Every freeper should read the book and watch the movie as a matter of basic situational awareness. Otherwise you are going to spend the next several months watching a lot of stuff going over your head.
The book was excellent, and the left hated it because the left hates truth. The movement of Appalachian whites — largely Scots-Irish with a residual hillbilly culture around the edges — into lowland city jobs, largely in the industrial midwest and upper South, is an interesting story. It bears some important similarities the first and second great migrations of rural black people from the deep south to northern factory jobs after WWI and WWII. The cultural backgrounds of these two populations were quite different, but both involved the transplantation of southern rural subcultures into northern urban settings.
These great internal migrations were reasonably successful as long as the factories were booming. But then began the great hollowing out of American manufacturing and the emergence of the rustbelt. Healthy working class communities got hammered — white as well as black and including the ethnic Irish, Polish, Italian, and other European immigrant communities as well as the internal migration from the south. What happened when the factories closed? Some adapted well, some didn’t, and some of the ancestral cultural patterns turned out to be maladaptive in the new, education based technocratic economy. That’s the story JD Vance set out to tell, which is why his book was entitled Hillbilly Elegy, not My Family Story.
It is a very good autobiography from a young man, in stark contrast to Barack Obama’s contribution to the genre, which was an orgy of gazing into the mirror to worship himself. Vance actually had insightful and intelligent things to say.
The left hated the book because Vance violated the dogma of the victimhood fetish. The sociological and economic shifts underlying the collapse of these working class communities are acknowledged and explored, but Vance’s story is one of triumphing against those odds. His family background? Two generations of alcoholism and drug abuse, with grandparents and parents who had been hard workers and good people but had been crushed by adversity and self-medicated into trouble. Vance himself skirted with bad companions and potentially serious trouble as a teenager, but he credits timely intervention by some pretty tough mentors for straightening him out. He joined the Marines, went to college, and then off to Yale Law School. In the movie, I thought his sister emerged as the most sympathetic character in the story. She was a bit older and knew a bit more than did JD about the demons lurking around the family dinner table. She resolved to get out as soon as she could. She found a good young man in high school and committed to him, and he stuck with her. She married right out of high school, they both went to work, they built a family, and the movies shows them living in reasonable small town, middle class comfort. I hope they’re still doing well.
The underlying message is that even poor people have moral agency and are responsible for their choices. Living clean and working hard pay off. Good choices, good companions and good character pay off. Being poor isn’t an excuse; it just means that wealth doesn’t give you a get out of jail card and buy you second, third and fourth chances. Straighten up, fly right, and be grateful to the people who are willing to help.
The left hates this message with a passion. Because the left is evil. And because conservatives embraced it as a truth message that the struggling American underclass needs to hear.
Read the book.
You should see the movie as a matter of situational awareness. I suspect Ron Howard was trying to dodge the political stuff, as the book had created a firestorm among the devotees of the Victimhood Cult on the left. Howard chose to focus on the substance abuse and family trauma issues, which are real and important, but this resulted in an oversimplification of a very sophisticated book. I suspect Ron Howard also got caught up in trying to produce an Oscar bait film for Amy Adams and Glenn Close, but that’s another story. (Somebody give those ladies an Oscar already!!! They’ve both earned it several times over, and they will both get a lifetime achievement Oscar if the Academy doesn’t do the right thing now.) The movie is not as good as the book, but put your big boy pants on, invest two hours, and watch it so you can call out the nonstop lying that the left will be doing about it for the duration of the campaign. At the risk of spoilers ... well, ok, no spoilers, but grandma, grandpa and mom are the grandparents and parents from hell. They might have all have been fine, in a robust working class way, if the rustbelt thing hadn’t crushed the family economically, whereupon grandpa let alcohol take over. As JD was growing up, his grandparents, now elderly, seemed fine. He liked and respected them but harbored a furious resentment towards his mother. In the film’s biggest reveal, his older sister finally sets him straight. She was old enough to understand some of what their mother’s life had been like, and she tells JD to feel sorry for their mom, not himself.
I would show this movie in every inner city school in America, just to show the at-risk black and hispanic kids that white people do dysfunction better than they do.
I’d show them Winter’s Bone as well, and for some of the same reasons. Whatever you think of Jennifer Lawrence now, watch Winter’s Bone.
Your usual excellent synopsis!
Thank you for your excellent commentary on Vance’s book “hillbilly elegy“. Iyou
have expressed what I think about the book so much better than I can. I read the book several years ago with a group that included some liberals. Everyone liked it back then. It would be interesting to know what they would say now.
Another book that every American middle school child should read is Ben Carson‘s “Gifted Hands”. It is inspirational and so much better than the movie. The movie is hardly worth a look. Carson, unlike Vance, had a very good mother, though she was poor and illiterate. She was hard-working and guided her boys to become upstanding adults.
A better book on the Appalachian migration is “Born Fighting” by Jim Webb.
Watching it this weekend.
Thank You