CONTROVERSIAL HILLBILLY ELEGY
Starring Amy Adams + Glenn Close on Netflix
In 2016, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by J.D. Vance was applauded and criticized. Vance, who grew up in the Rust Belt city of Middletown, Ohio, and the Appalachian town of Jackson, Kentucky, tells the story of his family’s struggle with poverty and domestic violence. His mother was a drug addict, first with opioids and then heroin. Vance managed to escape. He joined the Marines and fought in Iraq. He returned and attended Ohio State University and made it to Yale Law School.
Vance’s personal story is also a local story. It’s about generations of families in Appalachia, specifically those in Middletown who get left behind after the industrial jobs disappear. While Vance’s struggles were real, critics feel he took his own experience and assigned it to everyone in the Appalachian region.
Betsy Rader, an Ohio State Democratic Senator running for reelection to represent District 18, wrote an op-ed piece for The Washington Post in 2017. Titled– I was born in poverty in Appalachia. “Hillbilly Elegy” doesn’t speak for me. “Vance’s sweeping stereotypes are shark bait for conservative policymakers. They feed into the mythology that the undeserving poor make bad choices and are to blame for their own poverty, so taxpayer money should not be wasted on programs to help lift people out of poverty.”
Natives of the region questioned Vance’s “hillbilly” identity. It has been noted Vance only spent summers with his grandparents in Appalachia, which critics argue doesn’t give him the right to be the voice of the region. Still, Vance writes in the book, “People talk about hard work all the time in places like Middletown. You can walk through a town where 30 percent of the young men work fewer than twenty hours a week and find not a single person aware of his own laziness.”
The film adaptation of Hillbilly Elegy premieres on Netflix this November. Directed by Ron Howard, it stars Amy Adams as Bev Vance, Glenn Close as Mamaw Vance, and Gabriel Basso as J.D. Vance. The film’s recently released trailer garnered praise for Adams, but social media was quick to react. Some tweets made scorching points, “Amy Adams finally winning her oscar for conservative poverty porn.” Another person tweeted, “I’ve heard there’s a Hillbilly Elegy trailer and it’s a good day to remember that JD Vance is a hedge fund millionaire who has never lived in Appalachia.”
But, Director Ron Howard sees it as “The journey of a young, interesting, intelligent guy who loves his family and his family loves him, but the particulars of the family create some baggage.” While that may be true, will one man’s experience in rural America be a fair and accurate portrayal of the Appalachian people?
Hillbilly Elegy drops on Netflix on November 24th.
