My Take | J.D. Vance’s make-believe politics almost as bad as Donald Trump’s
- I read the Republican vice-presidential nominee’s memoir ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ and watched the movie based on it so you don’t have to
It’s apparently a truism in Hollywood that you can make good movies out of mediocre books but never good movies out of great books. It is, however, more often the case that people end up making mediocre movies from mediocre books. That’s certainly the case with Donald Trump’s running mate J.D. Vance’s 2016 bestselling autobiography Hillbilly Elegy and the movie based on it.
Though with two Hollywood greats Amy Adams and Glenn Close, their talents were wasted in the melodrama. Vance himself was an executive producer of the 2020 film.
However, the movie’s message is actually the one that Vance the political pretender would now want his supporters and voters to get, rather than the one that was delivered in his book.
Why? The discrepancy has everything to do with his chameleon-like transformation from calling Trump “America’s Hitler” to being his running mate for vice-president. What people wouldn’t do for power and wealth!
Perhaps that’s the true meaning of Vance’s “rags to riches” story or what he considers “pulling yourself up by the bootstraps”, something Vance accuses his fellow Appalachians for failing to do for themselves, hence their abject generational poverty, drug abuse, domestic violence and crime in which the backwater, socially broken region is mired.
Strictly speaking, Appalachia runs from north to south in the eastern United States and covers multiple states, not all of them poor.