I understand (but don't necessarily endorse) undercover documentaries, but this one's off the rails.
I'd heard several people complaining about this doc, but honestly had no idea what they were talking about.
So, I looked it up.
Had it in the queue for quite a while, confident it'd be terrible, but remained open-minded nonetheless.
Eventually, I began it, and the whole shebang made my skin crawl.
For starters, freshmen college girls are way too young and vulnerable to be exploited and manipulated in this way.
Rachel Fleit (who directed and stars) sowed the wind, so now she's reaping the whirlwind of hate and I needn't pile onto her as a person.
BUT, I will say that infiltrating, deceiving, and manipulating 18-year-olds (and spinning it as "investigative journalism") is not only misleading, but a breach of the code of ethics and certainly the spirit of what we know to be journalistic integrity.
Bama Rush gets us no closer to understanding authentic social dynamics among young women, the timeless and essential nature of rites of passage, the value of belonging and bonding in service to maturing and crystallizing one's sense of 'self' individually beyond community in the aggregate, or how identity and trust can be strengthened or shattered by those nearest to us—but that's because none of this appears to be the documentary's purpose.
From what I can tell, the filmmaker, a 42-year-old, was struggling mightily physically, and that—compounded by a protracted pandemic that tested many people's mental health for three consecutive years prior—became nitroglycerin near an open flame.
I think what's presented on screen as a panoramic documentary about others is, in fact, autoethnography instead.
The filmmaker is journaling and filming herself throughout, critiquing and judging others but relative to her own moral compass (and personal experiences and reflections), then evaluating an entire Greek system at one school for one semester through this self-anchored subjective lens, extrapolating from it, and ultimately attempting to distill a much wider social and cultural 'truth' while keeping herself as the touchstone and arbiter of what is and is not.
As such, it's Relativism 101 and the behavior of an influencer, not a journalist.
There are a dozen better ways to get at what the doc pretends to be, and had Max (formerly HBO Max) been more honest/transparent/forthcoming in their advertising and media campaign, or repurposed their methods to arrive at a more objective outcome, who knows, maybe we'd have lightning in a bottle rather than this lightning rod for controversy.
