Why Everyone Hates Hillbilly Elegy

Glenn Close and Amy Adams in Hillbilly Elegy [Netflix] — Glenn Close and Amy Adams in *Hillbilly Elegy* [Netflix]

Appalachian-born journalist Sarah Jones recently wrote about watching the new Netflix film Hillbilly Elegy. Five minutes into watching, says Jones, “I hit pause and walked out of my living room. In the relative safety of my bedroom, I stared at the wall and then at the ceiling; both suddenly appeared preferable to my television.”

Jones’ distaste was widely echoed by critics. The New York Times’ film critic A.O. Scott called the Ron Howard–directed film a “strange stew of melodrama, didacticism and inadvertent camp.” The series currently has just a 26 percent rating on the reviews aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes.

Hillbilly Elegy is an adaptation of a memoir by J.D. Vance, a Yale-educated venture capitalist raised in Ohio. Vance’s family is originally from Kentucky, and in the book, he connects the cycles of violence and substance abuse that plagued his relatives to what he considers to be their Appalachian values. Vance attributes his own success to rejecting “hillbilly culture” in favor of hard work, self-sufficiency and other well-worn clichés of American bootstrapism. The book Hillbilly Elegy took off in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s victory, becoming as Jake Coyle of AP writes “an election-year explainer to liberal America about the white underclass that fueled Donald Trump’s rise.”

Writers from Appalachia pushed back against the narratives put forward by Vance in Hillbilly Elegy at the time. Writing for LitHub, Elizabeth Catte asked why Appalachia, and not many other regions that went for Trump, got so much attention: “in prestigious publications and on popular websites…Appalachia ceased to be part of America but a destructive force unto its own—no longer a place but a problem now singularly responsible for the most distressing problem of all: a Trump presidency.”

Hillbilly Elegy’s ability to lay the blame for Donald Trump at the door of poor Americans (not the wealthy white people who also voted for him in large numbers) was what proved profitable for Vance and now for Netflix. The consensus among reviewers has been that Hillbilly Elegy is little more than warmed-over detritus from the 2016 post-election news cycle. In other words, like the book, its real purpose is to illuminate Trump’s rise to power by displaying the supposed resentments and misery of a mythologized white working class. The negative reviews of Hillbilly Elegy are not only critiques of the (very bad) film itself, but of the narratives media elites proffered to explain the last U.S. election, ones that tried to blame the poor for their problems, including their biggest one – Trump.

As Sarah Jones, who eventually left her bedroom to finish the film, put it, “Capitalism extracts. It takes timber from the forests, coal from the mountains, and labor from the people. The hillbilly is just another resource to exploit.”