Watermelon Woman
At a glance...
- Directed by Cheryl Dunye
- Released in 1996
- Runtime 84 minutes
- Watched at home
- Final feelings: begging for Asian American cinema to take a page out of Cheryl's book here!
Watermelon Woman is obviously low-budget and has some roughness, but it tries (and succeeds mostly) to reach so much further than I was expecting. The fiction within the fiction about Fae Richards, supposing that she was real, and the quest to find a history that no one else seems to care about, interspersed with very down-to-earth Black lesbian life, interwoven with the still-true-to-life tension and drama between different groups of queers and our failures at combating anti-blackness ourselves is just really amazing to watch. Perhaps frustratingly for the original creators, Watermelon Woman still is so relatable and, at-times, so scathing in its criticism, that it doesn't feel like it's missed a beat when watched from the 21st century. Some of the practical trappings are different, sure, but I was not prepared to feel so implicated when Cheryl visits the Center for Lesbian Information and Technology, only to run into an org more focused on gatekeeping via strict adherence to its own myopic values than actually supporting the work of others. Some things never change, it seems.
It's worth still celebrating this movie even now because we still want more of what this has to offer. Every dimension of marginalization wants more "representation" in our stories but here we are being demanded to go one step further. Representation doesn't mean shit when you don't have permission to be anything else but representative. Deeply racist and hateful periods of our history had "representation" in their art and movies that existed just to reinforce the existing hierarchy. Watermelon Woman had in 1996 what plenty of "representation"-focused productions now are sorely lacking: a desire to do more than simply litigate well-known social differences to appeal to white audiences. This movie has hostility towards whiteness, this movie lives confidently in the virtue of its own being, and it's not at all interested in talking down to the audience and saying, "isn't it so hard to be like me?" Instead it plainly declares the source of the problem that faces its main character: an entire history of erasure, institutionally and interpersonally, mostly enforced by white people. Honestly it is divine perfection that this movie took out the credibility of the National Endowment for the Arts after its release. Of course even our beloved arts funding institutions are not safe to reactionary mouth-frothing at the most straightforward depiction of queer pleasure, all from a movie that's begging to be made irrelevant. A lack of budget does not have to mean a lack of ambition! I am so thankful Cheryl Dunye kept the ambition and balanced it with a great sense of humor to make such a profoundly earnest film. The fact that it ends with zero resolution is just so great! It feels so true to life! Sometimes your projects and your friendships just end up in limbo. Sometimes you come up against the wall of history and still make something anyway. Sometimes it feels like your work doesn't matter but you keep going in the hopes that this time, it might!