Thread by @jbouie

watching ROSEWOOD for the first time since i was a kid. two thoughts: 1) i saw this movie way too young the first time. 2) john singleton is doing some really interesting things with this film besides just depicting a horrific event of violence.

it is interesting, for one, that this movie comes out as world war ii remembrance has reached a peak, with lots of stuff depicting white americans as heroic on a world historical level.

it is interesting, in the same way, that this movie comes out 10 months before AMISTAD

basically, this is a movie that has to be read in the context of the overall culture of the 1990s, including the prominence of the trope of the dysfunctional black family and a very mainstream discourse of black pathology

from the start, this film is commenting on and inverting those things in a way that isn’t at all subtle once you are keyed into it

i’ll end this thread for now and pick it up tomorrow, when we finish the movie.

one of the things this movie does, and does well, is show how the right and ability to inflict violence on blacks was constitutive of white male identity. and how the democratic exercise of racial violence by whites bound the community together.

there is even a nod here to du bois’ idea of the “psychological wage,” with the white owner of the mill/farm giving his white workers the day off to search for the alleged black fugitive.

another related theme, pretty much illustrated outright with a stand off between two groups of white men, is the tension between the state’s monopoly on the use of force and the democratization of the right to inflict racial violence among white men

in the scene, a sheriff and posse from a neighboring town stands off against a white mob and tells them to go no further, they aren’t welcome. one of the men of the mob yells “this is no way to treat a white man”

the extent to which this movie is aimed directly at deconstruction white racial violence and male identity makes me even more convinced that you gotta “read” this in the context of 1990s world war ii remembrance.

absolutely wild that this (great) movie was made and also no shock at all that it was a huge flop