[Ron Howard’s Netflix adaptation of Hillbilly Elegy continues a
long tradition of seeing hillbillies as a symbol of pristine American
whiteness. It’s the same nostalgia Trump has mobilized on the far
right.] [[link removed]]

PORTSIDE CULTURE

THE MYTHIC WHITENESS OF THE HILLBILLY  
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Ellen Wayland-Smith
November 20, 2020
Boston Review
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_ Ron Howard’s Netflix adaptation of Hillbilly Elegy continues a
long tradition of seeing hillbillies as a symbol of pristine American
whiteness. It’s the same nostalgia Trump has mobilized on the far
right. _

Glenn Close and Amy Adams in Hillbilly Elegy., Image: Netflix

 

J.D. Vance published _Hillbilly Elegy:_ _A Memoir of a Family and a
Culture in Crisis_ three weeks shy of the 2016 Republican National
Convention, just as presumptive candidate Donald Trump was barreling
toward the nomination. The memoir chronicles the author’s rise from
“hillbilly” poverty and dysfunction in rural Kentucky and Rust
Belt Ohio, through a tour in Iraq as a Marine, and then to a GI-funded
degree from Yale Law School. As _Hillbilly Elegy_ shot to the top of
the _New York Times_ bestseller list, Vance, who considers himself a
recovering hillbilly, became an overnight media sensation as the de
facto explainer of poor white Americans everywhere. He was here to
tell coastal elites why the rural white poor thrilled to the sound of
Trump’s pro-manufacturing, pro-America, anti-immigrant rants.

Since 2016, the iconography of the hillbilly, from scraggly beards to
Confederate flags, has been folded into the symbolism of the
revanchist militias that Trump has clearly come to think of as his
good ol’ boys.

But 2020 America is, in certain senses, a quite different country than
2016 America, and one way to track the difference is to consider the
shifting meaning of the idea of the hillbilly. During the four years
of Trump’s presidency, the hillbilly—at least, its pop culture
simulacrum, an identity that centers proud, fighting, poor white
masculinity as the ur-expression of Americanness—has come in for a
startling recuperation. Its iconography, from scraggly beards to
Confederate flags, has been folded into the symbolism of the
revanchist would-be militias that Trump has clearly come to think of
as his good ol’ boys.

Against this backdrop of hillbilly fandom among certain segments of
the far right, Ron Howard’s new Netflix adaptation of _Hillbilly
Elegy _(streaming November 24)—with its sentimental, feel-good
portrayal of Vance as the Hillbilly Who Made Good—strikes a
particularly dissonant note.

I know hillbilly. I was raised in rural western Pennsylvania, in a
county well within the sweep of what demographers call Greater
Appalachia. Growing up, the first day of hunting season was a school
holiday, Perkins was a fancy restaurant, and the demolition derby at
the county fair was the highlight of every summer. My home county
voted 68 percent for Trump on November 3, a tick up from the 67
percent he received in 2016. And though I moved away thirty years ago,
I continue to follow the evolution of my hometown’s political
climate—increasingly, like so many uprooted Americans, via social
media contact with family and old acquaintances. This often-melancholy
pursuit has given me anecdotal insight into just how central the
hillbilly identity (as myth, not geographical reality) is to U.S.
politics.

One Facebook feed, of the friend of a childhood friend, in particular
often catches my attention. Not long again he shared scanned photos
from the 1970s or ’80s showing him and his father during hunting
season. Wearing camouflage, father and son wrangle the bloody antlers
of a freshly killed deer to hold the beast upright for the photo op.
The grainy Kodak film and washed-out reds and yellows cast a nostalgic
hue. Often he posts selfies, some variation on himself sporting
reflective sunglasses, a Civil War–era beard, draped in Confederate
flag merch: rebel sweatshirt, rebel pins, rebel hat. Second Amendment
and Stand Your Ground memes abound. A particular memorable one was a
close-up photo of the barrel of a gun with the inscription “WRONG
HOUSE.”

Mixed in with this standard fare, however, is something rather
surprising: painting after painting of backwoodsmen, all done in misty
watercolors or pastel oils. The raccoon-hatted Davy Crockett types
populating these images—uniformly gun-toting, outfitted in fur coats
and boots, long-haired and grizzled—all embody a kind of funhouse
nineteenth-century masculinity reimagined for our Trumpian moment by
would-be Thomas Kinkades. They stand in craggy mountain passes or
squat next to campfires, squinting fiercely into maudlin orange and
lavender sunsets. They are emblems of bloody white-man survivalism
crosscut with stills from a Hallmark Channel movie.

Nostalgia can be sweet, and it can be violent. The same reverence for
a mythical proud, patriotic, freedom-loving, and implicitly white
heritage that motivates Vance’s hill folk in (to hear him tell it)
so benign a fashion has also fueled, for well over a century and a
half, what historian Amy B. Cooter calls U.S. “nostalgic groups,”
by which she means everything from the KKK to the militia that planned
to abduct Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer. It is the sweetness of
this pastoral origin myth—the dream of a simpler, whiter time—that
has allowed the hillbilly to function as such a seductive cultural
icon in U.S. political life. More than ever, it is important to ask:
What does it mean to be a hillbilly? And why does Vance’s memoir
strike such a sensitive national nerve?

[section separator]

The same reverence for a mythical proud, patriotic, and implicitly
white heritage that motivates Vance’s hill folk in (to hear him tell
it) so benign a fashion has also fueled everything from the KKK to the
militia that planned to abduct Michigan’s governor.

In historian Nina Silber’s _The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and
the South, 1865–1900 _(1993), she explores how the southern
“mountain white” as a pseudo-demographic category first arose in
the 1880s as the U.S. Industrial Revolution surged. In the aftermath
of the Civil War, railroads opened southern mountainous regions to
northern capital for the first time. In symbolic and literal
opposition to Reconstruction’s efforts to establish Blacks as
equals, this pocket of mythical whiteness took on outsize cultural
significance. William Goodell Frost, president of Berea College in
Kentucky, remarked that the Appalachian mountaineers constituted
“the unspoiled and vigorous reserve forces” of the nation, key to
offsetting the “undesirable foreign element” flooding in from
southern and eastern Europe. “The mountaineer is to be regarded as a
survival,” Frost noted. “In his speech you will soon detect the
flavor of Chaucer . . . [and] his very homicides are an honest
survival of Saxon temper.”

Carnal, cantankerous, freedom-loving, and proud, it was above all the
hillbilly’s status as a white “other” that constituted his
hypnotic appeal at the turn of the twentieth century. Appalachian
people were largely the descendants of the Scots-Irish who, as
historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz has documented, shored up their claim
to whiteness by serving as the shock troops of the young United
States’ genocidal wars against Native Americans. Having done the
work of empire during a previous generation, they would yet again be
conscripted to the project of white power—this time, in Frost’s
articulation, as the bridge on which northern Yankee and southern
Rebel might finally meet. The fiction of southern white manhood as
genteel, premodern, and gracious-yet-proud in defeat could be fused
with Frost’s romantic gun-toting Chaucer to bring the country
together in pursuit of a renewed—and now global—military destiny.
By the time Theodore Roosevelt rode up Puerto Rico’s San Juan Hill
in 1898 in the name of the white man’s burden, the grounding image
of a common white American (Southern-Western-Appalachian) heritage as
the beating heart of the nation had become a pop culture commonplace,
as well as fodder for many a stump speech.

In spite of now more than a century of use as a potent symbol in U.S.
political culture—or perhaps precisely because of that—the
symbolic significance of the hillbilly remains ambiguous. On the one
hand, the hillbilly is loyal, proud, plain-spoken, patriotic, dogged,
and family-centered—the panacea to all that ails modernity and
cosmopolitanism. On the other hand, he is also feuding, cussing,
trigger-happy, lazy, and self-indulgent. What gives him picturesque
“local color” and charm always risks tipping over into degeneracy:
a stubborn, primitive refusal to embrace the onward march of
civilization. The hillbilly can veer in a heartbeat from the yokel
hijinks of _The Beverly Hillbillies_ to the savage imbecility
of _Deliverance_.

This same symbolic lability helps to explain, as well, the
hillbilly’s perennial political appeal. In discussions of social
policy and in journalism, hillbillies can stand as both
self-destructive problem people _and_ lovable, salt-of-the-Earth
Americans whom the country has failed. By invoking the idea of the
hillbilly, the tension between these two conditions never has to be
resolved, but simply observed. As Elizabeth Catte notes in _What You
Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia _(2018), northern paternalist
interest in documenting the existence of poor whites is longstanding.
Both John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson made Appalachia a priority
in their “poverty tours” across the country, drawing national
media attention to white poverty at the height of the civil rights
movement, and thus, in Catte’s words, “unburden[ed] the white
viewer from the fatigue of thinking critically about race.” During
Trump’s vertiginous rise in Obama’s ostensibly post-racial
America, Vance’s memoir arguably served a similar role: tacitly
excusing Trump’s most egregious racist dog whistles, Vance reassured
readers that his hillbillies’ animus had nothing to do with race.

[section separator]

In discussions of social policy, hillbillies can stand as both
self-destructive problem people _and_ lovable, salt-of-the-Earth
Americans whom the country has failed. By invoking the idea of the
hillbilly, this tension never has to be resolved.

Vance’s memoir, and Howard’s new film adaptation of it, both
continue the tradition of northern voyeuristic fascination with the
lives of poor rural whites—this time updated with opioid addiction
and chronic unemployment. Both revive venerable tropes of white
“mountain” poverty and orneriness blended with heart-tugging
dignity, bundling them into a bland story of the triumph of the human
spirit without ever challenging how this nostalgic impulse sidelines
meaningful reckoning with whiteness and its iconography.

From his earliest days playing Opie on the _Andy Griffith
Show_ through much of his career as a director and producer, Howard
has made his coin providing a certain kind of white wistfulness to his
viewers, and _Hillbilly Elegy_’s deep reserves of love for
Americans who fail and then pick themselves up again certainly falls
in line with this. The arc of the film is more or less laid out in
miniature as the opening credits roll. The camera pans over stock
images of “Appalachians” in their natural habitat: falling-down
barns, ramshackle houses. Dirt-smudged men with dogs sit in folding
chairs on lawns littered with defunct farm equipment and tires and the
ruined hulks of cars. These shots are intercut with close-up images of
pristine nature: a clear blue sky, a spider web shining with dew, a
pulsing bullfrog resting in the shade of a green creek. The very
nature that threatens to swallow civilization whole—hillbilly houses
half-consumed by vines and shrubs and trees, as though all man’s
handiwork might disappear in one voracious gulp—is also (we sense)
what gives these primitives their power. They are closer to the Earth,
to the primordial beating heart of being human. They have a gut
loyalty to land and kin that no urban sophisticate will ever
understand.

_Hillbilly Elegy_ is a very bad film, and this despite some fine
acting from Amy Adams as Bev, J.D.’s loving but opioid-addicted
mother, and from Glenn Close as J.D.’s foul-mouthed, hard-as-nails
Mamaw. Adams’s and Close’s talent is no match, though, for the
morality play of a script, where characters serve as two-dimensional
screens onto which Howard projects the eternal American drama of Good
versus Bad Hillbilly. Bev is loving but self-destructive; Mamaw is
principled in theory but weak in practice. Both women are violent: Bev
physically and verbally abuses her children; Mamaw once set Papaw on
fire as he lay passed out on the sofa.

J.D. (played by Gabriel Basso as an adult and Owen Asztalos as a
child) is predictably posed as the Hegelian third term that will take
these warring contraries and sublimate them into something higher,
better, more respectably American and middle class. Howard stages
three scenes in which J.D. wrestles with his inner bad hillbilly, each
time inching a bit closer to victory.

The first time his temper gets the better of him, he is a confused
teen. Feeling abandoned by his addict mother, J.D. falls in with the
druggie crowd himself. When one friend proposes they go trash the
office of an employer who recently fired him, J.D. offers up Mamaw’s
burgundy Buick, and the pot-addled teens race off to wreak havoc.

In the second scene of inner spiritual warfare, J.D., now a successful
Yale Law School student, is called back home to Ohio when Bev lands in
the hospital after overdosing. J.D. is tasked with finding her a spot
in rehab. When Bev’s boyfriend calls her a “junkie whore” (to
which she predictably replies: “You’re a hillbilly loser! You
ain’t even got any teeth!”), J.D.’s family honor is sullied.
“Don’t you call my mom a whore you son of a bitch! I’m gonna
fucking kill you!” he roars before attempting to smash down the
boyfriend’s door. He is drawn back from the brink of hillbilly
madness only when a mother with a toddler in her arms (cue
Civilization) steps up and pleads with him to stop. To highlight both
his background and his evolution, this scene is crosscut with
slow-motion shots of teen-J.D. taking a tire iron to an office copy
machine, face twisted in a rapture of self-destructive violence, as
police sirens wail in the background.

_Hillbilly Elegy_ is a Bildungsroman about becoming middle-class
white that never asks why that gold standard is problematic.

In the final scene of this triptych, we know J.D. has finally made it
out of the hillbilly woods when, back at Yale, he gets redneck-baited
at a law school cocktail party, yet manages to keep his cool. J.D.’s
hackles rise when a smarmy East Coast type comments how hard it must
be to deal with all the rednecks back home. J.D. replies that his
mother is the smartest woman he’s ever met—in fact, probably
smarter than anyone in their goddamned, Ivy-coddled, Vivaldi-playing
cohort. This heated reply silences his tablemates, and J.D. assumes he
has lost any chance at a summer internship. In fact, the opposite is
the case. A silver-tongued classmate who jokes genially about not
wanting “any progeny besides billable hours” is passed over;
J.D.’s plain-spoken hillbilly righteousness and loyalty to kin gets
him the job. Assimilation is complete. J.D. has taken his inner Bad
Hillbilly and transmogrified him into that pure yet still virile,
pro-family, fighting American so lacking in the effete halls of the
Ivy League.

The Pygmalion tale is, of course, among the oldest and best loved of
stories. From _Cinderella_ to _My Fair Lady_ to _Pretty Woman_,
Americans in particular love a story in which the hopelessly vulgar or
fallen protagonist with a heart of gold finally gets their due, and
all the nasty, grinch-hearted elites are taken down a notch. The
problem with _Hillbilly Elegy_’s version of the Pygmalion story is
that it never reckons with the fact that J.D.’s whiteness—bought
and paid for, in part, by Scots-Irish ancestors through bloody
colonial warfare—is not just incidental but integral to his
triumph. _Hillbilly Elegy_ is a Bildungsroman about becoming
middle-class white that never asks why that gold standard is
problematic.

White nostalgia is a hell of a drug. In order to break our national
addiction, we need to learn to recognize it: not just in the
tiki-torch suffused snarl of a white supremacist, but in its blander,
more Netflix-savvy guises, as well.

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