In Black Women as Cultural Readers, Jacqueline Bobo asserts that "Black women are . . . knowledgeable recorders of their history and experiences and have a stake in faithfully telling their own stories" (36). In her first direct address of the viewer, Cheryl speaks to this imperative as she muses about what subject to use as the focus of her film: "I know it has to be about black women, because our stories have never been told." As this remark indicates, Cheryl Dunye recognizes that the voices of black women have been absent from the dominant cultural production of texts in this century; her film seeks to address this elision.
Recent cultural critics point out that the primary images of black women in film have been largely harmful and inaccurate stereotypes. Bobo explains that throughout the history of Hollywood cinema, we find "a venerable tradition of distorted and limited imagery" of representations of black women, who have been limitedly characterized "as sexually deviant, as the dominating matriarchal figure, as strident, eternally ill-tempered wenches, and as wretched victims" (33). Bobo specifies that within this last category, classical Hollywood portrayed black women as domestic servants, while more recent texts focus on black women as "'welfare' mothers" (33). In The Watermelon Woman, viewers are exposed to this history while they are also asked to critique it.
The film's central character, Cheryl, is fascinated by the unknown black actresses of early Hollywood cinema, while her friend Tamara chastises her for her interest in "all that nigga-mammy shit from the'30s." In her first monologue about her documentary, Cheryl tells viewers that she has been viewing tapes of 1930s and 1940s movies that have black actresses in them, exclaiming that she is "totally shocked" to discover that "in some of these films, the black actresses aren't even listed in the credits." In this way, Dunye the filmmaker comments on a real phenomenon, the historical invisibility of black women in film as well as the devaluation of their labor and identities, before she introduces us to the (fictitious) film that currently has her character Cheryl's attention. Cheryl relates that when she first watched this film, she "saw the most beautiful black mammy, named Elsie." Clearly intrigued by this actress, Cheryl insists that she show us a clip. Yet the "clip" from the video is typically racist and demeaning, containing a Civil War scene in which the mammy comforts a white woman, "Don't cry Missy, Massa Charles is coming back--I know he is!" This constructed excerpt is familiar to us, as heirs to a media culture that routinely assigned black actresses to such roles, not that many decades ago, as emblematized by Hattie McDaniel in Gone with the Wind (1939). While Cheryl is aware of the exploitation of black women in cinema, she is still seduced by these images. As she explains to the viewer, she is going to make a film about this actress, known as "the watermelon woman" because "something in her face, something in the way she looks and moves, is serious, is interesting."
Bobo notes that "Black female creative artists bring a different understanding of black women's lives and culture, seeking to eradicate the harmful and pervasive images haunting their history" (5). Dunye's film directly acknowledges the negative effects of the oppressive stereotypes with which black women have been imaged in the history of film. The title of the Fae Richards' film with which Cheryl is most fascinated is telling in this regard, Plantation Memories. Through mechanisms such as the naming of this (fictional) film, Dunye comments on the historical continuity of the oppression of black women. She reflects how the legacy of slavery affects the lives of black women in the 20th century (and how this legacy also shapes [End Page 449] the representations of such lives). She also reminds us that early stereotypical depictions of black women continue to impinge on the lived experiences of black women today and continue to delimit the options available for black women producers of contemporary cultural texts.
In the case of black lesbian women, however, what is "haunting their history," to use Bobo's phrase, is not so much a history of damaging and false images, but, is, instead, a certain absence of participation in the representations of the mainstream media. Jewelle Gomez comments on the black lesbian's "invisibility in American society" and explains that black lesbians "are the least visible group not only in the fine arts, but also in the popular media, where the message conveyed about the Lesbian of color is that she does not even exist, let alone use soap, drive cars, drink Coke, go on vacations, or do much of anything else" (110). Thus, Dunye's film serves first to document the existence of black lesbians, in much the same way as Julie Dash's film Daughters of the Dust (1992) was unique in featuring a group that is not typically the visual or diegetic focus of most films--black women. As bell hooks comments in a dialogue with Julie Dash, "To de-center the white patriarchal gaze, we indeed have to focus on someone else for a change. And . . . the film takes up that group that is truly on the bottom of this society's race-sex hierarchy. Black women tend not to be seen, or to be seen solely as stereotype" (40). Dash and hooks discuss the discomfort of some viewers of Daughters . . . in having to "spend . . . two hours as a black person, as a black woman" (40). While black women flocked to the film in droves (Bobo 9), black men and non-black viewers needed to connect with the film through mechanisms other than direct identification (Dash and hooks 40). Viewers from these subject positions were thus called upon to be more actively involved in the process of textual reception.
Dunye's film likewise calls upon an active viewer, but with the added dimension of sexual orientation. For if the black woman has been invisible or stereotyped in popular culture, the black lesbian woman has been even more invisible, and when present, this figure has caused even black women discomfort. (For example, Dash reports that the actress who played one of the black lesbian lovers in her film, Yellow Mary, later denied that her character was gay (Dash and hooks 66).) The Watermelon Woman foregrounds black lesbian identity throughout, but it does so in a way that invites the reader to connect the history of the black lesbian actress who rose to fame through a series of denigrating roles as servant and slave, with the present black lesbian filmmaker before us, Cheryl Dunye, who is playing a version of herself.
For example, in scenes filmed in Cheryl's home, the tape of Plantation Memories plays on the television, while Cheryl, a bandana tied around her head, lip syncs the mammy's part in the film's scene, exaggeratedly mimicking the fawning pretense of the black servant played by Fae Richards. Likewise, in another series of scenes in the film, Cheryl sits in front of her video camera, holding several postcards and pictures of the Watermelon Woman in her hands, hiding her face. The camera is tightly focused on the images of the Watermelon Woman that Cheryl leafs through, showing these pictures to the viewer, but Cheryl is visible in the background, an eye peering around these representations of the actress, a gesture of connection. Yet in the end what we have is a constructed history connected to a constructed but "real" figure, Cheryl the character standing in for Cheryl Dunye the filmmaker.
Commenting on the uniqueness of Daughters of the Dust, hooks notes that there are "very few other films where the camera really zooms in on black women's faces" (52). Dunye also employs this technique, and there are many scenes in which the faces and bodies of black women, in this case black lesbians, are prominent. These typically invisible bodies are rendered visible in a number of ways. First, there are many closeups of Cheryl in the segments where she directly [End Page 450] addresses her video camera. Second, there are explicit love scenes that break new ground. For while viewers of alternative cinema have previously seen the naked bodies of white lesbians, such as Patricia Charbonneau and Helen Shaver in Donna Deitch's Desert Hearts (1985), and even including The Watermelon Woman's Guin Turner who starred in the white lesbian film Go Fish (1994), love scenes that feature black lesbian women are rare. Patricia Rozema's When Night Is Falling (1995) is a notable exception in this regard, as it depicts a romance between a black lesbian woman and a previously straight white French woman. However, while that film's focus is on the white woman's "conversion" to lesbianism, The Watermelon Woman centrally engages the interracial dimension of its lesbian romances. The subjects of Cheryl's interviews about Fae Richards debate the nature of her relationship with Martha Page, and Fae's last lover, June Walker, refers to Page as "that white woman." More relevant to this discussion is the way that Dunye's film visually highlights the racial aspect of the lesbian relationship between Cheryl and Diana, in scenes technically reminiscent of Spike Lee's Jungle Fever (1991). Viewers are treated to tight close-ups of Cheryl and Diana's black and white bodies pressed together in explicit sex scenes. Their hands roam across each other's naked bodies as the women kiss. At one point, the camera zooms in on the interlocked black and white hands of the two characters in bed. In this way, the film not only requires that black lesbians be acknowledged; it also documents the existence of interracial lesbian romances. 1
