NETFLIX’S HILLBILLY ELEGY IS A FLOP. THE BOOK IS WHY.

In 2018, I attended a conference held by the Society for the Study of Southern Literature in Austin, Texas. It was my last semester of graduate school at the University of Louisville, and I’d been invited to participate in a panel on speculative fiction coming out of the South. The second-most memorable thing for me was how, in an imposter-syndrome-fueled nervousness, I visibly perspired through the neckline of my turtleneck while presenting a paper I’d prepared.

The most memorable thing for me, though, was how many people talked about the specter of JD Vance’s damaging Hillbilly Elegy. Panel after panel criticized, focused on, or discussed peripherally some characteristics of the memoir that had gripped the United States, especially in the wake of Donald Trump’s victory in 2016. It made sense, too. The text was viewed in popular media as a means of understanding the group of people they claimed pushed Trump to the presidency. 

Scholars at the conference criticized the text for characterizing people from Appalachia as deserving of their poverty, of their disenfranchisement. The common consensus there, even two years after the book had been published, was that it dangerously cast the people of the region as having control in – and actively choosing – their own marginalization. 

I left the conference both embarrassed that I’d gotten publicly sweaty and confused why Hillbilly Elegy continued to be celebrated – so much so that Ron Howard had signed on to direct its film adaptation.

Cassie Chambers Armstrong

Fast forward two years, and the overall view of the memoir has changed. More intellectually honest and responsible work has come out of Appalachia in the time that’s passed and Vance’s memoir simply doesn’t have the same gravitas as it did upon its original publication.

One example of important re-evaluative work coming out of Appalachia is Cassie Chambers Armstrong’s Hill Women, which I discovered this past Summer. The book reads as a faux-response to Vance’s polemic against the region: coming from Berea and growing up in Owsley County, she understands that poverty has largely been a policy problem, and that the people struggling in this region deserve community-level support rather than nationwide castigation.

The Wisdom in The Hills

Cassie Chambers Armstrong’s Hill Women applies both a reflective and ethnographic approach to her experience growing up in, leaving and returning to Eastern Kentucky. The narrative ultimately relies on Armstrong’s careful, nuanced characterizations of her family coupled with evidence-based analysis of her community.

In one of the ways she directly responds to Vance’s admittedly superficial understanding of the region, she focuses on the destructive nature of the term “hillbilly” when used pejoratively. 

“I hadn’t realized the way the rest of the world used that label as a brand. As a way to mark the inferiority of the people who live in the hills. As shorthand for all of the negative things the outside world thought about us: ignorant, lazy, unsophisticated.”

She gives more context to the psychological consequences “from the stereotype that mountain people are nothing but lazy hillbillies.” She suggests that the constant haranguing of the people and the region takes a toll: “This stereotype makes us feel ashamed: ashamed of our roots and our culture; ashamed that what we've contributed maybe hasn’t been valuable enough.”

Since Hillbilly Elegy’s publication in 2016, it’s received extensive cultural, historical, and social criticism across an array of Appalachian communities. Elizabeth Catte, an East Tennessee native, Appalachian historian and editor for West Virginia University Press, published What You Are Getting Wrong about Appalachia in 2018 to respond to Vance’s obtuse and even dangerous characterizations. 

While her work centers on Appalachia, she also works to decenter a lot of the problems that cloud Appalachia’s reputation. “There’s not a single social problem in Appalachia, however, that can’t be found elsewhere in our country,” she writes. “If you’re looking for racism, religious fundamentalism, homophobia, addiction, unchecked capitalism, poverty, misogyny, and environmental destruction, we can deliver in spades.”

These social problems can certainly be found in the South and in Kentucky. They can also be located in California, in Washington and in Maine. The point of this thread is to prove that even though much of the country shares these social problems, Appalachia, especially in the wake of 2016, has been viewed as the locus for reactionary politics.

One of the hallmark traits of Cassie Chambers Armstrong’s work is to destabilize that myth. She writes that “It’s not as if Appalachians are so unsophisticated and irrational that they are incapable of making good choices. People in the mountains have agency, and they use it.” And since Hillbilly Elegy hit the shelves in 2016, many from the region have chosen to use their voices to change the narrative.

Why the Film Fails

The film, released this month, has come at a politically fraught moment resembling the 2016 election. But after four years of a Trump presidency and with ample time for more critical approaches to the source text, the film adaptation for Hillbilly Elegy has widely been negatively received. It’s a surprising turn from a film that should generate Academy Award attention, even more so because of the talent associated with the project. 

Photo courtesy of Cassie Chambers Armstrong

To get a better idea of this disconnect, I talked with Professor Amy Clukey from the University of Louisville. She told me “that during Trump’s administration over the past four years, there’s been a really good challenging of that ‘Trump Country’ narrative” established by Elizabeth Catte. Popular in the lead up to the presidential election of 2016, several major news platforms featured coverage on Appalachia as being responsible for the nation’s divisive, crass political environment. “Trump Country,” for Catte, is the genre of writing from major media outlets that painstakingly paints Appalachia as a backwards, homogenous region where people outwardly vote against their own interests.

To release the film adaptation right after the 2020 presidential election has confused major film critics, who seem to have caught on that “Trump Country” isn’t exclusive to Appalachia. According to the LA Times’ critic Justin Chang, “The timing is interesting, to say the least: Movies seeking cultural cachet and industry hardware are not exactly rare at this time of year, but few of them are so calculated to exploit the political turmoil of the moment.”

Responding to cultural shifts and a new understanding of the region, noticeably absent from the film are the “‘welfare queens’ who have cellphones but no jobs, and who have responded to their adverse circumstances by cultivating a ‘learned helplessness.’” Put differently, these tenets put out by Vance weren’t scrutinized as heavily as they are now.

On this four-year shift, Amy Clukey told me that “the movie would have been massively popular 3 and a half years ago. But now? It’s not because basically the people most harmed by that narrative have fought back.”

Shifting the Narrative

JD Vance’s 2016 assessment of Appalachia did not come from an uncommon or unique thread. From the start, really, people have gotten both the place and the people wrong, projecting tired assumptions and stereotypes for the past 200-plus years.

What’s also becoming more commonplace is the way people connected with the region are working to dismantle its prevailingly negative reputational traits. Again, Cassie Chambers Armstrong in Hill Women offers that “There is hope in the spirit of a people who find creative ways to exist in a community that has been systemically marginalized.”

“That’s not to say that we shouldn’t provide opportunities for those who wish to go elsewhere to do so — we should ensure that those in the mountains have the same mobility as those anywhere else. But we should also invest the resources to make sure that those who wish to stay can live meaningful, productive lives. Young people are the biggest export of the mountains. Many leave not because they want to, but because there are no opportunities in the communities they grew up in.”

And it’s in this solution that both Armstrong and Elizabeth Catte share a common vision for the future of intellectually honest representations of Appalachia. Catte writes that, for the region, “what we need is solidarity, real and true, which comes from understanding that the harm done to me is connected to the harm done to you.” Indeed, Catte’s historical and cultural work continues to push back against the prejudices that dominate the narrative surrounding the people of Appalachia. Armstrong has committed to this work first as a lawyer and second as a recently elected metro council representative.

Armstrong didn’t write Hill Women purely or exclusively to rebut the problematic characterizations contained in Hillbilly Elegy. Instead, the text functions to add more dimension to the region.

“I hope they have shown people the surprising nuances of the region and its problems, so often reduced to a singular stereotype,” she writes. “I hope they have made voices from the mountains ring louder and helped people see the potential that exists here.”