Mememaw & I

 Or—Big Boy, Big Problems: “This might be normal in your family, but it’s not right.”

Actual content aside, “Hillbilly Elegy” is a hell of a title, and I’ve had it stuck in my head ever since I first heard it. (The subtitle, “A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis,” is pure, dry, unwieldy conservative-speak, and I’m going to pretend it doesn’t exist.) You’ve got the unlikely pairing of “hillbilly” with the big-boy poetic noun “elegy”; the rhyme, I honestly could do without (it tickles my brain in an annoying way), but the consonance with the “L” sound is a real treat for how… atypical it is. I find it quite the evocative title overall and think that it’s unfortunate it sits atop THIS: alleged couch-humper, soon-to-be Vice President, and confirmed Online weirdo JD Vance’s 2016 memoir, which I will almost certainly never read, and Ron Howard’s 2020 film adaptation, which I only finally watched this past summer out of morbid curiosity.

The word that now comes to mind, re. that movie, is “pornographic.” For one thing, I think Vance’s memoir could be called masturbatory. For another, this feels like it’s constructed to provide some sense of cathartic release for specific groups of people—almost certainly well-bred conservatives, whose contempt for their own constituents (see their political aims, which uniformly favor the rich and powerful) is justified by the desperate ignorance and incompetence showcased here, but also, probably, liberals, whose own preconceptions about the poor old hillfolk get confirmed as well. You can easily imagine the sympathetic chatter at the black-tie Raytheon-sponsored fundraiser. Just like adult films stereotypically deal in paper-thin character concepts that serve a stock function for pleasurous purposes (The Pizza Guy, The Step-Sister, The Babysitter), here you have the same sort of thing with The Wise Grandma, The Burnout Teens, The Irrepressible Junkie Mother, and so on. Except, like, with tears as the fluid of note.

There’s a line in the movie that made it into the trailer in a really prominent sort of way (once the music swells and we’re being shown all this footage that’s supposed to make our spirits soar on wings of feeling), where the grandmother says “Everyone in this world is one of three kinds: good Terminator, a bad Terminator, and neutral,” and it’s another one of those… artistic choices that agitates my brain. I get that the intent is for it to be the wisdom equivalent of drinking at least two non-diet Cokes per day while watching what has been called “the idiot box,” and maybe it’s even meant to be a little awkward (a little… under-educated) and like something a high-schooler would write down as meaningful; however, I just don’t think it sounds good, even assuming that intent. The “and neutral” deflates the whole thing with its awkward difference and lack of pizzazz. It should have just been “Good Terminator, and Bad Terminator,” is my opinion, and also that it’s like the whole movie in microcosm: just a weird misfire and awkwardly constructed. After the great title, this is the other bit of Hillbilly Elegy that’s stuck with me the past several years. Stuck in my mental craw, more like.

Clearly there’s supposed to be a lot of pathos in all this. Ron Howard doesn’t strike me as someone who’d intentionally approach this particular story entirely as a comedy, but I spent a lot of the movie’s runtime laughing at it because it is so absurd. There’s stuff that’s obviously meant as a joke, but there are a lot of things that seem to function that way unintentionally—like the scene where young Vance’s mom comes in requesting his pee for a drug test since she’s using again, and then they start fighting, and then grandma busts in demanding to know what’s going on, and then Vance angrily explains the situation and ends up storming out to go repeatedly throw a basketball against the side of the house, and then his “Mamaw” comes out and gives him what amounts to a passionate speech about the importance of appeasement, and then she holds out the pee cup for him to take and go fill (and then we watch him go and fill it for some reason)…

If you can imagine some sort of familial ignominy that’ll result in people screaming obscenities and smacking each other, it’s probably here. Or, that’s how it feels, at any rate. Absolutely none of this is actually funny in real-world terms (it’s abuse, after all), but here it’s just like… Jerry Springer. Again, I keep thinking lewd, rude, and bereft of value beyond the basest feelings of enjoyment. What moments of more genuine investment it cultivates are cheapened by the tactless intensity of the whole. It’s so consistently gross and over-the-top in its depictions of poverty and domestic strife—see the mom, Bev, being entertained by the couple next door having their own row at one point, without an ounce of self-awareness on the part of either her or the film—that it just can’t be read as anything other than disgusting comedy. It might be camp, it’s such a critical misfire tonally. I genuinely do not think this impression is a result of the additional knowledge that this is supposed to be the highly affecting origin story of one JD Vance and, instead, that Hillbilly Elegy is just incompetently dramatic.

It feels like people are screaming at each other in every scene, and you eventually hit a point of diminishing returns with that sort of heightened emotion, where it stops being traumatizing and just becomes whacky. Never mind that the story is full of stereotypes and predictable dramatic beats, which also make it harder to take seriously. It puts me in mind of the fake “Oscar Gold” film from the adult animated sitcom American Dad (quick warning for an ableist slur in the fake trailer)—In the episode “Tearjerker” (2008), the titular villain schemes to create a movie so award-winningly sad that it will kill people, with the very intentional joke being that the film in question is nothing but outrageous dramatic clichés piled on top of one another to the point that it wouldn’t actually win awards or make someone cry. Part of what makes the premise so funny, however, is the underlying logic that real hacks and audiences could very well agree with—that more sad stuff equals bigger feels, and what’s “bad” about that? It’s a great bit for a comedy but a bad fit for what is supposed to be a (real) serious, straightforward film.

This sort of overly saccharine construction ultimately works in the favor of a rural horror-comedy pastiche like Ti West’s Pearl (2022), with any more genuine-feeling dramatic moments subsumed into the exploitative, leering whole, but Hillbilly Elegy is much grosser and less… convincing to me due to its ostensible goal of, overall, being some kind of sympathetic, meaningful depiction of real life. Its seemingly, uncritically sentimental (even romantic) conception of the story being told renders it unable to present the absurd comedy of the situations, performances, and writing in a way that resonates if you’re able to parse tone at all. The exploitation eats the film from the inside out, leaving behind a shell of meaning and “representation” incapable of being Of Note. I strongly feel that I could have written more or less this exact story without any direct personal experience with this level of poverty or addiction, just based on stereotypes and hearsay. To me, it reads as inelegant fantasy and as sociologically worthless. As only an off-putting comedy (as a spiritual sibling in derangement to Howard’s 2000 How the Grinch Stole Christmas), it has its merits! It is highly quotable in your most offensive approximation of an American hillbilly accent.

The messaging of Hillbilly Elegy is ultimately as rote and gross as its plot and characters—It’s all individual responsibility, with a bit of family worship thrown in. It’s the American mindset (conservative and liberal) exemplified. There’s all this emphasis on personal strength and overcoming hardship. It literally begins with a preacher on the radio doing that Christian thing of using God/faith and those long-term promises to help bear up under an “American Dream” deferred. In other words, the usual supernatural “Maybe He will and maybe He won’t” excuses for systemic failures that I’ve heard myself since childhood. Movie Vance’s whole character arc weirdly pivots on him learning to put family first sometimes but also to advance his personal goals. This conflicting messaging is established early on with a bullying incident at the “swim hole,” where Narrator Vance shares some old family wisdom about not starting fights but finishing them if they do start… unless you can’t finish them, in which case your family will finish them for you.

It’s a strange tension, between needing to man up and do it yourself but also making sure you have that strong family there to back you up. In the end, Vance has to embrace his mother but also push her away to reap the rewards of his hard work. Of course, within the story, he wouldn’t have had the opportunity without someone (Mamaw) stepping in to berate him into shape, which is a virtue since it happens within the family between individuals but would be a mortal sin, to this worldview, if it took the form of, say, some sort of external social support network. (See also: Mamaw giving a very literal handout to another less-well-off neighbor kid.) The problem isn’t that the healthcare system is a profit-seeking nightmare willing to let you die in the street if you don’t have enough credit cards to charge and/or insurance—No, it’s all about your unwillingness to stop being so got-dang sick!

Movie Vance’s final words to his mother say it all. After spending an entire day, which takes the length of the whole movie in between flashbacks, trying to find a spot for her to recover from her overdose and receive help (and fighting about her not wanting the help, and almost getting knifed while trying to bust in and fight a man who called her a whore…), Vance finally gets her settled at a motel, goes to get some groceries, and then comes back to find her in the bathroom with a needle. Cue the fighting and screaming! After something like a sweet moment—a visual echo of a time when a younger Vance comforted his crying mother in her bedroom—he’s got to go in order to make his big boy job interview, so he tells her that Lindsay, his sister, is coming and that “I really hope you’ll wait for her.” It’s not that working to help yourself and taking help when it’s offered aren't important, even to me, a godless leftist, but you just know that this is meant to be another Individual Responsibility thing. It’s time for his mother to stop being weak and start being strong, like Donald Trump.

The (final) Thing of it all is that there are parts of this story that are recognizable. I actually have a bit of that outrageous drama and dysfunction on at least one side of my own family. It’s not as severe as what’s depicted in Hillbilly Elegy, but it is so ridiculous and seemingly inevitable that it becomes funny in just the same way. The relationship between Fantasy Vance and Mamaw also feels very real to me, in the sense that I’ve taught students a narrative essay in the past, and I eventually stopped teaching it in part because I had to hear so many stories like this one—about kids from “broken homes” who were essentially raised and set straight by grandparents who then died. Whatever the exact ratio of truth to lies in Vance’s story (either version?), I do think there’s probably an element of real feeling in there. The tragedy of JD Vance isn’t what he thinks it is, though: It’s that his rougher experiences, whatever they were, radicalized him in the wrong direction, making him just another Republican dickbag rather than an empathetic person, like I am. So fuck ‘em! Hasta la vista, baby!