Inside Jd Vance’s Hollywood

Politicians have always been defined, at least in part, by their favorite movies. Woodrow Wilson had Birth of a Nation. Richard Nixon had Patton. Donald Trump has Sunset Boulevard and Citizen Kane.

The films that define the worldview of incoming Vice President JD Vance? It may be a toss-up between an indie cult classic and a sappy 2000s rom-com.

Vance got his start in national politics as an author and memoirist, but on the campaign trail he revealed himself to be something of a cinephile as well, dotting his speeches and public remarks with references to his favorite Hollywood films and TV shows (and no, not just Hillbilly Elegy or Lord of the Rings).

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.

Most obviously, Vance — who turned 40 this past August — is the first millennial to serve as vice president, meaning his cultural reference points are much more recent than those favored by the gray-haired generations that still dominate Washington. (The oldest film Vance referred to was released in 1991 — the year Mitch McConnell was sworn into his second term in the Senate.)

But more specifically to Vance, his cinematic references are drawn primarily from movies that are preoccupied with the seedier and less glamorous sides of American life, from the rise of gang violence in South Central Los Angeles to the spiritual ennui of the New Jersey suburbs. Taken together, the films Vance has publicly name-checked paint an ambivalent picture of an America beset by both material and spiritual crises — a far cry from the triumphant picture of the country that dominated the silver screen during Hollywood’s Golden Age.

In this respect, Vance’s featured films offer some insight into the worldview that has shaped his particular brand of nationalist-populist conservativism. Like many of his fellow travelers on the “New Right” of the Republican Party, Vance has argued that the next generation of conservatives can’t just focus on conserving what they see as valuable parts of America’s political and cultural heritage, which — as Vance’s favorite movies suggest — have been destroyed by darker cultural impulses. Faced with this cultural landscape, Vance has written, conservatives need to “rebuild” those traditions using an “offensive conservatism, not merely one that tries to prevent the left from doing things we don’t like.”

Here are the films — all of which Vance has publicly mentioned by name — that have shaped that mission.

Boyz N the Hood

1991

John Singleton’s 1991 twist on the classic coming-of-age drama follows a group of Black teenagers navigating life amid the worsening gang violence of South-Central Los Angeles. On its surface, the story wouldn’t seem to have much to say to a little kid growing up in post-industrial Ohio. But when Vance appeared on the Joe Rogan Experience in October, he credited the film with being “extremely influential to my entire political worldview.”

“I watched that movie a ton when I was like 8 [or] 9 years old, and I didn't realize how much that movie has had an influence on me until I watched it last night,” Vance told Rogan. 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."

“[The father] 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.

Vance also pointed to a scene from the film in which Fishburne’s character lectures his son about the importance of having Black-owned banks and businesses in Black communities, explaining that it shaped his own views about the causes of economic decline in rural America.

“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.

At the breakfast, Vance referred to a famous scene from the end of the film in which Jules Winnfield, a hitman played by Samuel L. Jackson, tries to convince his partner, John Travolta’s Vincent Vega, that God had intervened to shield him from a hail of bullets. Vance — who converted to Catholicism in 2019 — got visibly choked up as he recounted Winnfield’s claim that God’s presence is felt rather than seen.

“Jackson's character says, ‘Well, look, it's not about whether God changed Coke to Pepsi or found my car keys,’” said Vance, quoting the film. “‘What matters is I felt the touch of God.’”

That wasn’t the only high-profile instance in which Vance named-dropped Pulp Fiction, either. 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?

Gangs of New York

2002

 Politics aside, Vance seems to have a weak spot for gang movies — this one set in New York City’s Five Points neighborhood during the Civil War rather than in 1990s Los Angeles. On the campaign trail, Vance pointed to Martin Scorsese’s blockbuster — in which two street gangs, one led by American nativists and the other led by Irish immigrants, battle for supremacy in lower Manhattan — as a useful heuristic for understanding the potential downsides of mass migration.

“Has anybody seen the movie Gangs of New York?” Vance asked at a press conference in August, in response to a reporter’s question about his past comments tying previous waves of mass migration to the U.S. to higher crimes. “That is what I’m talking about. We know that when you have these massive ethnic enclaves forming in our country, it can sometimes lead to higher crime rates.” The lesson, he added, is that the U.S. immigration system should prioritize assimilation.

Vance’s invocation of the film seemed to delight some of his online critics, who quickly pointed out that Vance appeared to be siding with the film’s villain — the flamboyant nativist leader Bill the Butcher — against its immigrant hero and protagonist Amsterdam Vallon.

The film’s deeper lesson, though, comes at the very end, when Scorsese features a time lapse showing 1860s Manhattan skyline transforming into a modern metropolis — implying that all feuds, no matter how epic they may seem in the moment, are ultimately overshadowed by the never-ending advance of history. Vance might want to remember this part of the film the next time he decides to engage in one of his epic social media feuds.

Garden State

2004

 During the campaign, an intrepid internet sleuth dug up some old posts from Vance’s personal blog, written between 2005 — when Vance first deployed to Iraq with the Marine Corps — and 2010, when he enrolled in Yale Law School. 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. made me want to tear up.”

Yet there might be more to Vance’s affection for the movie than teen angst. The movie follows an aspiring actor named Andrew Largeman (played by Zach Braff) as he returns to his hometown of Newark, New Jersey, for his mother’s funeral — an occasion that dredges up Largeman’s ambivalent feelings about his home, his family and his budding career in Hollywood. Eventually, Largeman works through his ennui with the help of a quirky new love interest, played by Natalie Portman, and decides to stay in Newark and start life fresh.

In this respect, the movie revolves around a series of questions — about the meaning of home, belonging and family — that have shaped Vance’s life and politics. Throughout his public career, Vance has criticized the modern, globalized economy for concentrating economic and social capital in a handful of metropolises, forcing people from less vital regions to move far away from their families and hometowns. The result, Vance has argued, is a pervasive sense of cultural rootlessness, especially among economic elites — the same problem Largeman confronts in the film.

Now as vice president-elect, Vance has reacted strongly against that rootlessness, blending Trump’s “America First” nationalism with a kind of conservative localism premised on the idea that rootedness in a specific location is an integral part of American national identity. At his speech at the Republican National Convention, for instance, he pointed to his family’s cemetery plot in eastern Kentucky as evidence that Americans “love this country not only because it's a good idea, but because in their bones, they know that this is their home.”

Or as Largeman puts it in the movie, “Maybe that's all family really is. A group of people that miss the same imaginary place.”

Forgetting Sarah Marshall

2008

 
By his own admission, Vance is a bit of a hopeless romantic and a “wife guy” — just listen to the story he told on the Joe Rogan Experience about his bumbling effort to cook a vegetarian meal for his wife, Usha, early in their relationship. But it seems like Vance may owe at least some of his romanticism to the romantic comedy “Forgetting Sarah Marshall,” which Vance called “one of my favorite movies of all time” during an appearance on the Nelk Boys podcast in August.

There’s a deeper irony to Vance’s admiration of the film, though. The movie follows the post-heartbreak hardship of Peter Bretter, a floundering composer played by Jason Segal, who flees to an all-inclusive Hawaiian resort after his successful TV-star girlfriend, Sarah Marshall, dumps him. The twist: Marshall unexpectedly shows up at the same Hawaiian resort, arm-in-arm with her new rock-star boyfriend, played by Russell Brand.

In real life, though, it is Vance and Brand whose political paths have crossed. Like Vance, Brand has taken a somewhat circuitous route to the MAGA movement, having begun his political journey as a self-professed radical socialist and critic of corporate capitalism before gradually shifting to the right amid numerous accusations of sexual assault. During the 2024 campaign, he sat down for a lengthy interview with Tucker Carlson and made a splashy appearance at the Republican National Convention — where he actually crossed paths with Vance in downtown Milwaukee.

“It’s one of the few times I’ve been star-struck in my entire life,” Vance told the Nelk Boys.

Emily in Paris

2020 - Present

 During his appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience, Vance was in the middle of recounting a story about watching “some stupid show, ‘Emily in Paris’” on Netflix with his wife when he caught himself and interjected: “Sorry, I don’t mean to call that a stupid show. I think ‘Emily in Paris’ is actually a masterpiece.”

Superfans of this popular Netflix series, which follows a bubbly American marketing executive who lands her dream job in Paris, are likely to agree — even if the critics are not. (The show has been panned by the film press as “soothing, slow, and relatively monotonous.”) Vance’s appreciation for the show may be a sign that he’s embracing some lighter fare as he settles into middle age as the father of three young children. Or perhaps he identifies with Emily’s Francophilia: In an interview with POLITICO Magazine earlier this year, Vance said one of his primary political inspirations is the French statesman Charles de Gaulle, who led the French resistance during World War II.

But if there’s a deeper significance to this one, it may just be that as Hollywood opts for more mass-market content over the lofty cinematic epics of yore, even the vice president-elect of the United States isn’t insulated from the streaming service slop.