“Hillbilly Elegy” (2020) and the Problem of Profoundness

Critics’ dislike of the film stems, largely, from both backlash to the book and their own lofty expectations.

It’s no secret that I hated the book Hillbilly Elegy. It wasn’t that I disagreed with some of Vance’s conclusions, because I too have come to believe that some (but not all) of the problems afflicting Appalachia are the result of a culture of stubbornness and refusal to change even in one’s best interest. No, in large part I hated it because Vance fancied himself a political commentator and so mistakenly took his own life story and used it to forward all sorts of bogus claims about the nature of poverty in America.

Given how much praise was lavished on the book by the intelligentsia, it was probably inevitable that the film would fail to live up to most people’s expectations. As of this writing, it’s currently sitting at a 25% on Rotten Tomatoes, though it’s worth pointing out that the audience score is a significantly higher 81%. However, I have to wonder whether the backlash to the film is in some ways a corrective to the fawning and lavish praise that the book received when it came out in 2016, when I was widely hailed as some sort of mystical and revelatory Rosetta Stone that could provide coastal elites and intellectuals some means of…