Ron Howard’s Hillbilly Elegy debuted this month on Netflix, offering an undeniably grim portrayal of Appalachian southwest Ohio. To be fair, it is not quite the darkest portrayal of Appalachian Ohio on Netflix this pandemic year. That dubious distinction belongs to The Devil All the Time, a remorseless horror movie adapted from the novel by Donald Ray Pollock, depicting a freakshow of religious mania, sex abuse, suicide, and serial murder. While Hillbilly Elegy claimed to reflect urban Appalachian life in southwest Ohio, The Devil All the Time offered a slice of gothic fantasy set in the state’s rural southeast. Both films topped Netflix’s most-watched list on their first days of screening.
What the popularity of such brutal viewing says about America’s view of southern Ohio—and Appalachian Ohio in particular—I’ll let others debate. This review of Ron Howard’s adaptation of J.D. Vance’s controversial memoir is simply my two cents. Nor is it a review of Vance’s book. Others have written at great length on that account, most of them better qualified than myself. (Notably, Vance’s memoir inspired a critical collection of essays and writings: Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy (2019). And this December 3, Downbound Books, the UACC, and West Virginia University Press present “Don’t Cry for Us J.D. Vance,” an online public event with readings by Ohio authors sharing their perspectives of Appalachia: register here.) I will confess, my interest in Hillbilly Elegy is personal. Like many folks, I have witnessed the angry passions unleashed by Vance’s memoir. I’ve also taught Intro to Appalachia classes at Miami University’s Hamilton and Middletown campuses. The reaction of my students, often from the same demographic background, was striking. Some rebuked the book’s stereotyping of their culture, not to mention Vance’s conservative social critique. Others took pride that a working-class kid from Middletown, Ohio put his hometown on the map. These polarized opinions suggest why Vance’s work is so controversial. Many writers have traded in stereotype about the culture, but Vance’s background raises awkward questions of identity. Who gets to speak on behalf of Appalachia? Vance’s family, like many others, were economic migrants, moving to urban Ohio from rural Kentucky in the last century, and keeping a foot in both places ever since. Admittedly, Vance’s world is not the timeless Appalachia of scenic mountains, but it is Appalachian nonetheless. Sadly, the strangeness of Vance’s world explains Hillbilly Elegy’s phenomenal success. Director Ron Howard, a Hollywood liberal with a solid track record (Apollo 13, Cinderella Man), is just the latest in a long line of commentators who see Vance’s story, not as the story of a young man from Middletown, Ohio, but implicitly the key to understanding Trump’s America. Thus, Howard boils drama down to fable, sprinkling the ordeals of Vance’s family, including his mother Bev’s heroin addiction and numerous unstable relationships, with voiced-over narration explaining the meaning of the story. “My family’s not perfect,” concludes J.D. Vance (Gabriel Basso), “but they made me who I am, and gave me chances that they never had.” Throughout, the elder wisdom of J.D.’s formidable “Mawmaw” (a chain-smoking Glenn Close) is contrasted with the downward spiral of his addicted mother (Amy Adams). These relationships are at the heart of this film, which like the book’s subtitle, offers “A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis.” J.D.’s rise from poverty to Yale Law School and his mother’s eventual recovery offer some kind of happy ending, but the lack of explanation for this resolution is weirdly unsettling. Mercifully, J.D. Vance’s much-criticized sociological musings are axed from the movie (few viewers wish to be lectured to), but like it or not, his welfare critique lay at the heart of the book. Without this focal point, the movie struggles to make do with half-baked platitudes about family values. Admittedly, Hillbilly Elegy was better than its YouTube trailer, which strung together the film’s shoutiest moments. Ron Howard is normally a gifted director, but here inspiration escaped him. Amy Adams and Glenn Close gave strong performances, and Owen Asztalos (young J.D.) showed great acting potential. Arguably, Hillbilly Elegy’s ultimate failing is how it rides slipshod over history. As my friend Sam Ashworth (Middletown Historical Society) pointed out, the film contained several historical inaccuracies, great and small. Sam drew my attention to a quote by Stephen Stoll (Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia): “Seeing the world without the past would be like visiting a city after a devastating hurricane and declaring that the people there have always lived in ruins.” Among the details screwed up was Middletown’s Armco steel plant, depicted in the 1950s, displaying a logo not used until the subsequent decade. “Imagine the outcry if a detail like this had been overlooked in Ron Howard’s Apollo 13?” asked Sam, pertinently. GRADE: C-
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Each week, The Extraordinary Times catches up with leading folks in the local historical and cultural scene. This week it’s our pleasure to catch up with Jeff Suess. Jeff is the author of Lost Cincinnati (2015), Hidden History of Cincinnati (2016), Cincinnati Then and Now (2018), AAC 150: Art Academy of Cincinnati 1869-2019 (2018), and Cincinnati: An Illustrated Timeline (2020). His writing has also appeared in Edible Ohio Valley, the Marion Star, and Imagineers, Impresarios, Inventors: Cincinnati’s Arts and the Power of Her (2020). He is a reporter and librarian at the Cincinnati Enquirer where he keeps the archive and writes about local history. Jeff grew up in Modesto, California, and graduated from San Francisco State University. He lives in White Oak on Cincinnati’s West Side with his wife, Kristin, and their daughter, Dashiell. * How have you been keeping this year? I’ve been working from home most of the year. I broke my ankle in January, then was back to work for two weeks before the pandemic struck. Thankfully I can work from home for my job at the Cincinnati Enquirer, and my daughter has school online, so the whole family is together all day. That has been a bit of a challenge for work, but it has been a blessing to spend so much time together. I think this all makes us a stronger family. * Tell readers about your new book, Cincinnati: An Illustrated Timeline. The book showcases the key moments in the entire history of Cincinnati, from the indigenous mound builders to Fiona the hippo and everything in between. Sports, politics, iconic buildings, favorite foods, all the people and places and events that define Cincinnati. The real challenge was identifying which moments to include. Major historic events like the 1937 flood have to be in there, but for the last 50 years it is more difficult to figure out what will be important, what will have made an impact viewed 50 years from now. One of my goals is to be able to go back and forth through the timeline to see the connections over the years, how Procter & Gamble is rooted in Cincinnati’s history as a meat-packing center. How today’s racial relations are tied to unrest in the 1820s, 1840s, 1960s. The evolution of the city moving from the river to the basin, to the suburbs. As an illustrated timeline, the book includes more than 350 historic photos and images, many of them from the Cincinnati Enquirer archives. That was a challenge as well, to locate photos for every event and then to whittle down from the hundreds, thousands of photos to best portray the history. * Do you have a favorite image from the book, and why? I think my favorite is the photo of the old Mabley & Carew department store at Fifth and Vine Street, where you find Fountain Square today. It was taken not too long after 1906, because the Lyric Theatre is there. Someone had found the photo in a safe and donated it to the Enquirer archives at some point, and it is so beautifully crisp with so many tantalizing details to discover when you look at it. All the theaters and shops going up Vine Street, the early Fountain Square, the elegant Victorian architecture. Mabley & Carew has also become one of favorites in Cincinnati, how they elevated the entire Fountain Square area, with the store and the Carew Building across the street. It’s a photo of a Cincinnati I would love to visit. * As an adoptive Cincinnatian, what everyday things you appreciate that a Queen City native might take for granted?
As a transplant, I am still so fascinated by Cincinnati, and that curiosity leads me to things people overlook or have forgotten about. And I like to learn about those places and see what happened and why. Architectural gems like the Dixie Terminal building, the water towers at Eden Park, the Carnegie libraries, or Hughes High School come to mind. There is still a remarkable number of historic places that are still around if we are curious enough to look. * What does your job at the Enquirer generally entail? I have been working in the Enquirer library for more than 21 years. I keep the digital archives as well as the original photo archives, plus do research for myself and reporters. But I have taken on different roles, from writing about Cincinnati history, plus putting together galleries and videos, and posting content online. My role is always evolving. * Other than Cincinnati history, what do you enjoy reading in your free time? I like U.S. history in general. I recently finished Richard Snow’s Disney’s Land on the history of Disneyland. I am a fan of mysteries and science fiction, and this summer I started my daughter going through my entirely too large collection of Doctor Who books. I also love comics, and I am rereading Neil Gaiman’s Sandman with an online graphic novel group This pandemic year has been challenging for public events at Miami University’s regional campuses. Among many programs put on hold was a performance of Coal Town Photograph, which showcased poetry by Pauletta Hansel [bio below*] brought to life by Northern Kentucky’s Falcon Theater, plus original music by the multi-talented Raison D’Etre. Vaccine permitting, hopefully this event will be rescheduled, but meantime, The Extraordinary Times caught up with Pauletta for the following interview.
[* Pauletta’s eight poetry collections include Friend, Coal Town Photograph and Palindrome, winner of the 2017 Weatherford Award for best Appalachian poetry; her writing has been featured in Oxford American, Rattle, Appalachian Journal, The Cincinnati Review, American Life in Poetry, Verse Daily and Poetry Daily, among others. Pauletta was Cincinnati’s first Poet Laureate (2016-2018), managing editor of Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, the literary publication of Southern Appalachian Writers Cooperative (2010-2020), and is a Core Member of the Urban Appalachian Community Coalition. Pauletta offers writing workshops and retreats for children, published authors and everyone in between.] *What have you been up to this summer? This summer and fall have both been active seasons for me. My primary work is as a teacher of creative writing, mostly poetry and memoir classes I offer for adults interested in developing their writing, and a few guest artist gigs in schools and community settings. In the spring things came to a screeching halt. I was able to keep one class going virtually, as the class project was epistolary poetry (letter poems)—a bit of serendipity during the pandemic to be writing letters to each other when we were unable to meet. I wrote a lot of poetry this spring, and then in the summer worked on two separate manuscripts. Both have been accepted for publication, Friend, the epistolary pandemic poems, for this year, and I Tell You Now, a poetic exploration of the intersection of gender and place, for 2022. I appreciated the quiet time for writing and revising, but I found myself really missing people, so I spent the latter part of the summer teaching myself to translate my in-person classes to online. So now I am leading as many classes now as I did last fall via Zoom. There are pros and cons to this for sure, but one thing I have really enjoyed is being able to work with writers from all over the country, and especially with other Appalachian writers. * What led you to write Coal Town Photograph? I often tell folks, “I don’t write books, I write poems.” What I mean by this is that I usually draft and revise individual poems based on whatever interests me at the moment, without thinking about an overall book project. Even Friend, with poems that are both thematically and temporally related, was not written as a book, but as letters to other poets. Coal Town Photograph began to emerge as a book in the summer of 2017 when I was leading a poetry manuscript class for a small group of poets who were putting together their first books. I always like to work alongside my students—it is often my most productive time as a writer—and so I began to organize the most recent of my “Appalachian” poems into a manuscript. I thought originally it would be a chapbook of around 20 poems, but I wrote more poems during this time, and was also able to add other poems previously published in a book now out of print. So it may be more accurate to say, “I start by writing poems, but I end by writing a book!” Coal Town Photograph’s themes of childhood, Appalachia, family, movement, etc., are my lifelong interests as a writer—even obsessions, you might say. Many of the poems in that collection began when I had the opportunity to revisit some of the eastern Kentucky towns I grew up in. That juxtaposition of the memories and the current experience of a place is a powerful writing prompt. Once the book was completed, I was asked to do some work as a teaching artist in the high school I had attended. I spent several days in my home town and later began working on a whole new set of poems which ended up in the manuscript, I Tell You Now. * How did you come to collaborate with Falcon Theater and Raison D'Etre? When Clint Ibele of Falcon Theater contacted me about the possibility of Coal Town Photograph being part of their annual Falcon Takes Flight series, I was thrilled. I had attended several of their past performances, and am also a huge fan of the musical group, Raison D'Etre. Falcon focusses their readers’ theater series on Kentucky authors. Believe me, I am in some good company, George Ella Lyon and Maurice Manning among them. I believe Falcon had first heard poems from Coal Town Photograph when I read there as part of a poetry and music program organized Roberta Schultz of Raison D'Etre. All of this pre-pandemic, of course. May we live to see live theater, music and literary readings once again. * What was it like becoming Cincinnati's first Poet Laureate? I hesitated putting my name in the hat for the honor, primarily because I am not a much of a public poet. My own poetry is quite intimate, and my preference is to work with others in small groups where a true exchange can occur. So I had to spend some time envisioning what such a role would encompass for me, with my particular skills and interests. Once I had come up with a sort of mission statement the work was easier to craft: Bringing poetry to people, and people together through poetry is a pretty good description of my professional life before and after the laureateship; as Cincinnati’s Poet Laureate I had the opportunity to do it on a slightly larger scale, and hopefully, to help put in place some structures that will help sustain Cincinnati’s literary community. * How has the experience of migration shaped your understanding of the world? There’s a Welsh word “hiraeth,” which has been useful to me in thinking about my relationship with Appalachia, and about the Appalachian community’s relationship with other exiled peoples. I have heard it translated as longing for a home that does not exist. In her essay “Dreaming in Welsh” Pamela Petro states, “Wales is a poor, rural place of mountains and ribboning hills with empty underground pockets where its coal used to be…” Does that make you think of anyplace else? Appalachia, like Wales, was long ago colonized for its resources, and thus never had the opportunity to become itself. “To feel hiraeth is to feel a deep incompleteness and recognize it as familiar,” Petro says. When I worked with students in my home county of Breathitt County, I felt from them that same sense of longing for what might have been, even among those teens who believed they would stay. For me, there was never really a question of returning. Appalachia is always home, and home is a place that does not belong to me. That awareness brings me into this larger community of those who are displaced, whether it be from a gentrified neighborhood, a nation at war, or a family that cannot accept their “otherness.” We are all, in our various ways, wayfaring strangers. My hope, always, is that a recognition of this can help up find common cause. |
AuthorMatthew Smith, PhD (History). Public Programs at Miami University Regionals. Historian of Appalachia, the Ohio Valley, & the early American republic. Archives
February 2024
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