There is a popular myth about the birth of modern film, which goes something like this. It is late in December of 1895, and it is Paris, and the brothers Lumière are showing their films at LeSalon Indien du Grand Café. Tonight is the first public film screening in h.istory. The audience is cosmopolitan, well-to-do, and well-educated. It is not a large Salon, after all. The movies are all actualités of about forty seconds, but for each little clip the brothers feed in seventeen meters of film. This does not detract from the spectacle, not at all



These films show scenes from daily life. They are demonstrative in nature and their appeal lies in the simple joy of being able to look at things. One Lumière film is called “The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station”; it shows a train pulling up to a country town platform using one continuous shot. The camera was positioned right next to the tracks, so as the train comes in it runs diagonally across the screen. It is distant at first but then larger and larger until it is huge in the center and heading right for us. And then the train stops, of course, and lets the people out onto the platform—but by now it is too late, as the legend would have it, because everyone in the Salon is jumping up or shouting or running away to the back of the room where they think they will be safe. The little wooden chairs have all been knocked down to the ground, and the Lumières are standing there cross or perplexed or maybe even gleeful.



In this chaotic moment, the film audience was born. It was a dotted line before the modern, a call to play the skeptic in the face of illusion. In A Short History of the Movies, Gerald Mast described it with appropriate smugness: “Audiences,” he said, “would have to learn to watch movies.”



Today, we are almost entirely certain that this never really happened. Martin Loiperdinger, Tom Gunning, and other film historians have made a variety of convincing cases against it. (For example: The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station was not part of the original ten-film program; it was first screened in 1896. For example: the film was flickering, grainy, all black and white, and projected onto a fairly small screen at the front of the room.) But the myth has stuck regardless, and the Grand Café anecdote is now part of the lore of modern film culture. Plus, the fact of its ubiquity may show us more about ourselves than its truth or falsehood.



Here is a thing that definitely did happen. In 1902, Edison Studios released a short film called “Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show.” It was quite clearly a knock-off of a movie made in England just a year before, “The Countryman and the Cinematographe,” and it featured an excerpt from an Edison film called “New Diamond Express” (1900)—itself quite clearly a knock-off of the Lumière Brothers’ wildly successful “The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station” (1896). 



“Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show” is a fairly simple movie. It stars an unsophisticated rube from the country called “Uncle Josh,” a character who showed up in many films and audio monologs at the time. Here, Uncle Josh has booked himself a box at the cinema. He is off to one side of the frame, sitting in his box and watching the screen that takes up the other half of the shot. “The Edison Projecting Kinetoscope” comes up on the screen, and then a “Parisian Dancer” begins to do the can-can in a sultry,  fin-de-siècle sort of way. Uncle Josh is so moved that he jumps out of his box and starts trying to dance with her. But then the film changes to “New Diamond Express”, and poor Josh is still there in front of the screen as the train starts to come, so he leaps with a fright and throws himself right back into his booth. When the third film comes on, it is a country couple fighting, and when Uncle Josh goes to intervene he knocks over the screen. The understandably cranky projectionist wrestles Josh to the ground, and the film ends there.



This Uncle Josh is hairy, and proud, and melodramatic. It is the dancer who first lures him out from his box—lures him from the left side, the safe side, of the film’s single shot—but the second time he ventures out, it is to intervene in what looks like domestic abuse. He does not seem like a bad sort of man at all: his bantam posturing makes him ridiculous because he does not understand that it is all an illusion. The lust, fear, and moral insistence that would otherwise make him normal are discredited in the moment that he gets out of his box and walks out past the curtain. When he steps in front of the screen, he disappears in the projection, and when he tries to enter into the world of the film, everything comes crashing down around him—and Uncle Josh is the one to blame.



“Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show” is a funny little film, but in moments, it can start to feel surprisingly sad.



At the start of the twentieth century, Uncle Josh and other rube stories gave the early film audience a reflection of their own viewing experience and, moreover, trained them against the wrong way to respond to illusions. By the 1920s, these films were no longer popular. They were replaced, in a way, by the urban legend of the Lumière Brothers and “The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station.” Anthropologists around this time also wrote about the terror of “primitive” tribes when they encountered film technology. The naïve country bumpkin had been replaced by whole audiences of the past, and by a colonial Other, in the popular imagination. 



The modern spectator, when confronted with illusion, undergoes the uncanny excitement of being both skeptical and vulnerable, of succumbing to an illusion at the same time as realizing that the illusion is false. As Cécile Whiting has noted, an audience can watch a documentary about the special effects used in Jurassic Park and then still jump in fear when the virtual dinosaurs lurch from the screen. Yet it seems as if modern viewers need something else as well, some familiar way to deflect their insecurity onto the credulous, the uninitiated, or the weak.



*        *        *  



“Reality television,” Germaine Greer said once, “is not the end of civilization as we know it: it is civilization as we know it. It is popular culture at its most popular, soap opera come to life.” The heady world of reality TV is no place for the skeptic. Just this year, there were numerous accusations that Kourtney & Kim Take New York had been “backfilled” with scenes that were faked later on. The finale of The Hills in 2010 was essentially a confession that the show had been scripted from the start: after a last sentimental scene, the camera zoomed out to show Brody Jenner standing in an outdoor set in a Hollywood studio. Said Kristen Cavallari, one of the protagonists: “Fans need to understand it’s all entertainment. It’s all in fun. I would never actually put my close friends or a real relationship on a show.” 



It is hard to get a grip on the status of fact and fiction in contemporary visual culture, and it is hard to understand how skeptical or susceptible we are all supposed to be. Since the Blair Witch Projectin 1999, found-footage style has become a horror movie staple. Comedies like The Office take on the appearance of documentaries, while factual documentaries, mix in dramatic re-enactments and performative interventions. As basic ontological categories blur, and as nothing comes without self-conscious mediation, reality begins to assume all the values and demands of the spectacle. 



We are fascinated, and we are vulnerable. In this sort of landscape, there is not even a screen for Uncle Josh to rip down. You are not supposed to watch The Hills and then think it is true. But if you do not watch The Hills because you think it is false, then it seems that you too are missing the point somehow.



When the UK’s Channel 4 aired the reality show Space Cadets in December of 2005, the Sunday Mirror said it lay “somewhere between completely hilarious and incredibly cruel.” According to the promotional blurb: “Channel 4 is blasting a group of adventurers, ordinary members of the public, off into space to spend five days orbiting the earth. It’s thrilling, it’s exciting, and it’s totally bogus.” These would-be reality stars were hand-picked for their boldness and credulity. They were taken to a disused military base in Suffolk and then told that it was Russia, told that two of them would be chosen to go up into space (along with three professional actors who had been planted there to help guide the illusion).



The cadets were trained by a former KGB agent and their base was decked out in exclusively Russian products. (The production team at Suffolk smoked Russian cigarettes in case one of the contestants found a butt somewhere.)  When they finally went up in the shuttle, which was a hand-medown from Space Cowboys and Armageddon, they saw a distant earth out the window thanks to Hollywood-standard visual effects. All told, the show cost Channel 4 more than four million pounds. 



The cadets were put through their paces. They saluted a Russian “poem,” which was actually a translated recipe for English sausage pudding. They memorized planet names, made balloon animals, acted out Alice in Wonderland. They wrote poems about their youth and they hugged it all out. Just before the show ended, they held a space funeral for a celebrity dog called “Mr. Bimby.”



At the grand finale, the host opened up the shuttle and showed the contestants that they were not in space but in a studio surrounded by their family and friends. Keri said she was “heartbroken,” said she had been planning a speech about her childhood dreams of going into space. Paul from Bristol said, “Aw, man. We’re not astronauts. We’re just asses.” And Billy Jackson said, “This is the biggest wind-up ever. This is wicked.” Each of them was given £25,000 and a trip to the real Space City near Moscow. The host’s relief was visible: the number of viewers had dwindled rather quickly, but the hoax had been pulled off without a major hitch.



The reality-twist genre was nothing new when Space Cadets came around. Shows like Average Joe and Joe Millionaire had already applied a twist to the dating show format, as did the spectacular There’s Something About Miriam in 2003. The latter program, which was subtitled  Find Me A Man, showed a group of English lads as they fought for the heart of a beautiful Mexican model named Miriam. It is an awfully tiresome show, but the finale is interesting enough. Here, Miriam stands on a balcony next to a cactus: she coyly announces her winner, who jumps forward and hugs her with a smug little smile. But the host intervenes and says that, before they can get on the boat full of money, there is something that Miriam has to say to Tom (23, lifeguard and ex-ski instructor). “I really love spending time with you, and kissing you. You see, I love men, and I love being a woman.” Tom is completely blank; the other contestants start to giggle arm-in-arm in the background. And then, of course, we find out that Miriam has a penis, and the joke is all on Tom—get it? Now the losers start to laugh, start to dance up in front of him—“I knew it, I told you, I knew it”—and Tom is looking faint then the host calls them all to order. Tom agrees to go on the boat anyway, because he and Miriam are “good friends” after all, and the host declares that a round of applause is in order.



And then Tom sues the show for defamation and sexual assault and personal injury through emotional and psychological damage. Some of the production team backs him up, and the show does not get released until the next season. It still goes to air, however, and—horrible treatment of transgendered life aside—There’s Something About Miriam proved to be a high (or low) point in the life of “reality-twist.” 



Reality TV demands a certain degree of credulity from its stars and its audience. Yet to appeal to a media-savvy and generally skeptical audience, it becomes necessary to turn the viewers into producers: to draw a line in power between the two different sides of the screen. 



It is hard to ignore the moralistic edge that comes with this form of spectatorship, especially when reality shows put participants through some ostensible test of character. Adam Mesh, who was adorable when he lost Average Joe to a pretty boy, went from hero to villain when he starred in his own dating show and chose a socialite over a schoolteacher. Viewers are always encouraged to pick out who is being sincere, who is being fake. (Often this choice determines who can stay on the show, as in the proudly panoptical Big Brother.) And when programs hold up the wrong kind of behavior—think I Love Money 3, for example—they can always hide behind the defense: look, this is just real life we are showing.



The “reality twist” pulls the rug out from under its stars, like “Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show” does to its fictional protagonist. And yet: if credulity is what these shows demand from their participants, then the space cadets and Tom (23, life guard and ex-ski instructor) are not really like Uncle Josh, because they are responding in precisely the right way to the illusion on the screen. Reality television does not make its contestants into fools because they are doing it wrong—it makes them into fools for obeying, fools for living out the spectacle, as the audience must, in whatever way will sustain the illusion. The skeptical position is no defense, because the very concept of “reality shows” presupposes the deepest kind of skepticism. Those who are more vulnerable are simply those who are on air, those who are desperate to be seen: those who are lured to step out of their box. The only safe space is right here on the coach: here on on this side of the screen. 



Unless. As the Space Cadets hoax wore on, the audience got bored and began to speculate on the internet. One of the show’s non-actor participants was seen in an ad for the National Blood Service; this, and the unbelievable credulity of the contestants, led to a “double hoax” theory—a suggestion that the joke might instead be on the gullible public, because in fact everyone on the show was an actor. The theory was dispelled by the end of the show, but it commanded a considerable following and seemed, for a time, rather convincing.



There were other theories posited as well. “Maybe it’s a triple hoax,” one commenter wrote. “They’re all actors, but they’re ACTUALLY going to get sent into space. The fame hungry twats.”Another one wrote: “Producers, you really need to get everybody dressed up in monkey suits for when the ‘Cadets’ ‘Return to Earth’ for a comedy ending.”



A stranger thing that happened was the confessional that Charlie Skelton, one of the show’s professional actors, submitted to The Guardian after the big reveal. Skelton said he found it hard not to believe that he was actually in space, even while he knew he was running an experiment in groupthink. He described the poems that he wrote, based on a past full of lies, and the hugs that the group exchanged at moments when he shared them. “I enjoyed the poems,” he wrote. “I also—it has to be said—enjoyed the lies. I lied about my father being a violent wannabe jockey. I lied about my fear of Christmas trees. I lied about not believing that Albert Einstein existed. But always the truth outweighed the lies.” In the end, the joke was not on Charlie Skelton or the British viewing public. But it just as well could have been. 



 



The founding myths of early film paved the way for a visual culture that meets illusions with a mix of the skeptical and the credulous. The country rube figure and the Grand Café myth have long nourished the vanity of the modern watching audience: an audience that is increasingly sophisticated, but astonished nevertheless. Now, however, in the unstable world of reality programming, it is hard to be sure that the fool of the hoax can provide such catharsis. And as for Uncle Josh, well, he was nothing but an actor all along.



 



 

I was out of shape when I showed up. I had kind of thought I was done. I had already made it through the hoop that counted, the admissions hoop. I had stuck my landing; now I could relax. They don’t tell you when they accept you that hoop-jumping is the official sport of the College. Especially at the beginning, I had this sense that I was in fact a hoop-jumping recruit, a scholarship kid. I had to keep jumping to earn my spot here. I would later talk about the sport in terms of the fix: that dopamine rush as your toes have cleared and you realize *you’re through*.  In those first monthswe were all obsessed with recreating the experience of that first successful jump.



 



You get the sense that you have to join a cult to make it here. There are a lot of options for what cult to join, but you have to join *one* or you’re never gonna have a Real College Experience. Unless you have really great roommates. If you have really great roommates, you’re exempt.



 



To join a cult, you have to jump through that cult’s hoop. When you meet people here, you look at their bodies. You look at what muscles they have where, whether it looks like they could make a particular jump.



 



The cults recruit every semester. They run training programs that last most of the semester and culminate with the Jump where you either make it through the hoop and into the cult or you don’t. Sometimes there is a preliminary hoop that happens halfway through training, and if you don’t make it, you aren’t allowed to try to make it through the final hoop that semester. Every cult has its own hoop—different shapes, different heights—and each training program is tailored specifically to the cult’s hoop. Sometimes training for one can make it very hard for your muscles to learn to jump through a different one. Some hoops are easier for certain body types.



 



It’s a big deal. At the very end of College there’s always the prestigious Hoops prize which I think is for the senior who has jumped through the most hoops. If you get that you can do whatever you want. Then you definitely don’t have to jump through any more hoops.



 



       I knew pretty early on which cult I wanted to try out for. I went to the Intro Training meeting. I was shaking a little bit when I walked into the culthouse—it felt important and intimidating, like the very wood was charged with gravitas. I looked at all the older affiliates and thought they looked much cooler than me. They were sitting around a heavy wooden table, with the Big Kahunas sitting in the middle looking important, looking out at us. All the jumpers were on the floor. All the affiliates spoke with the same cadence. Perhaps they spent so much time around each other that one had adopted another’s distinct manner of speaking in turn until everyone spoke with the same unified nuances. This was true of a lot of the cults: You could tell who was in what by how their voice sounded. All these affiliates made it through the hoop, I thought to myself. This terrified me. I imagined their bodies tensing up with nerves, sprinting and vaulting and *clearing the hoop*, muscles taut. I imagined the smiles on their faces when they stuck the landing. Some of their bodies had since gone to seed. Once you made it through the hoop, I guessed, you didn’t really have to stay in shape. You didn’t have to worry about much at all: In a cult, you had it made. People *respected *you.



 



       At the training meeting, we watched all the old videos, in which famous old affiliates, long graduated, cleared the cult hoop with *style*. I felt my toes pointing in my boots. I was anxious to prove myself. I was on *fire *with it. At the end of the meeting, the Big Kahunas looked at each other and took the big group of us jumpers into a small locked room in the basement of the culthouse. We were all huddled in the doorway—I went up on my tiptoes to see over the group in front of me. And there it was.



 



       “Of course, it will be higher,” said the Big Kahuna. It was old and made of a warm brassy medal and extensively engraved. It was a small hoop—not more than three feet in diameter—but I heard they kept it relatively low down. This was good, because I was not very tall. It seemed like it would weigh a lot and hurt a lot if you messed up your jump and crashed into it. I looked back at the other jumpers. They were all shiny-eyed. Some of them were already in very good hoop-shape. I was going to have to train very hard, but I really wanted it.



 



       I spent long hours doing the calisthenics the cult’s trainer recommended.



 



There are rumors that affiliates lower the hoop for jumpers they like, for jumpers who look like they would belong in the cult. I didn’t know whether to believe them or not, so I tried to dress like the affiliates and try to get the cult trainer to like me, just in case it helps. I got to know some of the other jumpers during our training sessions and we would laugh in hushed voices about the vocal tics of the cult trainer or the Big Kahunas’ pretensions during the Intro Training meeting. I felt connected to these other jumpers.



 



A couple days before the preliminary hoop, I cried over lunch with an older friend who had cleared a number of well-respected hoops. Sometimes around here it feels like everything's about who's jumped through what hoops. I asked why we even needed cults. If there were no cults, I told him, we could just*spend time together *and get to know each other in the normal way and not spend our time sniffing out who was worth knowing based on what cult they were in. He nodded patiently and told me that all of these things had occurred to him when he was a young jumper. This complacency made me terribly angry: Once you were enfranchised, once you were in, there was obviously no motivation to do anything about it. I imagined myself, suddenly, years down the line, a complacent affiliate, watching all these freshmen making the jump they’d trained for months for and missing the hoop and knowing they would spend another semester on the outside. Don’t let me be that person, I told myself. A small voice said, *But if you make it, of course you will be.  *



 



       I made it through the preliminary hoop, which was just like the final one but larger, easier, made of a flimsier and more forgiving material, and kept training hard. I watched my body change. I woke up to aching muscles I didn’t know I had. I dreamed about that final hoop. There it was, dusty, winking at me from the basement of the culthouse.



 



Final hoop day was less of a big deal than I thought it would be: They hauled the thing up into the big main room on the second floor of the culthouse and you waited in line until it was your turn to jump. You made it through or you didn’t, and then you landed.



 



When you're looking at a hoop—even a low hoop, even a hoop that everyone makes it through eventually—you're thinking a couple of thoughts. You're thinking that this hoop is the measure of your worth as an individual. You *know *that this isn’t true—you know that there’s a lot of chance and variables you can’t control that go into whether you make it or not—but you inadvertently can color the result as the ultimate reflection on your innermost self. Do I deserve this, you’re thinking, or you’re not, because you’re focusing too hard on the jump itself.



 



I made it, and I stuck my landing, thank god. The cult trainer and a couple of other affiliates marked notes on clipboards. A Kahuna carefully measured my final distance from the hoop, which was discouragingly small. Other jumpers had jumped further. There was some polite applause, and I was ushered into a room downstairs to wait with the other jumpers who had made it.



 



Because I was a freshman the cult swallowed me pretty cleanly—I didn’t have many strong attachments. After I became an affiliate of my cult, I saw those other jumpers—the ones I’d gotten to know who hadn’t make it—around the College. They didn’t really want to talk to me. It was okay: Suddenly I had a place to go, somewhere I felt a little bit special every time I walked in the door. The culthouse felt like it was a place of magic. It radiated out from the hoop stored in the basement, permeating everything we did and said inside the culthouse. I felt lucky to be a part of all of it.



 



A week or so after I made it through the hoop, a Big Kahuna mused that he was jealous: He wished he could be a new affiliate again. I stared at him, wide-eyed, and asked why he’d ever want that. Big Kahuna smiled and said that as a new affiliate, everything felt so magical and shiny and new. Over time, he said, with more responsibility, the magic wears out. I have a song for you, he said, and hooked up his phone to the speakers to play a song which repeated a single lyric to an infuriating beat. “You can normalize,” a voice said over the sound system, “Don’t it make you feel alive?”



 



I thought about that glowing hoop in the basement. I couldn’t imagine normalizing any of this.  We have this notion that we can reach out and grab the self-assurance of affiliation and hold onto it forever. Really we can only take validation in doses. The feeling always fades, and then you need a little more. You find yourself another hoop, but there are always diminishing returns: Suddenly the same dosage won’t do it for you anymore. It’s like when you get stronger and suddenly the ten pound weight doesn’t make your muscles burn. You get something heavier. It seemed like if you wanted to feel like a real part of the cult, you had to be a Kahuna.



 



Becoming a Kahuna meant another jump—this time through the separate intracult hoop, which was a different deal entirely. This one was very large but was some kind of a polygon, a scalene triangle, they said, so it would be easy to guess the angle wrong and get stuck. The Kahuna hoop was set out annually and the jump was set to happen about a month after I became an affiliate. Luckily for new affiliates they kept the hoop pretty low. (It was higher, of course, if you wanted to be a Bigger Kahuna). I was still in good jumping shape and made it right through.



 



As a little Kahuna, I had new responsibilities.



 



I could play my own music over the speakers in the culthouse. Suddenly I couldn’t hear the different cadence in the voices of the Big Kahunas and couldn’t tell if I’d adopted it or not—it just felt normal. At first, cult-ural acclimation is confusing and weird and stilted, and then it’s natural, and then it’s just like breathing, and then you can’t imagine *not *doing those things. You can’t remember a time when you didn’t know to play this song or drink that drink. I *was *starting to normalize. There is something really satisfying about feeling like a part of a place just by knowing its little customs.



 



But that humming golden hoop in the basement just felt like an old hump of metal. For so long I had felt I was catching a glimpse of something furtive and beautiful that belonged to all of us, partaking in a set of customs and aesthetics decided by a Big Kahuna long ago. Now, another little Kahuna and I would play a certain song and then someone would ask for that same song a couple days later. We could do things that had never been done before, and affiliates might like them, affiliates might do them with us.



 



This was exciting, but it was also hard to be in awe of something we were making. I wanted that reverie back.



 



Suddenly I was on the other side of the Intro Training meeting. I was very conscious of this reversal, but it didn’t really feel like a big deal. It felt hollower from the other side: The affiliates at the table were all familiar faces. I wondered if we seemed intimidating and cool to the jumpers. I couldn’t imagine we did. We were just goons.



 



I was put in charge of training a couple of jumpers that Spring. I turned to older affiliates for training programs and held as many extra practice sessions as my jumpers wanted. I cared about them. Not one of my jumpers made it.



 



And then there are the would-be affiliates who were told from a young age that hoop-jumping isn't for them. Their bodies weren't built to jump through hoops, affiliates used to think. Moreover, maybe the hoops weren't made to allow their bodies through. This is a complicated problem which can't always be solved by changing the shape of the hoop (the shape of each cult's hoop is sacred, so sacred). From the inside, I badly wanted to believe that mystique and inclusivity were not mutually exclusive.



 



At the College, the absence of a cult can feel like a deep insecurity that leaves you open to a kind of death: the death of being just like everyone else. Or at the very least, it’s like being the only vegetarian at a BBQ restaurant or the non-smoker on the smoke break, except instead of cigarettes we’re talking about achievement-crack. I admire these people who do the College without it.



 



Sometimes I worry that one day I will be old with all of the spoils of my hoop-jumping career sitting around me and wish I had spent my life on something other than the stupid sport. I consider the arthritis some long-term hoop-jumpers get from the repeated exertion. I’ve already had one bout of this arthritis.



 



But the spoils can be sweet: the feeling of communal self-worth; a kind of special inclusion in something magical and secret; a humbling sense of one’s own privilege to be a part of the group. I think some of it also really does come from all those good things we talk about in our pre-jump speeches: from having a community in which to invest your energies, a thing you have come to care about altruistically, for its own sake. The big old world, from inside of a cult, was whittled to a manageable size.



 



I don’t think they’re mutually exclusive—the community-mindedness and the validation —but I worry that the latter is addictive.



 



I decide to go for a bigger hoop. A lot of people expect that I’ll have no trouble making it through—I’ve never missed, have I? I’ve done a lot for the cult and the Big Kahunas will recognize that and put the hoop lower.



 



I don't make it through the hoop. A tie on my jacket gets caught on one of the odd polygon’s corners and I hang there, half in half out, for much too long before they figure out how to get me down.



 



       People normally don't get stuck. When they take me down, everyone’s sympathetic. It’s okay, they tell me. We’re still your family.



 



The other little Kahuna makes it through and becomes a Big Kahuna. I feel a little bit left behind, and then again, I’m happy for him. I’m happy for the cult; I know he’ll do great things as a Big Kahuna. But I’m sad that I won’t get to do them with him. I didn’t know how to look at this: The cult was in great hands, but those hands weren’t my hands. It didn’t need me.



 



These things are really fucking messy psychological experiences. They never sound good politically: In this article, I inevitably come across as overly ambitious or a traitor to my cult or allegiant to a problematic power structure. We talk about all this in such sanitized terms: Are cults objectively *good*, or objectively *bad*, for the College community as a whole? I think the real answer is much more nuanced—the structure as it is has oscillated between giving me a home and a sense of magic and breaking hearts (mine, others’). My time as a jumper and then as an affiliate and then as a Kahuna—an absurd trajectory which is completely illegible outside of the College—has given some meaning to my subjective and individual experience. I think there are conversations about these groups that aren’t making it into the discourse (the politically-incorrect, subjective, biased experiences of people inside and out, which get sterilized into strong political statements). I think we too often conflate ambivalent subjectivity with emptiness, uselessness.



 



Let’s end with a tally. I have gratitude for the strength I gained from jumps, successful and not, and gratitude for the family the hoop gave me. I worry about the way that love for the sport itself can tear this family apart. I worry about cult-ures of exclusivity and the lines (perhaps arbitrary) they draw between the inside and the outside. We dance across these lines (which make all of us uncomfortable, inside or out) with buzzwords like “inclusivity” and scathing op-eds and small acts of kindness toward our hoop-trainees. I think there are fulfilling ways to be in and around this cult-ure without hoop addiction. I am still trying to find them.

Lucy hasn’t been able to get even a word in with her boyfriend Tom and she’s just about had enough, though of course the birthday boy was always going to be the center of attention, birthday aside, what with the moody indigo blazer and the black button down and bolo tie and the fake golden crown to which he’s glued a plastic eyeball where the center jewel ought to be, with his charismatic conversational virtuosity and his sizable mental library of anecdotes and his appetite for attention. Here’s a little bit about Lucy: Lucy’s got those big eyes that turn heads and inspire double-takes, eyes complexly hazel with droplets of jealous green and melancholic blue mixed in those oceanic irides; her aesthetic can best be described as carefully careless, though tonight she’s paid particular attention to the first part, strutting her stuff in her tea-length shimmering dress with a pattern like the night sky and her bold eyeliner decisions; she’s exceptionally pretty but doesn’t feel that way about herself, and because of this she’s got a complicated relationship with compliments and mirrors, to give you a sense of the girl.