Inside JD Vance’s Hollywood

While the movies Vance alluded to cover a range of styles and genres — from Martin Scorsese’s historical epic Gangs of New York to the rom-com Forgetting Sarah Marshall — they tell a coherent story about his cultural outlook. He went on to explain that the film’s central relationship — between a Black-nationalist-minded father, played by Laurence Fishburne, and his son, played by Cuba Gooding Jr. — “spoke to me when I was a kid because I grew up at the time and I didn’t have my much of a relationship with my dad.” “ talks about, like, the importance of fatherhood, the importance of especially young boys having a father in the home — it’s like I got that from Boyz N the Hood,” Vance said. “A lot of his stuff about not letting financial institutions buy up all the stuff in your community — obviously, he’s talking about Black people in L.A. and not, you know, white people in rural small-town America, but I was like ‘Oh, that’s maybe the first place that I ever heard this idea.’” Pulp Fiction 1994 During a speech at the Faith & Freedom Coalition Breakfast in July, Vance borrowed a line from Quentin Tarantino’s cult classic to explain his Catholic religious faith to a room of conservative evangelicals. In his much-discussed foreword to Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts’ new book, Vance also draws on Tarantino’s film, writing: “In the classic American Film Pulp Fiction, John Travolta’s character, recently returned from Amsterdam, observed that Europe has the same consumer goods as America, but there it’s just a ‘little different.’ That’s how I feel about Kevin Roberts’s life.’” All this raises another question for Vance: Is it appropriate to try to kill a man for rubbing your wife’s feet? In one particularly introspective post from the days before he deployed to Iraq in 2005, Vance waxes nostalgic about the romantic comedy “Garden State,” writing, “I couldn’t watch Garden State because New Jersey’s landscape is so much like Ohio’s, the music is so relevant to my life right now, and the story of a guy returning home, realizing that home isn’t what it used to be, etc.