Movie Review – The Watermelon Woman

The Watermelon Woman (1996)
Written & Directed by Cheryl Dunye

The intersection of queerness and Blackness is where a lot of contemporary culture has emerged from. When watching Paris is Burning, I noticed how much of their slang is now part of American slang, particularly among Millennials and Zoomers. It’s nothing new. Elvis’s entire career was started by co-opting Black music and putting it with a white face. Rap/Hip hop has transcended its roots as a purely Black musical form. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with deriving inspiration from another culture to make art as long as the artist actively acknowledges the cultural roots and adheres to authenticity rather than appropriation.

Black women have been at the focal point of American culture since the first Africans were enslaved and forcibly brought to America’s shores. They served as the cooks and nannies to many wealthy slave-owning households and received nothing but living hell as thanks for their labor. The Southern cuisine I enjoy, particularly the biscuit, is something that would not exist without Black women. Finding ways to feed yourself and your community with less than a pittance given to you by a slave-owning ghoul was an accomplishment. It always irks me when I come across some “Southern fine dining” restaurant because I think that’s the antithesis of that style of food. It is food for the masses, not for the elite. 

Take the watermelon, for instance. Before its place as a racist trope, watermelons were originally a profitable and easy-to-grow cash crop for newly freed Black people in the American South. They were seen as a symbol of self-sufficiency, of newly freed people able to sustain themselves separate from those who once held them back. But of course, white Americans couldn’t let it be; they had to be hateful. So in the late 1860s, magazines were already publishing grotesque depictions of Black people as “simple-minded” because they seemed satisfied by a watermelon and a good rest. This continued to be warped and twisted through the obscenity of minstrel shows, and it remains one of the pathetic slights thrown out by the brain-dead racist chuds of America. 

In “The Watermelon Woman,” we follow Cheryl (Cheryl Dunye), who works at a video rental store in Philadelphia. The rest of her time is spent researching depictions of Black women in films of the 1930s and 40s. She wants to make a documentary about these performers showing how racism held them back from getting roles beyond that of kitchen workers and “mammies.” She watches an obscure film titled Plantation Memories, which starred someone credited only as “The Watermelon Woman.” Despite the production & script limitations, Cheryl is impressed with her performance and wants to know more. So she embarks on a journey to discover this actress’s name and history.

The film within a film and its actress are inventions of writer-director Dunye, and it came to her in 1993 when she found Black women were often not fully credited in films from this period. It would be near impossible to identify and pay respect to each of them as records connecting roles to identities, especially for marginalized people, were often lost to time. To fully explore Black identity in film, Dunye created a fake actor with an entirely invented history that paralleled the fragments of other real-life performers. There was even a 78-photo collection created for the film that depicts the life & times of Fae Richards that was auctioned off to help fund the film’s production.

But what does this have to do with Pride Month, you may be asking. Dunye is a lesbian, another identity she reflects in the story of Fae Richards. Cheryl learns that Fae was well-known in Philly as a singer in clubs for “stone butches.” It’s also heavily suggested that Fae was in a romantic relationship with the female director of Plantation Memories, the also-fictional Martha Page. Throughout the movie, Cheryl becomes romantically involved with a white woman named Diana after the two meet in the video rental store. Cheryl’s friend and co-worker (and also a Black lesbian), Tamara, disapproves of Cheryl’s relationship with Diana, which becomes a big point of contention between them. Tamara believes Diana has a Black fetish based on her dating history and thinks Cheryl aspires to be “more white.” The relationship of these women serves to parallel the imbalanced romance rumored between Fae & Martha.

The Watermelon Woman doesn’t end with a firm conclusion, but that’s the point. The trail runs cold, and Cheryl has few leads left to pursue. Fae’s still-living sister gets incredibly angry when it’s suggested that her sibling is gay and refuses to talk anymore. A woman purported to be one of Fae’s lovers falls ill and is hospitalized, unable to give Cheryl more information. Dunye reflects on the reality of doing forensic work of this kind and how Black people were actively being erased and forgotten. In that way, white people could fake a history in which they were solely responsible for all arts & achievements. It becomes even worse if the Black person was a woman and even worse if they were queer. The more marginalized communities a person belonged to, the more they were crushed down and erased.

Cheryl Dunye’s work as a director reminded me a lot of Charles Burnett’s (she cites Killer of Sheep as a significant influence). It is episodic while still having a narrative arc. Interactions between characters feel theatrical rather than cinematic, which completely works in a more intimate, character-centered piece like this. Dunye also does an incredible job directing her actors. Everyone feels authentic, and most of them are playing characters similar to themselves to help with that. 

Outside of Black filmmakers & artists, Dunye lists the late Chantal Ackerman as an influence which you can see in the way women’s lives are centered in this film. As a cis straight white guy, I was interested to see social interactions between people entirely unlike myself, the way within even the Black lesbian community, there was such rich diversity in personalities and relationships. There is a horrible tendency in the West to view things as monoculture. While there are commonalities between people in marginalized communities, they certainly get along about as often as white people do with each other. 

There’s a reason behind the recent backlash against all things “woke” by the reactionary masses. It is mainly a desperate attempt by those in power to hold on to our institutions rather than allow a radical change to transform society into something better for everyone. It’s not new; they are just getting louder about it because they are in a losing position. I think my generation and younger don’t feel insecure about allowing people who are unlike us in some regard to having a presence in society and be given due respect. There isn’t some finite supply of freedom that will run out if Black or queer people are allowed liberty. The fear of those in power is that a day will come when the racist tropes & hate-mongering fail to work anymore, and everyone sees themselves as a collection of unique identities to be celebrated and just another human being going through the same struggles as anyone else. Everyone can be known in that time, and no one will be pushed to the side or erased from the record.