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Last weekend, my friends and I decided to stay in on our Saturday night to order pizza and watch a movie. We stumbled across some movies that at least two of us had already seen, until we came across this movie called GOAT. After seeing that Nick Jonas played a huge role in this movie, we decided to watch it (without any of us knowing what the movie was going to be about). All we knew about this movie was that it was about a man’s journey through starting college, trying to make friends, and joining a fraternity house.
The movie starts by showing the high schooler’s experience at a “fun” college frat party with girls, drinking, and drugs. But on his way home, he endures a life changing event that traumatizes him throughout the movie. It then flashes forward to the him moving into this university, where he decides to rush for the same fraternity his brother (Nick Jonas) belongs to. The movie’s depiction of hazing escalates from the “rushies” going on late-night food deliveries for the “brothers,” to drinking hot sauce from the bottle, to being kept in a cage like a goat. The hazing scene go into vivid, horrifying detail, and truly made my friends and I sick to our stomachs.
By the end of the movie, my friends and I felt incredibly uncomfortable by the idea of freshmen encountering any of these hazing actions purely for the purpose of making friends in college. GOAT made us feel lucky to not have fraternities on our campus, but also made us question if fraternities at other colleges in Boston closely relate to the fraternities in this movie. We also wondered if sorority inductions have the same approach to “welcoming” in new “sisters.”
Hopefully, this movie will open people’s eyes to the horrifying hazing that freshmen encounter as the come to college. This movie will shock, sadden, and surprise you about what some people are willing to go through, just to be accepted into a group and feel like they are a part of something.