American audiences are gluttons for punishment. That’s the only logical explanation for the repeated tendency to be warned, at great volume, that a piece of pop culture is abysmally terrible—and then flock to it anyway and make it bafflingly popular.
The latest example is the surge in popularity of the Netflix film Hillbilly Elegy, the 2020 cinematic abomination—er, excuse me… adaptation—of J.D. Vance’s 2016 memoir.
Ron Howard’s film starred Gabriel Basso as Vance, a former Marine and Yale Law student, and Glenn Close and Amy Adams as his “Mamaw” and mother, whose addiction issues forces Vance to return to his Appalachia hometown and wrestle with his roots, just as he was trying to escape them.
