This week on the pod we zig a little into our first film crit episode, and chat with local filmmaker Benji Wade about Hillbilly Elegy, a movie that has been on everyone’s lips since it came out in time for the election.

It’s the not-so-riveting story of how a poor white kid from Southeast Ohio overcame generational trauma through nothing but his own pluck and grit (or so the film would have you believe), attended Yale Law School, went to work for Peter Thiel — one of the great monsters of recent American history — and eventually moved back to Cincinnati to start a non-profit that helps, like, train unemployed coal miners and steelworkers how to code, or something.

Seems a little far-flung to what we usually talk about on RANGE, but the plight of poor people in extractive economies in Appalachia is pretty similar to the plight of poor people in extractive economies in the Inland Northwest, and this movie is a masterclass in blaming the poor for their plight.

So yeah, a topic ripe for RANGE. 

The movie is bad, but the conversation is good, and Benji and I took the time to cobble together a mountaintop worth of other actually good coal-country (and coal-country-adjacent) content for you to remove into your ear- and eye-holes.

That was a coal mining joke. You’re welcome.

Referenced in the episode

Review: Ron Howard's Rust Belt Saga Is Yokel Hokum

Review: Everything about Netflix’s Hillbilly Elegy movie is awful

Slavoj Zizek explains Ideology

What is “White Trash”?

Better things to watch than Hillbilly Elegy

Harland County, USA

Matewan

Coal Miner’s Daughter

Junebug

This Boy’s Life

Justified (prime Timothy Olyphant and Walton Goggins content)

Better things to listen to than Hillbilly Elegy

“Listen to Dolly Parton Instead”

Anything Loretta Lynn

Death in the West podcast

Better things to read than Hillbilly Elegy

Educated by Tara Westover

The Enchantments of Mammon by Eugene McCarraher

Goofs 

Bar none the best TV theme song ever

Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard

Get full access to RANGE at www.rangemedia.co/subscribe