The Watermelon Woman: Faking It/Making It

Unsurprisingly, The Watermelon Woman was born of Dunye’s own stymied investigations into Black film history while studying at Temple University. She found that early U.S. cinema seemed to systematically omit credits for Black actresses, usually relegated to mammy roles. By the time she started to work on The Watermelon Woman, she had already helmed several experimental short films exploring Black and lesbian identity and feminism, including the 1990 autobiographical project Janine, excavating her teenage relationship with a wealthy white girl. This personal work teases at the uneasiness of racial and queer identities: Is who I am what I desire? If Van Peebles’s Watermelon Man must refigure his life according to societal expectations of Black men, Dunye’s Cheryl struggles to embody her Black lesbianism according to the expectations of Tamara, Stacey, and then Diana. Dunye calls upon the film within a film—Cheryl’s documentary—to sort through this conundrum of self-invention. In her search for the actress who played the Watermelon Woman—whose name, she learns, is Fae Richards (Lisa Marie Bronson)—Cheryl begins interviewing scholars of feminist history. Notably, the famously contrarian cultural critic Camille Paglia plays herself, speaking with her trademark exclamatory confidence. Paglia, in a kind of self-satire, proffers a positively spun theory of the mammy, yet—like the other interviewees—has no knowledge of the Watermelon Woman.

The missing archive is a persistent theme in Black American art, from the unknown stories of enslaved Africans kidnapped across the Atlantic to the suppressed histories of Black radical activists of the mid-twentieth century. Imagining those contents has led to constant renewal within Black aesthetics, including with Julie Dash’s 1991 film Daughters of the Dust—which emphasizes alternative forms of Black mythmaking, melding invented symbols and actual history while very loosely following a narrative structure—and Saidiya Hartman’s 2019 book Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval, a deeply researched literary retracing of forgotten and discarded histories of rebellious, working-class Black girls’ lives, as well as with experimental visual works by artists Jacolby Satterwhite, Doreen Garner, Arthur Jafa, and Khalik Allah. Dunye, however, works from a more conventional formal palette, playing instead with the ideas and assumptions that convention elicits. It’s a strategy in many comedies, but you also might call it a queer practice: taking things as they are and twisting them. When Dunye conducted research for The Watermelon Woman at the Lesbian Herstory Archives and the Library of Congress, she found she was unable to use relevant documents in her film for an affordable price. So, instead, working with artist Zoe Leonard, she staged all the archival photography seen in The Watermelon Woman. In one scene, Cheryl visits the cheekily titled Center for Lesbian Information and Technology (CLIT), where a frazzled archivist (a cameo by writer, activist, and AIDS historian Sarah Schulman) rifles through disorganized boxes—it’s a funny bit that also references the limitations involved in The Watermelon Woman’s production. In Dunye’s second film, the bleak prison drama Stranger Inside (2001), made for television, she would continue to draw on documentary methods, pulling again from academic research—this time the work of abolitionist scholars—and working with real female inmates to develop the script.

At CLIT, Cheryl finally happens upon a strong personal link to Fae: an autographed photo of the actress signed to June Walker (poet Cheryl Clarke), who, it’s implied, was more than a fan. The confirmation that Fae was herself queer breaks open a string of associations for Cheryl, and the project becomes more than a puzzle to solve—it turns into a beacon in her own life. Her findings recall her relationships with Tamara, from whom she increasingly grows apart, and Diana, whom she barely knows at all. When Cheryl first came upon Plantation Memories, she assumed that the film’s white lesbian director, Martha Page (The Watermelon Woman coproducer Alexandra Juhasz), was Fae’s secret girlfriend. But in a letter to Cheryl, June, who’s Black, redirects her; the compelling part of Fae’s story isn’t her work with Martha but rather her life as a Black artist and lesbian, which included a long-term relationship with June. Fae struggled against the prejudice of the mainstream film industry, eventually finding a haven in all-Black productions, and lived out the rest of her days in domestic bliss with June in Philadelphia. What is Cheryl avoiding by seeking out an ultimately alienating relationship with the self-absorbed Diana? Diana has a huge, nicely decorated apartment and “volunteers,” notably for a charity that works with poor Black youth—is Tamara right in saying that Cheryl is aiding in her own fetishization by taking Diana seriously? If Fae could escape that fate by leaving mammy roles behind for a more obscure, yet more artistically satisfying, career, then why can’t Cheryl finally fall into step with her old friend?

Dunye doesn’t offer easy answers: Cheryl and Diana are badly matched not simply as a result of race and class but because their attraction is driven by curiosity rather than recognition. Soon, Cheryl begins cringing at Diana’s pronouncements, such as “Actually, my father’s sister’s first husband was an ex-Panther. His name was Tyrone Washington!” Whether or not Diana is fetishizing Cheryl, specifically, it becomes apparent that Diana’s proximity to Blackness has provided her a kind of “cred” she can’t acquire from her rich, white circles, and yet she’s happy to use both to get her way. Here, Cheryl becomes something of a chump, getting played by yet another suspect white woman, as Tamara lamented during their last argument. Yet, in rejecting Tamara’s call to an acceptably Black lesbian domestic life, Cheryl asserts an artistic freedom, one that Dunye enthusiastically delivers on with The Watermelon Woman: the freedom of invention.

After Stranger Inside, Dunye directed a few more features, including two cowritten with Schulman: The Owls (2010), a crime thriller featuring performances by Turner and fellow Watermelon Woman alum V. S. Brodie, and Mommy Is Coming (2012), about a lesbian couple trying to spice up their sex life outside of their relationship. Like The Watermelon Woman, these were low-budget features for which Dunye relied on the help of friends, especially other gay and lesbian artists and filmmakers. She then took on a tenure-track professorship, and it wasn’t until 2017 that she would be able to return to directing, for television shows including Ava DuVernay’s drama Queen Sugar and several others helmed by Black artists, such as Moonlight cowriter Tarell Alvin McCraney’s David Makes Man and Misha Green’s Lovecraft Country.

It’s easy to lament the level of improvisation and compromise Dunye has been required to embrace in her filmmaking career, especially during a time when Black lesbian perspectives weren’t themselves embraced in mainstream or even independent-film circles. But The Watermelon Woman has outlasted a moral panic as well as Hollywood neglect: it’s still screened in repertory theaters and at universities, is part of the Museum of Modern Art’s film collection, and in 2021 received the Legacy Award at the Cinema Eye Honors. It’s an endlessly revealing film, with the power to surprise and invigorate audiences who are seeing it again or for the first time. That’s in large part because the kind of dexterity and imagination that Dunye had to display in making The Watermelon Woman also happens to be the film’s driving narrative force. In the end, Cheryl doesn’t stay loyal to a fixed idea of identity but to the freedom of making things up as she goes along. Her methods aren’t necessarily superior to Tamara’s, but they’re her own.