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How JD Vance Went From ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ to the Ultimate Celebrity Apprentice — Thanks to Hollywood’s Help
Donald Trump named J.D. Vance, a senator with less than two years’ political experience, to be his running mate. Did the media make him a contender?
Introducing readers to what would become Trump’s base, Vance laid out those concerns: poverty, opioid addiction, lack of access to higher education and, perhaps most importantly, entire communities where the local economy had imploded, eliminating jobs and leaving housing stagnant. “Hillbilly Elegy,” the movie, is part of a much larger genre of sweet-tea Southern coming-of-age stories — “Mommie Dearest” meets “The Andy Griffith Show,” in which a star as radiant as Amy Adams plays a bedraggled nightmare version of Vance’s seldom-present mom. Instead, we get scenes like the one where a shotgun-waving Close rants, “If you got a problem with that you can talk to the barrel of my gun!” By contrast, the media romanticizes glamorous New York characters and careers, like sex columnist or ad man, while reducing those in “flyover” states to variations on the banjo-picking hillbillies seen in “Deliverance.”
Or read this on Variety
