An apology. It seems that I played a significant part in the probable ascension of JD Vance to the vice-presidency of the United States.
Born poor in the southern reaches of Ohio, Vance worked his way through the military and on to a law degree at Yale University. Fame came in 2016 – the year of Donald Trump’s election – with his publication of Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis.
To this point Vance was, to put it delicately, agnostic on the incoming president. He vacillated between “thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad ... or that he’s America’s Hitler”. Full conversion to the Maga cause seems to have come with the release of Ron Howard’s take on Hillbilly Elegy for Netflix in 2020.
“It was not just critically panned but greeted with intense online mockery,” as the Washington Post noted. True enough. Glenn Close received an Oscar nomination for her broad-as-the-Atlantic portrayal of Vance’s “Mamaw”, but the reviews could scarcely have been more savage. “According to Vance’s best friend from Yale, Jamil Jivani, the wounding commentary was the ‘last straw’ in his falling-out with elites,” the Post piece continued.
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Look at me. I’m an elite. Glancing back through the archives, I find I was indeed at home to “intense online mockery” in my review. The opening paragraph comprised a parody of the theme song to The Beverly Hillbillies that greatly amused all readers over the age of 90. “Come and listen to my story about a man named Ron...” and so on. “Hillbilly Elegy is the Hustler, the Penthouse, the Razzle of poverty porn,” I added.
My point, made facetiously, was that Howard’s film (whatever about the book, which I haven’t read) was patronising to the very community Vance sought to elevate. Hillbilly Elegy certainly touches sympathetically on the desperation among rural communities – Vance’s mother was a drug addict and his grandfather was an alcoholic – but does so in the least subtle manner imaginable.
At any rate, a Damascene conversion took place that set Vance on the path to Trump’s announcement this week that the US senator for Ohio will be his running mate for November’s presidential election. “It’s not whether a woman should be forced to bring a child to term, it’s whether a child should be allowed to live,” Vance said when asked about exceptions to abortion bans for rape or incest. “These people are political prisoners, and their captivity is an assault on democracy,” he said of those imprisoned for the attack on the United States Capitol on January 6th, 2021. “I’m sceptical of the idea that climate change is caused purely by man,” he pondered. Just this month Vance joked (I think) about the UK becoming an “Islamist country” after the election of Labour.
Elsewhere, he has taken to self-flagellation when considering his own “Scots-Irish” background. “We do not like outsiders or people who are different from us, whether the difference lies in how they look, how they act, or, most important, how they talk,” he said of those descended from Protestants who left Scotland at the time of the Ulster plantation. Hang on there, wee man. That’s my people you’re talking about. We’re as tolerant as any other huge-headed community, and I’ll give anyone a slap who says different.
Where was I? Oh, yeah. So, JD Vance seems like a rum character. And the fallout from the reviews of Hillbilly Elegy – if accurately reported – call up disputed stories about Barack Obama roasting Trump at the White House correspondents’ dinner in early 2016. “That evening of public abasement, rather than sending Mr Trump away, accelerated his ferocious efforts to gain stature in the political world,” the New York Times argued. (Trump claims he had a great time.)
Along the way, the yarn positions Hillbilly Elegy as one of the few motion pictures to have altered history. This is not something I anticipated when I was reworking the Beverly Hillbillies song. At the very least Vance becomes an unsuccessful VP candidate, having ascended to be the orange Mikado’s right hand man. After that, who knows? As we have recently observed, Trump’s powers of survival are prodigious, but actuarial science tells us Vance has a decent chance of attaining the Oval Office before 2028.
Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver accidentally inspired an assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan. The Birth of a Nation revitalised the Ku Klux Klan. Less terrifyingly, in the 1960s, Ken Loach’s Cathy Come Home triggered a rethink on homelessness in the UK. Sometimes the film has the effect the director intended. Oliver Stone’s silly JFK really did inspire a generation of conspiracy fantasists. Hillbilly Elegy looks to be in a different category: a minor work that stumbled its way towards unexpected influence.
Y’all come back now, ya hear?
