Fin: Contra J.D. Vance, film critics are not “elites”

Plus, the late, great Hannibal Lecter, life (doesn’t) imitate Bob Roberts, politics is pro wrestling, and more in this week’s notes column.

I wrote earlier this week about the part the Hillbilly Elegy movie played in the rise of J.D. Vance, arguing that it’s been overstated, at least compared to the book. A few hours later, Vance was named Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick, and by the end of the week, the movie was climbing the Netflix charts. 

I want to focus on something else about that film. This week, a line from a Washington Post story from early 2022, when Vance was running for the Senate, began making the rounds. 

Written by  Simon van Zuylen-Wood and titled “The Radicalization of J.D. Vance,” the piece traced Vance’s transformation from a Trump-skeptical “working class whisperer” circa 2016 to a more far-right figure who was embracing Trump just a few years later. 

According to one source in that story, the critical reception to his movie had a great deal to do with it: 

When the “Hillbilly Elegy” movie came out on Netflix in 2020, it was not just critically panned but greeted with intense online mockery, and the tenuous cultural diplomacy achieved by the book seemed to unravel for good. (Rotten Tomatoes audience score: 83 percent. Critics’ score: 25 percent.) According to Vance’s best friend from Yale, Jamil Jivani, the wounding commentary was the “last straw” in his falling-out with elites.

The wildest thing about that, by far? The laughable notion that film critics are “elites.”

I’ve been a film critic for a long time, and I assure you, we’re not. 

I know that misremembered quote from Pauline Kael lives forever in the heads of many cultural conservatives. However, of the Tomatometer critics, many either review movies for free or nominal money and command no real cultural power beyond their contribution to the critic's score. 

In other words, the average film critic commands a lot less cultural power and is less in line with the term “elite” than a Yale Law School graduate who has worked in private equity, is a best-selling author, a sitting U.S. Senator, and is a major party’s nominee for vice president of the United States. 

And besides- most of the people who gave bad reviews to the Hillbilly Elegy movie weren’t panning J.D. Vance himself- several of them had the gripe that Vance’s book had something unique to say, while the movie had nothing to say at all.