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
bad theology aside its worth saying that he can’t even get his labels right. “eschatology” relates to religious doctrines concerning the final fate of humanity. what erickson is trying to discuss is “soteriology,” the term for doctrines of salvation
probably worth saying, as well, that in the dispensationalist eschatology of American conservative evangelical christianity, God whisks away the saved/elect and subjects the rest of humanity to seven years of escalating horror culminating in near total annihilation.
there is no real way to extricate this fantasy of the armed white property owner standing off against thieving hordes from either america’s settler history or from the deep-seated and pervasive antebellum fear of slave revolt
it is arguably one of the ur-american fantasies, something recapitulated again and again in our media and pop culture