Hillbilly Elegy director Ron Howard says he’s ‘surprised and disappointed’ by JD Vance

24 comments

1. I’m so tired of hearing about this book. My uncle talked to me about it like it’s a sequel to the Bible. Like the mere publication of it shook the heavens and Earth. He has never read it nor does he own a copy. I’m so tired of Republican brainwashing.

2. It wasn’t even a very good book. Incel vibes former emo kid from Cincinnati whines about how the decline in Appalachia is narrowly all the people’s fault for not being better than they are, and nothing at all to do with the offshoring of plant, mill, manufacturing jobs and failed trickle down policies.

3. Why did he get a movie in the first place?

4. Hillbillies don’t need elegies.

5. The whole “I’m not mad, just disappointed” thing was invented by kind dads like Ron Howard

6. Well, EVERYONE is disappointed by JD “LA-Z-BOY Lethario” Vance.

7. I’m not even joking when I say, of all the people I wanted to hear from on this it’s Ron Howard. I find this man to be an American treasure and was scratching my head about his involvement with Vance

8. I feel bad for that movie’s casting couch

9. We all are, Ron.

10. Perspective matters; it’s a terrible “small town boy makes good” movie and Howard should be ashamed of making it. That being said, it’s a fairly decent “villain origin story” movie and Howard still should be ashamed of making it.

11. You know it’s bad when Opie is disappointed in you. The only thing worse would be to see that same disappointment in Aunt B and Pa’s eyes too.

12. I read his book in high school with very little context other than “all the NYT think pieces say this book explains the Trump voter”. It does not, it explains why JD Vance probably despises the average Trump voter.

    My civics teacher saw me reading it and asked what I thought, I didn’t have much of an answer. He says “oh, well I thought it was just terrible” before abruptly stopping and giving me a wide-eyed look. “I should not have said that and let you make your opinion I think”.

    Yes Mr. Mertz, you should have- I never got the joy of coming to the conclusion JD Vance is a cancerous tube worm on my own.

13. Howard should’ve waited for Demon Copperhead and made that into a movie instead.

14. Join the club, bud.

15. It was a good movie. I wish it’s all I’d ever heard of him though now.

16. Ron really took some artistic freedoms with the “foldout couch” scene. No one saw it coming.

17. Surprised? Disappointed? I don’t understand. Vance (and Trump) have been like this for years. You’re just embarrassed you fell for the con.

18. Opie got played. Blind ambition isn’t a sudden onset condition.

19. I read it like 6-7 years ago and thought it was garbage then

20. Then Ron Howard should donate all the money he made from selling J.D. Vance’s story to fight opioid addiction or shut the hell up. Put your money where your mouth is.

21. Does the book explain why he cannot order a box of donuts like a normal human being?

    For example, does he have some kind of debilitating trauma linked to making a simple, informed choice? Or is there a reason he turns into a robot when faced with people working in a service industry?

    “Please state the length of your employment. I will take one selection of your finest human food. This completes the transaction, good bye.”

22. I wrote this review of Hillbilly Elegy in 2019, before JD Vance’s senate campaign was bankrolled by Peter Thiel. One of my few moments of prescience:

    If the book is supposed to be about a culture in crisis, about the struggles of growing up as a member of the white working poor, no one seems to have told the author. The first 150 pages were over-dramatized stories from his youth, complete with juvenile opining and jokes designed to beat you over the head with the punchline. (“I assure you, Beaver Hunt has nothing to do with that specific aquatic mammal.”) I kept wondering why I should care about Mamaw and his rotating cotarie of stepfathers if it’s not making a larger point about hillbilly society writ large. There are few pages that start to dip the toe in the water of commentary but then we are pulled back in to experiences like boot camp or attending school. There is nothing in this book that gave me insight into growing up in Kentucky or, honestly, made me care about the author or his family. It was told from such detached perspective that I never felt the author had real emotional connections to his family and, instead, told the story he was supposed to tell “I love them, they saved me, etc etc.”)

    This is not a book about hillbilly culture or a dying portrait of Appalachia. It’s one person’s boring attempt to paint his family as the one thing that kept him going despite their full-throated attempts to hold him back.

    Got 3/4 of the way through waiting for a larger point that never came. DNF.

23. Hillbilly Sofa King

24. lol Ron got scammed by the Yale scientists’ laziest creation yet