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This article was published on November 18, 2020.
Were recirculating it with the news thatDonald Trump has picked J.D.
Vanceas his running mate.
Five minutes intoHillbilly Elegy, I hit pause and walked out of my living room.
It tells us early how it intends to go about things.
The camera pans out to show broken-down houses and rusted-out trucks in what is supposed to be Eastern Kentucky.
This is a holler, according to director Ron Howard, and nothing good could happen next.
But Im not a coward.
I returned to the movie.
Where was the holler aunt?
What distinguishes her from other varieties of aunt, and how would I recognize her?
Reader, I cannot tell you anything about the holler aunt.
Like the mythical Sasquatch, she eludes me.
My antipathy for its source material J.D.
Vances 2016 memoir of the same name is by now well-established.
In Vances Appalachia, poverty and immorality intertwine.
Vance, meanwhile, is a hero by virtue of his escape.
The deceased do not give elegies for themselves.
Local activists and scholars alike havewrittenbooksin response toElegyand its politics.
Vances invitation to the 2018 Appalachian Studies Association even sparkeda protest.
Everyone knowsDeliverance, with its twisted backwoods rapists.
The subjects of hillbilly movies have served a consistent function over time.
SoElegyisnt meant for the people of Appalachia, or the Ozarks, or the Rust Belt.
No hillbilly film is ever made for the people it depicts.
Viewers want to look at the hillbilly and reassure themselves they arenot that.
After all, theyd vote for Obama a third time if they could.
Located beyond the reach of reason or society, the hillbilly is pure white id.
Hes also a fiction.
In reality, the trappings of civilization do not purify a soul.
A movie about poor people of Appalachian extraction does not have to be a hillbilly film.
Glenn Close plays Mamaw, lurching around in Warby Parker spectacles and oversized T-shirts.
She exists mostly to spout profane homespun wisdom and to rescue Vance from his troubled mother.
Theres three kinds of people, she tells a young Vance.
Good terminator, bad terminator, and neutral.
She speaks portentously of the customs of hill people.
Her childhood abuse perpetrated, sometimes, by Vances beloved Mamaw are presented to give her dimension.
In every other respect, Adams plays a stereotype.
She steals pain pills, then escalates to heroin.
She loses jobs and hits her children.
Thats just how hillbillies are.
And that is a political problem.
The movie sidesteps politics or at least it tries to.
Its not so easy.
Before liberal Hollywood took an interest in Vances tale,Hillbilly Elegyfound its earliest champions on the right.
This was not a coincidence.
Vance merely recycled old party myths about poverty and the hillbilly.
Sold as sociology,Elegypromised explanations for cultural tendenciesof which many readers were only dimly aware.
This matters, because Dreher isnt exactly a Lincoln Project Republican.
Like Thiel, Dreher belongs to a further fringe of the right wing.
Dreher haspraisedand even met with Viktor Orban, president of Hungary, dubbing him a champion for Christians.
Dreher has alsosaidhe is glad that Francisco Franco, the fascist dictator, won the Spanish Civil War.)
Though its not always clear what he means by this.
On labor rights, meanwhile, he is relatively silent.
He has complained about the abortion lobby and has worried frequently and publicly about declining American fertility rates.
But in elevating Vance, however sanitized, Howard also elevates the nativist movement that influences his young hero.
And there are signs, sometimes, that the creators ofElegysuspect they have walked into a trap.
The films worst excesses feel like an attempt at misdirection.
Hes not a guy anyone wants to Google.
But there were Oscars to win, holler aunts to cast.
It takes timber from the forests, coal from the mountains, and labor from the people.
The hillbilly is just another resource to exploit.
