegedly (but not actually) mic-ed up PNMs, and concern over a “secret” documentary made by Vice Studios and director Rachel Fleit.
Fleit, who directed the 2021 film Introducing, Selma Blair, was indeed making a film in Tuscaloosa: Bama Rush is now available on Max, the service known until yesterday as HBO Max. But the 101-minute film is not the exposé on US sororities that traditionally tight-lipped sororities seemed to fear. Rather, it’s a collage of individual experiences in and around recruitment 2022 – the sense of belonging, whether achieved or desired, that undergirds the whole thing. The goal, Fleit told the Guardian, was “to go down there and pull back the curtain on these TikToks, find out who the real young women are behind these, and really talk about what it means to be a woman right now”.
Sororities, on the organization level, were not receptive to that intention. “We received a lot of resistance when we started,” Fleit said. Her team contacted more than 500 young women, from active sorority members to prospective freshmen, but according to Fleit, most said it was against their sorority’s rules to talk to her. No PNM was ever mic-ed for recruitment; that was all rumor, one that defines the final act of the film. “The sorority system is this big behemoth, but behind it are all of these people,” said Fleit. “The behemoth is quite strong and powerful, and people really want to be a part of it. To me, the rumor just exemplified the stakes for belonging.”
Belonging, either in true friendship or in access to the predominant social scene on campus, is the main desire expressed by each of the four young women Fleit follows ahead of recruitment, beginning in the fall of 2021. “I don’t really know who I am, you know?” says Isabelle, a high school senior with large, searching brown eyes, who hopes to find friends within the structure of Alabama sorority. “I have a really hard time finding people who love me no matter what.” Isabelle is anxious enough about the rush process – essentially, an audition of the self to a club, and of the club to you – to hire a rush consultant, a couple of whom appear in the film.
Shelby, a bubbly blond pageant queen from Illinois, openly regards Alabama rush as her “Olympics” – “it’s a sport, definitely,” she says while planning her outfits and reviewing her strategy binders, minutely detailed tips that she shares with followers online. Holliday and her friend Makalya plan to rush as sophomores – soft-spoken Makalya didn’t rush as a freshman, while the louder, more candid Holliday was dropped from her sorority after someone reported her wearing another chapter’s letters. (Sorority codes of conduct, as the film briefly discusses, are lengthy, punishing and designed for peer surveillance – everything from no alcohol in the house to, for some, no wet hair downstairs and requirements on dress, makeup and decorum.)
All four girls worry about how to present themselves. All four highlight their hair blond, including Makalya, who identifies as mixed race (her late father was Black) and is among a small percentage of non-white PNMs in a sea of girls with hair the color of a peeled banana. All four discuss experiences with depression and anxiety; almost every young woman, sorority or not, brings up their struggles with eating disorders. There’s the overwhelming pressure to fit in, the enduring beauty myth and the warped panopticon of social media. As three Zeta Tau Alphas explain to Fleit, knowing you can shrink a waist with one tap on Photoshop doesn’t mean you stop comparing yourself with a mirage.
And then, of course, there’s the gender and class norms that Greek organizations uphold and perpetuate. (The average annual cost for new members at Alabama is about $8,300.) “Rush is a social stratification ritual, bar none,” says Elizabeth Boyd, the author of Southern Beauty: Race, Ritual, and Memory in the Modern South, in the film. It is “competitive femininity and the contemporary performance of the southern belle”. The film touches on the development of sororities from educational groups in the late 19th century to competitive social organizations, and the difference between the Panhellenic organizations on campus – the sororities of #BamaRush – and the “Divine Nine”, the traditionally Black sororities formed outside of a Greek system that did not admit Black students. The University of Alabama only integrated sororities in 2013, the year I went through rush as a lost freshman at the University of Virginia. (Like Makalya, I found the process draining and forced, and dropped out partway through.)
Rian, a Black active member in a “bottom-tier” Panhellenic sorority, bluntly lays out what people in top-tier sororities are “entitled” to: test banks to help on exams, better and richer connections, a male gaze that can be beneficial to you. That hierarchy is determined primarily by fraternities, whose criterion is basically, as several young women report in the film, hotness. Fraternities get a few shots and mentions in the film, particularly on the subject of a secretive Greek-wide society known as The Machine, but no frat boys are present. “I wanted this to be focused on the female perspective,” said Fleit.
That does not include the participation of sororities, who declined access. With the exception of bid day, a quasi-holiday in Tuscaloosa when thousands of PNMs receive their official offers, almost all representations of sorority life – the chants, the fashion, the chatter – come from TikToks and recruitment videos, AKA the already public-facing side of each chapter. Instead, Bama Rush turns personal, including on Fleit herself, who discusses her own journey as a freshman in college, afraid to reveal her bald head as a result of alopecia. “One of my hopes was a viewer could be watching this and thinking, well, how did I rush?” she said. “What did I do to feel like I could belong, or that I could get accepted to this community and feel that sense of belonging?”
Bama Rush offers plenty of evidence to side-eye the Greek system, from mentions of playing the recruitment “game” to its sordid history – you don’t have to go back far in the yearbooks to find Greek scene hangs with Confederate flags. But Fleit shies away from characterizing the system as a whole. “Every single person is going to have a different experience watching this film,” she said when I asked about possibly labeling the Greek system as “toxic”. “I think some of it is really, really good, and some of is it really, really bad. Some of it is really confusing and in the middle. It’s hard to characterize.”
If the film lands anywhere, it’s that, as Fleit says at one point, things are complicated. “There’s so much underneath the hood of the car,” she said. “And we’re quite similar to these young women, many of us.” Some of the young women in Bama Rush find acceptance, new friends and a community amid the huge student body at Alabama. Others felt disinterested, or ambivalent, or disappointed. Either way, the show goes on.
Bama Rush is now available on Max in the US with a UK date to be announced