Watermelon Women Analysis

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The film Watermelon Women is a film that was one of the first of its time. The film is classified as an “Indie” film because it was independently funded and was a very low budget film. Cheryl is both the main character and the film director. Cheryl is on a journey to become a film maker but the only problem is that she doesn’t know what she wants to make a movie about. She is an African American woman that is lesbian living in Philadelphia and she realizes that there are no movies about women like her. When this movie was made there had been barely any African American actors and actresses appearing in films, so once Cheryl finds a movie she rents from the movie rental store she works at that has this African American women in it named The Watermelon Women she latches on to this lady and decides to make a movie about her. Once she finds out that the actress is also a lesbian Cheryl sees herself in her. She finds herself in media and finds someone that is very similar to her. Cheryl starts to get obsessed over finding out more about The Watermelon Women that she starts to lose relationships in her personal life. her friend Tamara calls her out for not being satisfied with who she is and wanting to be someone else. Her love interest is a more masculine and tries to act African American and I think that’s one of the reasons Cheryl is attracted to her. She’s uncertain about her life style. This journey that Cheryl takes to find out who The Watermelon Women is can be looked at as her trying to find her true identity. Cheryl is confused about her identity because African Americans or LGBT people were not represented in American film industry at that time. Cheryl uses cinema in a way to create and validate her personal identity. At the end of the movie we find out that The Watermelon Women was never a real person. The Watermelon Women was made out of Cheryl’s imagination so that validates that Cheryl was trying to make a point that African American LGBT were not present in the film industry. She was also using this film project as a way to understand herself better. Cheryl learns to accept who she is and learns that it is important to embrace your differences. The director Cheryl Dunye brings awareness to the changing times of having African American lesbians in the film industry. She creates a name for herself for making an Indie film that caused awareness to its viewers.

29 thoughts on “Watermelon Women Analysis”

  1. Thanks Alexia – your point about Cheryl’s friendship with Tamara (and how Tamara “calls her out for not being satisfied with who she is and wanting to be someone else”) is really interesting.

    I still have a lot of questions about Tamara’s character. Some of them are more basic questions related to narrative structure and characterization, like is Tamara a complex character – does she change in the film?

    But I also wonder about the future of Cheryl’s relationship with Tamara. At the end, in her last direct address to the camera, Cheryl says “Tamara, girlfriend – let’s just hope we can work things out soon.” She seems to be speaking directly to Tamara, but she leaves their relationship open-ended and uncertain. Toward the end of the film, Fae’s lover June reminds Cheryl that “our family will always only have each other.” Tamara and Cheryl seem like family . . . but I wonder if their relationship is salvageable.

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  2. I thought Tamera was a really interesting character in this film because she was also an African American lesbian and yet she seemed to have no interest in this project and the history of African American women in film. It was an interesting contrast to Cheryl’s seeming obsession with the project. Tamera was showing less and less interest in the project as the movie went on. It was confusing to me the whole time because it made it seem like she was devaluing the work that Cheryl was doing. Whereas Cheryl was making the project seem like a huge milestone in LGBT and African American history. I think it would make for a very interesting discussion to talk about the purpose of Tamera’s character in the film at all.

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  3. I like that you brought up the relationship between Tamera and Cheryl. I thought that their dynamic was very interesting, the fact that they had always been friends but now seemed to be at odds. I had a bit of a difficult time deciphering why this was though. On the surface it seems simply that Tamera does not like Cheryl’s new girlfriend, which is what I took it for, although this confused me because true friends would not usually be so extremely conflicted over something so superficial. But the way you put it- that Tamera is “calling her out” for being unsatisfied with herself really puts it into perspective. It exhibits a much deeper problem within Cheryl that is effecting her entire life and really puts the meaning of the whole film into perspective.

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  4. I found your point about Tamera calling out Cheryl for not being satisfied with who she is extremely relevant to the message I felt the film was trying to portray. We all struggle with self identity and trying to figure out who we are. In a time when race and associating as LGBT were not as accepted as they are today I can understand why Cheryl would have doubts about exposing who she is. The Watermelon Woman does an excellent job of exploring identity and the struggles we have in excepting our own identity. Cheryl spends a large portion of the movie trying to validate herself through the Watermelon Woman and I think you do a good job of highlighting that through your post!

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  5. In my opinion, t was difficult to understand how Cheryl and Tamara were even close friends to begin with. They seemed to have many conflicting interests. They often argued about their ideas, especially in regards to African Americans and lesbians. Although, their friendship was questionable for me throughout the film, I believe that this relationship helped Cheryl to grow. She came to realizations about her thoughts in comparison to her former best friend. She was able to let go of the bind of Tamara’s thoughts and truly begin to think for herself. Her identity became much better established and defined as the film progressed as her and Tamara began to drift apart.

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  6. Relating Cheryl’s personal identity problems with the mission to learn about the Watermelon Woman really represents one of the central themes of this film. During the 1990’s, members of the LGBTQ* community were not as widely accepted as they are today. For this reason — in addition to being black — it is clear throughout the film that Cheryl is trying to figure out who she is as an individual. Her relationship with the girlfriend, like you said, does a good job of helping Cheryl figure out what she does and does not like in a significant other. There are a lot of unique sub-themes that stem from the main plot of this film, but I think that connecting it to Cheryl’s quest for self identification is spot on.

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  7. I don’t agree that Cheryl in this movie is not comfortable with her identity or trying to validate her identity as a black lesbian woman. I think it’s often a safe and dismissive assumption about folks in the LGBTQ community that they are “struggling” with identity, but I don’t think this is true for everyone, and certainly not Cheryl in the Watermelon Woman. I would argue that she made this movie in order to illustrate that lesbian women of color face a lot of distinctive problems in that intersection or race and sexuality. And outside of that marginalization they struggle with the same things everyone else struggles with — friendships, jobs and money. I analyzed this move through an entirely different lens, and thought that the reason Cheryl was making a documentary about the Watermelon Woman was as simple as trying to validate the Watermelon Woman as a person and actress, that it was in fact a commentary on the lack of credit and inclusion for women of color in Hollywood during that time. I don’t think it had anything to do with Cheryl’s identity, but the two women certainly had parallels and that’s probably part of the narrative.

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