The Watermelon Woman draws upon "pseudo-realism, borrowing heavily from the documentary format" (Turoff). The viewer's relationship to the film's presentation of "truth"--that is, whether or not the viewer is aware that "the watermelon woman" is a fictionalized construction--pivotally influences the viewing experience. For example, I first viewed this film at a local cinema in the spring of 1997. During the entire film, I was unaware that Fae "The Watermelon Woman" Richards is a fictional creation of Dunye's; I was shocked to read in the credits an acknowledgment of the fictionality of this character. At the time, I believed that Dunye's inclusion of this information in the credits revealed that the filmmaker did not anticipate that viewers would necessarily realize that the black actress named Fae Richards never existed. For while Dunye deconstructs and satirizes the documentary form throughout the film, she also replicates it in a way that leads viewers not to question its verisimilitude. In fact, the Internet Movie Database even goes so far as to list the film's genre as "Documentary."
Since the time of my initial viewing of the film, I have learned that when the film was first screened, it did not contain any reference to the fictional status of Fae Richards, so the film's first viewers were not aware of this dimension of the film (Jackson and Moore 500). Conversely, some viewers do not have the privilege of seeing the film and sorting through this issue of the actress's fictionality for themselves. I saw the film a second time while in London in August of 1998. Although I was thrilled that such a film was being shown on British television (as part of Channel 4's "Queer Street" series), and although I was prepared to watch the film again from a position of already knowing its "secret," I was dismayed to see that the British weekly magazine Time Out directly indicated that Fae Richards was not a real person in its description of the film. I knew that British first-time viewers would approach the film much differently because they already were aware that its documentary was staged.
Thus, there are three possible viewing positions of the film: never learning that the documentary portions record a fictional subject's life; realizing while viewing the film, or learning during the film's credits that Dunye created the character of Fae Richards; and knowing about the actress's fictional status at the film's outset, for example, after having read a review of the film. (I am aware that this article itself, ironically, reproduces this last dynamic for readers who have not yet seen the film.) Another irony is that while the issue of secrecy and confession are typically associated with gay identity, this film does not conceal homosexuality, but instead contains a "secret" about the fictional nature of the subject of the central character's documentary. Having now watched the film for a third time on video, I am convinced that much of its power comes from the ambiguity of the figure of Fae Richards. Dunye leads the viewer to ask herself why she is unfamiliar with this actress, a questioning that has significant implications for thinking through the relationship among media texts, politics and history. Watching the film from the position of not knowing that the documentary subject is fictional enables viewers to appreciate fully the way that this film "create[s] a certain tension between the social formation, subjectivity, and representation" (Kaplan 138). [End Page 455]
Bobo reminds us that, "Within the last several decades black women have effectively written themselves back into history; they have retrieved their collective past for sustenance and encouragement for present-day protest movements" (36). In some ways, Dunye's film is situated within this tradition. However, Dunye's final remarks make clear that she was unable to retrieve this history she wanted to find; in the credits she tells viewers: "Sometimes you have to create your own history," explaining that "The Watermelon Woman is fiction." Yet although Dunye rewrites a history that is/was not there, she does so with a firm grounding in historical realities for black people, particularly black women, in this century. For example, Cheryl's search for information on the watermelon woman leads her to interview her mother and others who were part of the vibrant black club scene in Philadelphia in the interwar decades. Cheryl learns that black films were played before the Hollywood features at the early 20th-century black-owned cinemas from Lee Edwards, who tells her, "If they'd only played the black cast films, they would've gone out of business during the Depression. Black folks [in the'20s and'30s] wanted to see the Hollywood stuff with the stars, the costumes--all that junk." In such segments of the film, Dunye informs viewers about lost pieces of African-American history through her construction of Fae Richards' history and her fictional account of Cheryl's investigation of it.
The film liberally uses photographs in its documentary portions. The photograph is a textual form that supposedly signifies "this really happened" to the viewer; it testifies to the existence of people and events. Yet, in this case, the photographs have been created for this film, and the history they purportedly record is fabricated. In a further irony, these photographs are now objects of textual analysis themselves. A journal published in West Germany, Parkett, contains an article entitled, "Watermelon Woman: The Fae Richards Photo Archives." The abstract for this article specifies that it contains "A selection of photographs from a series created for use in Cheryl Dunye's film The Watermelon Woman." The abstract goes on to tell us, "Created in collaboration with Zoe Leonard, the photographs depict scenes from the life of a fictional character, Fae Richards." So the constructed figure of this black lesbian actress visually lives on, at least in the world of academic cultural criticism.
The feminist cultural critic Jeanie Forte, in the words of Jill Dolan, "suggests that because of its structural recognizability, or 'readability,' realism might be able to politicize spectators alienated by the more experimental conventions of non-realistic work" (43). This film draws upon this strategy of textual production. Both the film's narrative portions and the film's documentary segments contain realist aspects and are, as such, "readable" to the film's viewers. However, in the juxtaposition of these two "stories," the film enacts a postmodern deconstruction of both realist cinema and documentary forms. The film's metafictional elements, such as Cheryl's asides to the film's viewer, further serve to destabilize the film's realistic quality. And this critique of realism is also a critique of the racist politics often promoted by the mainstream mass media's realist presentations; as bell hooks explains, "one of the major problems facing black filmmakers is the way both spectators and, often, the dominant culture want to reduce us to some narrow notion of 'real' or 'accurate'" (Dash and hooks 31). The Watermelon Woman seduces viewers with realist elements, only to make us question our naïveté at the film's end, and in this way the film disrupts the naturalizing function of realist discourse.
This film's technical qualities, such as the use of montage, talking-head interviews, segments that appear to be from early film news spots, and film footage with an archival look, lead [End Page 456] viewers to perceive the text initially as based upon reality. They see all the film's characters as "ethnographic subjects" and believe the film to be "Dunye's casually taped, autobiographical video journal" (Jackson and Moore 500). This reading of the film goes against what film critic E. Ann Kaplan recommends for a "counter-cinema" such as feminist cinema (131). She argues that filmmakers
must confront within their films the accepted representations of reality so as to expose their falseness. Realism as a style is unable to change consciousness because it does not depart from the forms that embody the old consciousness. Thus, prevailing realist codes--of camera, lighting, sound, editing, mise-en-scène--must be abandoned and the cinematic apparatus used in a new way so as to challenge audiences' expectations and assumptions about life. (131)
The Watermelon Woman confronts realism not by presenting a film that radically breaks from realist form; rather, this film reworks Kaplan's formulation so that the challenge to viewers comes at the film's end, when we are often shocked to see that the documentary subject matter within the film has been constructed and when we thus must confront our own ideological investments that led us to misinterpret this aspect of the film.
In contrast, viewers who read about the film's fictional elements in reviews or who have previously seen the film with the final disclaimer included, are more able to appreciate the film's humor. In the words of Randy Turoff, the film is "savvy, wry, and self-consciously ironic." One way that the film employs humor is to enact a critique of what bell hooks calls "the Eurocentric biases that have informed our understanding of the African American experience" (Dash and hooks 39). Particularly through a scene featuring a mock interview of the white cultural scholar Camille Paglia, the film comments on the way that white scholars appropriate and treat condescendingly the work of non-white scholars. Paglia tells us,
Well, actually, the mammy figure is a great favorite of mine, particularly Hattie McDaniels' brilliant performance in Gone with the Wind. I really am distressed with a lot of the tone of recent African American scholarship. [cut] It tries to say about the mammy that her largeness as a figure is de-sexualizing, degrading, and de-humanizing, and this seems to me utterly wrong. Where the large woman is a symbol of abundance and fertility, is a kind of goddess figure.
Demonstrating the way that white critics often falsely bring their own life histories and experiences to bear on those of the non-white objects of their investigations, Paglia continues:
Even the presence of the mammy in the kitchen it seems to me has been misinterpreted: 'Oh the woman in the kitchen is a slave, a subordinate--' Well, my grandmas, my Italian grandmothers, never left the kitchen. In fact this is why I dedicated my first book to them. And Hattie McDaniel in Gone with the Wind is the spitting image of my grandmother, in her style, in her attitude, in her ferocity. It brings tears to my eyes. [End Page 457]
That I did not originally view this interview as a satire says a lot about my opinion of Camilla Paglia as a feminist critic, but the fact that almost all of the film's other initial viewers, college students and art house audiences, missed the irreverent and exaggerated portrayal here also speaks to the power of the film's precise simulation of the documentary form, right down to the title at the bottom of the screen at this interview's outset, "Camille Paglia, Cultural Critic." Alexandra Juhasz emphasizes that "many of the codes of documentary label, categorize, and imply understandings of authority," revealing that documentary images are not merely recording nor undermining traditional power relations, but rather, deepening them (98). Audiences have been taught to view the documentary's elements evidenced in The Watermelon Woman as indications of a person's credibility and expertise, and thus, initial audiences did not question this woman's authority. Additionally, because similar trends exist in academic criticism, where members of groups in power presume to speak for "marginalized" groups, Camille Paglia's monologue did not seem outside the realm of truth or possibility. As Bobo makes clear, there is "an unstated presumption that the only reliable information about [black women] is that collected by white observers" (11). Camille Paglia's character romanticizes representations of African-American women in her commentary; for instance, she completely elides the impact of slavery or issues of unequal power relations, yet viewers seduced by the realist coding of her presentation miss the film's implicit critique of racism in this section.
In the last point that Paglia makes in her "interview," the white scholar's actions are carried to their greatest point of exaggeration. As before, Paglia continues to speak rapidly, rarely pausing for breath, and to gesture frequently with her hands, in a parody of the ludicrous connections that some scholars often make in their work:
The watermelon, it seems to me, is another image that has been misinterpreted by a lot of black commentary--the great extended family Italian get togethers that I remember as a child ended with the men bringing out a watermelon and ritualistically cutting it, distributing the pieces to everyone, almost like the communion service. [cut] And I really dislike these kinds of reductionism of a picture of, let's say, a small black boy with a watermelon, him smiling broadly over it, looking at that as negative. Why is that not, instead, a symbol of joy? and pleasure, and fruitfulness? After all, a piece of watermelon has the colors of the Italian flag--red, white, and green--so I'm biased to that extent. I think that if the watermelon symbolizes African American culture, then rightly so, because look what white, middle-class feminism stands for--anorexia and bulimia--
In this way, the film shows us not only how women of color must go up against white control of signifying practices, but also demonstrates the oppressiveness of the racist interpretation of signs (as well as the ridiculousness of much of the esoteric ideas of contemporary criticism).
The Watermelon Woman again parallels Daughters of the Dust in that "part of what [the film] does is construct for us an imaginative universe around the question of blackness and black identity" in an examination that the director does "situate historically," as bell hooks comments to Julie Dash about her film (28). Dunye takes this imaginative creation and historical situating a step further, however, because she has had to create a history of a lesbian black celebrity; these women, too, are invisible in our received history of popular culture. After the Paglia interview, we see Cheryl interviewing white (lesbian-looking) women on the street. One says that she has [End Page 458] heard of Martha Page, but does not know the watermelon woman. Another adds, "If she's in anything after the 1960s, don't ask us, we haven't covered women and blaxploitation yet," again parodically pointing to the way that the institutionalization of women's studies and African-American studies have yet to transcend gendered and racialized stereotypes in their curriculums. The film then segues back to Camille Paglia, who tells Cheryl, "I'm stunned to hear that the director was lesbian or bisexual" and that "any kind of interracial relationship at this time [is] mind-boggling," remarks that reveal how heterosexism and racism often underlie the romanticization of the celebrated white creators of popular culture's representations. When Paglia tells Cheryl, "This is an astounding discovery that you've made," she seems jealous of the young black woman, even though she then wishes her good luck. The competition amongst cultural scholars is invoked in this exchange.
At film's end, Cheryl addresses the viewer. She speaks to the concerns raised in June Walker's letter, explaining to Walker that they have different experiences of Fae Richards and thus she means different things to each of them, as described above. Cheryl then elaborates about what remembering this actress means to her:
It means hope; it means inspiration; it means possibility. It means history. And most important what I understand is it means that I am gonna be the one who says, "I am a black, lesbian filmmaker," who's just beginning, but I'm gonna say a lot more and have a lot more work to do. Anyway--what you've all been waiting for--the biography of Fae Richards. Faith Richardson.
This monologue is followed by a series of images, including simulated filmstills and scenes from films, depicting the life of Fae Richards, in chronological order, narrated by Cheryl's voiceover. This "biography" is interspersed with titles giving the film's credits, and in the middle of this "documentary," the title that explains the fictionality of the character flashes by, rather quickly, I might add. Thus, we learn then that all of these "meanings" of Fae Richards to Cheryl--hope, inspiration, possibility, history--are, to some extent, illusions. Dunye had to make up a history of a black lesbian actress; in other words, she had to create her own hope, inspiration and possibility through the creation of a history that was not, but could have been, in some ways should have been, there. However, this undoing of the power of the influence of Fae Richards is not total. For Cheryl's ending statement, while spoken by a fictional character about, we soon learn, another fictional character, documents a real black lesbian filmmaker, Cheryl Dunye, who has acted on hope, inspiration and a sense of possibility through her (meta)fictional text. Thus Cheryl's declaration that she will be the one who says that she is a black, lesbian filmmaker is found to be true in Dunye, and in the end we are left to ponder just what effort it took for her to realize that proclamation, to reflect upon the invisibility of black lesbians in American popular culture.
Laura L. Sullivan is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Florida. Her essays have appeared in Computers and Composition, Kairos, and SECOL Review, as well as in numerous anthologies.
