Hillbilly Elegy, a review
I sort of hate it when movies, books, media reduce complex issues down into easily digested bites. That’s the trouble with Hillbilly Elegy, the movie now playing on Netflix: distilled into the Hatfield and McCoys. In fact that piece of mountain myth is referenced in the first 15 minutes of the film. My book Cloud of Witnesses and Hillbilly Elegy by JD Vance follow the same character arc—sort of. Hillbilly Elegy came out in an election year, 2016, and talk shows turned to it as a way to understand how Trump became President. I’m still not sure how that happened or why still 74 million people voted for him this time. Vance’s memoir served as an in-road to understand people who live paycheck to paycheck in forgotten, dried up manufacturing towns. I guess. I was simply irritated by the book. Because no one story tells the whole story. But from Elegy people (media, Ron Howard) derive memes. The truth depicted just as in Cloud of Witnesses is that Appalachia births resilient peop...