"La Rivista di Engramma (open access)" ISSN 1826-901X

233 | aprile 2026

97888948401

Hillibilly Split

A critical reading of: J.D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy (Netflix, 2020)

Nicole Coffineau

Abstract

Hillbilly Elegy, a dramatic film based upon the 2016 memoir by J.D. Vance, was released by Netflix in 2020. When the book was published, Vance was 32 years old. The book and film give an account of the young politician’s poor, rural background and transplantation into the milieux of the socially and politically powerful, making him worthy, ultimately, of Donald Trump’s white house. The story follows Vance from childhood to Law School across impenetrably superficial settings, demonstrating the potency of the in-born characteristics that distinguish him. While the film’s narrative is, naturally, less robust and detailed than the novel’s, its inconsistent structure as much as its pandering content contribute to a mode of politicization that has underwritten an important strand of recent right-wing strategy. It has been widely commented that Hillbilly Elegy (which) re-appropriates and adapts a form of identity politics for the white working class, and that it played a significant role in attracting these groups to right and extreme-right parties. Indeed, the film tosses around plenty of stereotypes about the white, rural poor in America and traffics in tropes of survival and overcoming in order to cast Vance as a heroic protagonist. This essay will bolster these criticisms by discussing how the sequence and structure of the narrative contribute to what is ultimately a politically effective lack of depth that masks a void in which certain ideologies may be nurtured.

Overall, the presentation of Vance(Charcater)  as intact from the beginning (of?)is belies several storytelling devices that substitute changes in setting and tone for introspection, creating a flimsy outline of the main character’s journey of self-discovery that ultimately does not exist. Inconsistent and reductive portrayals of social and class environments and personal values amount to a confoundingly productive ambiguity, or rather, haziness, creating narrative voids. It is these voids that carry political impact in the real world. In other words, Hillbilly Elegy’s cinematic failures generate discursive openings for the cultivation of certain far-right messaging. Understanding this tactic may help illuminate the American right’s recent success in gaining the support of the working class and the rural poor.

A review in The Guardian, published the day before the film’s release, could manage to be only this laudatory: “This is a well-meant story of someone pulling himself up by his bootstraps, with some help from his grandma. But it feels contrived and self-conscious” (Bradshaw 2020). What this reviewer clocks as self-consciousness is an overabundance of agency on the authorial voice of the film. Although the adult, retrospective voiceover narrating the coming-of-age American boyhood tale is a well-used standard, this voice is generating rather than guiding the viewer’s understanding. At the same time, the extremely superficial mise en scene, including supporting and peripheral characters, functions as a barrier. At many moments, the telling greatly overpowers the showing. And yet, this didacticism is obfuscated by the familiarity of the stereotyped settings and cliché dialogue, which disable critical reflection on the level of the narrative.

In the film, Vance moves across class boundaries, rather than develops or transforms as a person, to become what he is by the end of the film. This is not to say that the main character does not learn lessons on his epic journey from rural poverty to righteous power, but that there is a shiftiness, or a splitting, of focus and perspective, and an inconsistency of imagery of class and social conflict, that create the discursive space into which rhetoric or ideology may be planted. A major device in the story is Yale University. The way Vance presents his admission to Yale as the ultimate accomplishment, and his presence there the ultimate juxtaposition, suggests that these two phenomena legitimize his capacity to speak for the working class. But his relationship to Yale is contradictory and problematic. Vance’s time at Yale serves as the parentheses within which the story of his childhood unfolds. We see him there for the first time just eleven minutes into the running time, and his climactic choice to return occurs one hour and forty-three minutes in, or fourteen minutes before the film’s end. This use of Yale as a framing device for the memoir serves to stabilize the former as the present from which Vance’s diegesis takes place, closing it off from the relative subjectivity of recounted memory.

Within the parentheses of Yale, Vance’s biography is episodically presented in a way that is roughly chronological. A collection of personal memories is cinematically re-enacted and described retrospectively from the narrator’s perspective. This generates a situation in which the viewer must trust the narrator to illuminate the meaning of particular artifacts from the past. The problem, though, is that these artifacts appear as heavily fabricated approximations of stock clichés about rural life, distancing Vance’s authorial voice from reality, while at the same time providing coherence to individual episodes for the viewer. The result is that the viewer is not rendered critical of the narration, but has the space to participate in an undetailed and un-imaginative imaginary, either identifying with Vance’s voice or projecting themselves into the scene. Vance’s deployment of relatable hillbilly clichés glosses over contradictory images of him as both regular folk and superhuman exception. The question of his perceived reliability as a narrator is important for understanding this slippage as a tactic to politicize viewers.

In a study opposing memory and history, Pierre Nora argues that during the mid-nineteenth century, the concept of “real memory”—what he calls embodied “life […] social and unviolated […] taking refuge in gestures and habits, in skills passed down by unbroken traditions, in the body’s inherent self-knowledge, in unstudied reflexes”—was usurped by the archival impulse. While it might be a stretch to call Sevaistre’s albums archives, Nora’s use of the term refers to archival modes of perception and valuation. This is at the heart of my inquiry into the album’s documentary functions, their capacity to convey history as a base for identity, and in their construction of the subjectivity of the viewer via certain relations with time and narrative (Nora 1989, 8, 13).

The topics of Nora’s inquiry are the mechanisms by which social and cultural knowledge are constituted, protected, transmitted, and enacted. He identifies a shift during modernity whereby perception and intuition became less powerful tools for understanding the history of one’s own identity and community, and the material trace or object gained traction as the arbiter of historical truth. What he seems to be grieving is the loss of direct access to personal and societal knowledge through experience to the need to record and externalize, and to preserve history in visual and material form, relying “entirely on the materiality of the trace, the immediacy of the recording, the visibility of the image. The less memory is experienced from the inside”, he writes, “The more it exists only through its exterior scaffolding and outward signs” (Nora 1989, 13).

Nora is writing of the period in which the nation-state was being constructed across Europe, focusing upon the institutionalization of the public collection and archive in order to stake out national identity. He is also writing about modes of perception that shaped collective understandings of nationalism and identity. The stakes are in the degree to which social, political, and cultural knowledge are a matter of individual, internal, direct recording by the individual, versus the degree to which it relies upon what he calls “prosthesis”, the external image or object that mediates history, obscuring its contours and distancing it in time. Said another way, narrative and time undergo shifts within the representation of history as it pertains to identity because of a lack of direct experience and the reciprocal rise of the archival impulse (Nora 1989, 17). Nora identifies the temporal dimension of his argument thusly: “Memory is a perpetually actual phenomenon, a bond tying us to the eternal present; history is a representation of the past” (Nora 1989, 8). The problematization of perception around the status of the subject, the proximity of narrative, and the quality of time underwrite Nora’s opposition of memory and history, and the particular loss or complication associated with modern history that he laments. It is interesting that Nora locates this problem in the conflict between modernization and nostalgia for “primitive societies” in light of the political and cultural frameworks in which Vance and the far right currently traffic. Ultimately, the confusion between self-awareness, temporal proximity, and cultural-historical accuracy generates the void in which viewers may be politicized without the explicit insertion of ideology. The remainder of this essay will look specifically at some of the film’s contradictions.

The gendering of the question of whether Vance is self-made shifts drastically from the book to the movie. While the latter emphasizes the role of his grandmother to the exclusion of all others, there are several male figures in the memoir version that shape Vance (1:49:10). He says in voiceover towards the end of the film, “The first time, it was Mamaw who saved me. The second, it was what she taught me […]”. Other than his grandmother, whom he calls Mamaw, those that imparted lessons to Vance seem to do so unwittingly. In the worlds of repressed rednecks and out-of-touch elites that he goes between, he is the only figure that seems to see the whole picture. Vance is not, of course, the first fascist to valorize himself with this mixture of imagery. He claims several different “belongings” or “roots”, creating an all-American composite meant to represent the white working class. The cliché presentation, however, encourages viewers to imaginatively inhabit a generalized, conglomerate discourse surrounding historical and political identity in the US.

Broadly, the low-pitched writing style of both the book, likely ghost-written, and the film, which was adapted by Vanessa Taylor, a quite flexible screenwriter who is also responsible for Guillermo del Toro’s Shape of Water and around twenty episodes of Game of Thrones, amounts to an almost impenetrably superficial and trite narrative. The simplified backdrop upon which Vance elaborates his origin story is partly created to put his own agency and strength of character into high relief, but it also serves to represent an American demographic in a pandering and catastrophic way. It has been noted recently in the Los Angeles Times:

Vance portrayed [the working class] – 35% of Americans – as tragic victims of alcoholism, drug abuse, laziness, and their own self-destructive moral failings. Journalists ran with that, bringing their own stereotypes to depict the working class as angry, uneducated white men driven by economic insecurity and racist nostalgia to support Trump’s retrogressive campaign. This distortion widened a real divide by alienating many Americans (Berry 2025).

But there are additional aesthetic and rhetorical layers that do more than generate or exacerbate stereotypes that were deployed to the benefit of the Trump campaign. Slippages and shifts across certain polarities within the film hold open a space in which it is possible for new right politics to be articulated and, more importantly, take hold.

The opening sequence introduces the young Vance in his primal setting. The viewer sees kid stuff from a kid’s point of view, bugs and frogs and other things from a low camera angle, then riding on a bike through the holler, until the swimming hole is reached. When women are shown hanging laundry, the camera doesn’t move, suggesting the stability of this this work, which is always done by others, possibly only women. There is a cut to Vance bursting out the front door to jump on his bike, and his voiceover begins. The first dialogue displays Vance’s qualities in contrast with a representative hillbilly kid. Vance is automatically caring towards a wounded turtle he finds, knowledgeable about anatomical terms and physiological processes, and compassionate towards the turtle’s life. There is a jump cut, briefly returning to the scene he's just left, where we meet the supporting characters and are charmed by their tough but tight-knit hillbilly ways. Then, cut back to Vance seen from directly above, on his back in the river, floating into the center of the frame, which he shares only with reflections of the trees and the sun. Three boys attack him for apparently no reason.

The scene delivers an incredibly simple dichotomy between good and bad in which three fit, slightly older boys attack Vance without apparent provocation. This dichotomy is reinforced when the three boys are just as pointlessly venomous towards Vance’s male elders that come to his rescue in the knick of time. This dramatic scene is also the vehicle to lay out the platitudes that serve as Vance’s core values, such as, “Never start a fight, but always finish it”, and “Family or maternal pride above all else”. Indeed, he attacks the generic, mean hillbilly only when he tells Vance that he’ll “visit his mom later”. This split between the inherently good and the inherently bad within the hillbilly class is reinforced throughout the film, by both adults and children. Mamaw, for example, refers to a, “No good mama behind the curtains. I wouldn’t spit on her ass if her guts were on fire”. As she offers leftover food to her “little buddy”, presumably the no-good mama’s son, who lives next door. Later, young Vance becomes friends with boys who, in Mamaw’s words, “Will be on food stamps or in jail in ten years’ time”. Vance is saved when Mamaw makes the boys leave. He protests, “Those are my friends. Who am I going to talk to?” And Mamaw replies, “You can talk to yourself. It works for me”, implying that the moral distance between her and the no-good kind of hillbilly is unbridgeable. The pejorative reference to social welfare programs, and their valuation alongside jail, draws a moral distinction, setting up implications that state and government benefits are both dysfunctional and corruptive, which is reinforced and contradicted later in the film. Mamaw herself relies upon a national food assistance program called Meals on Wheels, but it lets her down by failing to bring J.D.’s meal after he comes to live with her.

The duality between good and bad is embedded in the family fabric throughout the film, and may reflect the fact that Vance did not actually grow up poor, but middle class. The family had three homes, for example – Mamaw’s, Pawpa’s, and Bev, his mother’s, although she moved quite often to live with different men, according to the memoir. On the other hand, a scene involving young Vance at school shows him, and only him, unable to afford the $84 graphing calculator required to do his algebra assignments. He goes and steals the calculator, which Mamaw buys for him when he is caught by a store owner, who calls her instead of the police.

In this and other moments, we see the familiar collapse of sex and gender in service of the argument that the natural role of women is as scaffolding for men to live their lives. This notion is a well-known conservative staple. The complexity, however, given to Bev’s character, performed movingly by Amy Adams, may deflect attention from the natural limits of her horizons. Bev did well in school and was the salutatorian, or second ranking student over all in her high school class, but nonetheless succumbed to drugs and hillbilly misery. The catalyst of this downfall, interestingly, was not the environment, but accidental pregnancy at age eighteen. As Bev explains to Lindsay, her daughter and the result of this pregnancy, “That’s just what happens to girls”. To which Lindsay replies, “Not stupid ones”, initiating a physically violent fight.

Another important slippage relating to family and motherhood occurs in a traumatic scene when Bev becomes enraged with her son J.D. while she is driving, threatens to crash the car and kill them both, then pulls over and starts beating him. Her anger was insighted when she learned that an acquaintance of Vance had said something insulting about her, calling her many boyfriends “Flavors of the month”. Bev flies off the handle, saying, “You let that little shit talk about your mom like that?” and quickly explodes. Young Vance, before becoming terrified, has a moment of confusion. He doesn’t see the problem, pointing out that he didn’t let the kid say it; “He just said it”. This attitude is notable because, while it adds drama to the scene, it betrays the “code” we saw equally dramatically rehearsed in the first scene, when Vance resorted to violence in defense of his mother. The book explains ad nauseum that the hillbilly code essentially consists of defending your family with zero tolerance for outsiders even making negative or judgmental comments. Mamaw, played by Glen Close, delivers the intentionally iconic line, “Family is the only thing that means a goddamn”, in a scene in which Bev asks J.D. for is his urine so that she can pass a drug screening. It is ambiguous, however, the extent to which the immediate “hillbilly” community may be considered “family”, and where and how to draw the lines of inclusion and identity in a political or social sense.

A scene dramatizing one of Bev’s relapses brings forth a major ambiguity or slippage regarding family as a value. In a public humiliation in which Bev runs into the neighborhood street, apparently in great crisis, she expresses that her apparent relapse was triggered by the death of her father. She screams at Lindsay, when she says to her mother “We all miss him”, “He was my daddy! Quit pretending like he was yours, he was mine!” While this heart wrenching attachment can be analyzed in several ways, there is certainly an argument that Bev suffered and relapsed because her family bond was too strong. This happens again after Mamaw, her mother’s, death, when she begins injecting heroin. Indeed ,the dramatically performed, sheer panic comes across as a distillation of unadulterated attachment to the nuclear family, undermining the simplicity of the film’s “family first” moral lesson. These contradictions, however, do not interrupt the affective experience of the film, partly because the extremity of the clichéd scenes and motifs creates an impenetrable surface over the entire film.

So, quickly back to Vance’s obsession with Yale. He consistently relies upon it to make the point that he is remarkable for being there. Indeed, the way he pauses after saying the word “Yale” in many interviews over the last decade reveals the weight he gives to it. He is, of course, not the only person who identifies as poor or working class to have ever attended Yale. Bell hooks, in a personal reflection upon class and her own life, discusses her professorship at Yale with decidedly more depth and reflection. The most tired cliché in the entire film, centered around silverware and dinner etiquette, takes place when Vance attends a recruitment dinner at Yale law after his first year, about fifteen minutes into the running time. The scene is hard to watch, not least for the dialogue that is lazy, unconvincing, and contrived. The trope of the provincial wannabe calling a friend to help navigate a sophisticated place setting is fully elaborated. Arguably, this trope is so familiar, it could easily have been abbreviated, rather than fully fleshed out. The reference is well-known and crystal clear. This rare moment of commitment in the script serves to enforce Vance’s feeling of alienation from the environment and social milieu. The use of close-up photography and the drawn-out rehearsal of “just-move-from-the-outside-in” advice that Vance receives from Usha, his then girlfriend, now wife, over the phone creates a moment in the film in which the viewer stays close to Vance. This invitation to identify with him as a character is, again, diffused by the familiarity of the cinematic situation, creating a narrative void for the viewer. A kind of passive ambiguity between memory and presence beckons the viewer to partially project themselves via participation, while accepting the image of Vance within the empty vessel of the clichéd scene.

In the final scene, Vance makes the symbolically loaded choice to drive back to Yale in the middle of the night for a big interview. After having returned home because Bev had overdosed and refused to go to rehab, Vance reflects upon his entire life in montage, releases his mother’s hand, and delivers the line, “I can’t stay. I’m not saving anyone here”. He walks to his car to drive back to Yale, and to jump back across that class boundary, into that world, from which he can save America’s white working class. In the silverware scene, Usha directly tells the viewer why they should trust J.D. Vance: because he “isn’t a douchebag and doesn’t know how to use silverware”. In another scene, when Vance remarks that his sister, Lindsay, has become a soccer mom, she responds by calling herself a fake. “I think I got you outfaked by a mile”, is Vance’s reply. Between all these identities and across all these class lines, Vance amounts, in the film, as a shifter that refuses to commit. He’s not blank, but he is a canvas.

Bibliographical references
Abstract

Coffineau’s contribution examines how Hillbilly Elegy (Netflix, 2020) transforms J.D. Vance’s memoir into a politically productive narrative of upward mobility. Rather than offering a coherent account of personal development, the film relies on clichés, shallow class imagery, and structural inconsistencies that produce narrative gaps and ideological ambiguity. The story presents him as both representative of and exceptional within the white rural working class, while never fully resolving these contradictions. The essay presents the film’s lack of psychological and social depth is as a condition of its political efficacy: by substituting stereotypes and familiar tropes for reflection, Hillbilly Elegy opens a discursive space in which right-wing and far-right messages can take hold. In this sense, the film’s cinematic failures help explain its wider political usefulness.

keywords | Hillbilly Elegy; J.D. Vance; Netflix; Yale; Republican party.

questo numero di Engramma è a invito: la revisione dei saggi è stata affidata al comitato editoriale e all'international advisory board della rivista

Per citare questo articolo / To cite this article: N. Coffineau, Hillibilly Split. A critical reading of: J.D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy, “La Rivista di Engramma” n. 233 (aprile 2026).