Iconography is central to the rhetoric of Hillbilly Elegy, which now functions, as it seems to have known it would, as political promotion. Not
that anyone escapes rhetoric: making films, writing, speaking, we’re all trying
to win an argument.
Glenn Close has the role of her career as Mammy Yokum, and
gets the only laughs in the film, as when she shows the finger: “Perch and
swivel.”
“Wouldn’t spit on her ass if her guts were on fire.”
“You know what's interesting about the Poles? They bury their
dead with their asses sticking out of the ground. That way they got a place to
park their bikes.”
And like Ma Kettle and Granny Clampett, she
runs the show, or at least is the court of final appeal. Somewhat more touching are the houses the hill people live in.
In the early shots those are of brick rather than clapboard, but they evoke Walker Evans’ photographs in Let Us Now
Praise Famous Men. 
Note the placement of things. Margaret Bourke-White took
similar pictures (you may recall Evans’ and Bourke-White’s photos introducing Bonnie
and Clyde, our hippy Li’l Abner and Daisy Mae), but Bourke-White’s husband
Erskine Caldwell objected to her changing the position of objects in the cabins, and thus falsifying the implicit story.
Caldwell wrote hillbilly novels God’s Little Acre and
Tobacco Road, and the latter was filmed by John Ford, who
is incapable of not making a masterpiece. This is all protest material, made by Party members and fellow-travellers, but it had its place and time; it was like the sixties, everybody was doing it.
(See below the review
of Oppenheimer for American Marxism in the thirties.)
James Agee, for example, wrote the legendary prose in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and despised
the usage “sharecropper” (over “tenant farmer”) as “one of the words a careful
man will be watchful of, and by whose use and inflection he may take clear
measurement of the nature, and the stature, and the causes, and the timbre, of
the enemy.” 
Near the beginning of Hillbilly Elegy J.D. shows a
wounded turtle to “Cousin Nate,” who seems to live in the woods, and tells J.D.
to see how far he can throw it. Nate disappears for the rest of the
film but for that moment we are in the presence of Tom and Huck. 
Not that those boys were hillbillies, strictly speaking. To
qualify it helps to have roots in Appalachia, which includes Cape Breton, where
my own people are from, or the Ozarks, or Washington state. As long as you’re on high ground you should be all right. Elvis was a Tupelo flatlander but he
managed it. 
My favorite hillbilly is Robert Mitchum’s moonshine-runner
in Thunder Road.
Per Bob Dylan, “We ain’t paid no whisky tax since 1792.” So American.
Are we ever going to hear the end of this legend? I doubt
it. Too pat. Too saleable. Too American.
But, having located us in iconographical heaven, the film
goes on too long. Amy Adams is an actor and a half—the screen belongs to her when she’s
there—but the film hits me over the head with her long after I get the
point. It has a commitment to unrelieved miserablism that rivals that of Joker;
whereas Vance's book has humor.
I wish J.D. well, at least for this July-2024 moment. But
that doesn’t mean I have to like the movie.
Robert MacLean is an independent filmmaker. His The Light Touch is on Amazon Prime, Tubi and Scanbox, and his 7-minute comedy is an out-loud laugh. He is also a novelist, a playwright, a blogger, a YouTuber, a film reviewer, a literary critic, and a stand-up comic poet. Born Toronto, PhD McGill, taught at Canadian universities, too cold, live Greece, Irish citizen. No brains but an intellectual snob.
I am his Highness' dog at Kew;
Pray tell me, sir, whose dog are you?
On YouTube:Boccaccio’s "The Husband" Boccaccio's "The Horse Trade" Boccaccio's "The Stupid Friar" Chaucer’s "The Miller's Tale"
Iconography is central to the rhetoric of Hillbilly Elegy, which now functions, as it seems to have known it would, as political promotion. Not
that anyone escapes rhetoric: making films, writing, speaking, we’re all trying
to win an argument.
“Wouldn’t spit on her ass if her guts were on fire.”
“You know what's interesting about the Poles? They bury their dead with their asses sticking out of the ground. That way they got a place to park their bikes.”
Note the placement of things. Margaret Bourke-White took
similar pictures (you may recall Evans’ and Bourke-White’s photos introducing Bonnie
and Clyde, our hippy Li’l Abner and Daisy Mae), but Bourke-White’s husband
Erskine Caldwell objected to her changing the position of objects in the cabins, and thus falsifying the implicit story.
James Agee, for example, wrote the legendary prose in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and despised
the usage “sharecropper” (over “tenant farmer”) as “one of the words a careful
man will be watchful of, and by whose use and inflection he may take clear
measurement of the nature, and the stature, and the causes, and the timbre, of
the enemy.”
Near the beginning of Hillbilly Elegy J.D. shows a
wounded turtle to “Cousin Nate,” who seems to live in the woods, and tells J.D.
to see how far he can throw it. Nate disappears for the rest of the
film but for that moment we are in the presence of Tom and Huck.
Not that those boys were hillbillies, strictly speaking. To
qualify it helps to have roots in Appalachia, which includes Cape Breton, where
my own people are from, or the Ozarks, or Washington state. As long as you’re on high ground you should be all right. Elvis was a Tupelo flatlander but he
managed it.
My favorite hillbilly is Robert Mitchum’s moonshine-runner
in Thunder Road.
Per Bob Dylan, “We ain’t paid no whisky tax since 1792.” So American.
Are we ever going to hear the end of this legend? I doubt
it. Too pat. Too saleable. Too American.
But, having located us in iconographical heaven, the film
goes on too long. Amy Adams is an actor and a half—the screen belongs to her when she’s
there—but the film hits me over the head with her long after I get the
point. It has a commitment to unrelieved miserablism that rivals that of Joker;
whereas Vance's book has humor.
I wish J.D. well, at least for this July-2024 moment. But
that doesn’t mean I have to like the movie.
Robert MacLean is an independent filmmaker. His The Light Touch is on Amazon Prime, Tubi and Scanbox, and his 7-minute comedy is an out-loud laugh. He is also a novelist, a playwright, a blogger, a YouTuber, a film reviewer, a literary critic, and a stand-up comic poet. Born Toronto, PhD McGill, taught at Canadian universities, too cold, live Greece, Irish citizen. No brains but an intellectual snob.
I am his Highness' dog at Kew;
Pray tell me, sir, whose dog are you?
On YouTube:
Boccaccio’s "The Husband"
Boccaccio's "The Horse Trade"
Boccaccio's "The Stupid Friar"
Chaucer’s "The Miller's Tale"
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