Is This America?

In 1970, in a social moment agitated by the hard fight for civil rights, Columbia Pictures decided to invite the African American director Melvin Van Peebles (1932—2021) to make Watermelon Man, based on a script by Herman Raucher. The story was surreal, but effective in its goals: Jeff Gerber, a white, middle-class business owner known to make racist and misogynistic remarks, inexplicably wakes up one day to find he is Black. Van Peebles had already achieved fame at certain film festivals for his film La permission, shot in Paris, about a romance between a Black American soldier and a young white Frenchwoman.

Herman Raucher intended his script to be a critique of the covert, patronising racism of a white middle class of supposedly liberal leanings, but Van Peebles shook things up further by his stroke of genius decision to cast the Black comedian Godfrey Cambridge in the lead role. Columbia Pictures and Herbert Raucher had wanted to choose Jack Lemon or Alan Arkin. This would have entailed the protagonist being in blackface for most of the film, before a final ‘redemption’ in which Jeff, having undertaken his expiatory journey, would reawaken white once again, but ‘cured’ of his racism. A moralism typical of Hollywood films at the time.

Thanks to Van Peebles’s decision, it is a Black actor who is made up as a white man for the film’s opening ten minutes. With Cambridge’s make-up and portrayal of Jeff, which verges on caricature, there is a rebalancing of accounts with the way in which Hollywood for many decades caricatured Black people, casting white actors to play Black characters or demanding that Black actors played their roles in the stereotyped, humiliating manner revealing of a racist gaze. One of the best examples of this ‘revenge’ is the scene in the café where Jeff Gerber makes some racist jokes to the elderly Black waiter, who in front of Jeff laughs subserviently, but behind his back makes fun of the cartoon-like stereotype of the exuberant white man. Justice is done to the actor Mantan Moreland who, during the 1930s and 1940s, had played supporting Black roles in line with Hollywood’s racist stereotypical gaze.

The way that “whiteness” reflects and applies a corrosive humour to the racialised mask that each of us wears, makes it an artificial construct rather than a normality. Being white is not synonymous with being American, but rather of a narrative of privilege that oppresses and discriminates against a section of the population.

By choosing a Black actor to play the lead, the film avoids the originally planned vision of Blackness as simply a temporary “nightmare”. Instead, a path is followed leading to a new self-understanding of what it means to be racialised, to have a racial identity constructed by the gaze of others. Gerber’s immediate reaction is literally epidermal, as he tries by every means possible to remove the colour from his skin. All of this provides us with hilarious scenes and dialogue typical of a sitcom, as the blame for the transformation is attributed first to a tanning light, then to soya oil. Next, Gerber comes face to face with his own prejudices when he realises that, as he goes about his usual daily business, he is now seen and judged in a different light. Running after the bus on his way to work is no longer just a funny exercise; now it holds the potential of being accused by the public of being a thief and subsequent arrest by the police. Entering a high-end restaurant is no longer possible and even his sexuality is objectified by a supposedly liberal Norwegian woman who, seeking in him the constructed narrative of Black men’s virility, ends up shouting racist insults when her advances are rejected.

Melvin Van Peebles also made another drastic change to the end of the film. Promising the studio that he would film two alternative endings, he ended up presenting them with only one. The protagonist becomes conscious of what it means to be Black and accepts this fact, before joining the fight for justice and empowering other Black people with a defence of Black Power. This had always been Melvin Van Peebles’s intention. Meanwhile, the criticism of apparently progressive white people remains present, with their liberal veneer cracking the moment they realise they must share their day-to-day with a Black person. Althea, Jeff’s wife, and his neighbours are the best examples of this. Indeed, within the logic of capitalism, the presence of a Black person in the neighbourhood brings down the house prices and they must be kept away by paying as much as possible. But for Van Peebles the solution was to be found in the actions of Black people themselves, and this remains the film’s final message.

Another interesting aspect of the film emerges from the director’s innovations: the odd inclined angles used during dialogue; the colourful, almost psychedelic filters; and, of course, the brilliant soundtrack, a mixture of jazz, soul, funk and rap written and sung by Van Peebles himself. The music crashes through the film accompanied by giant subtitles, with particular emphasis given to the main theme, “Love, That’s America”, containing the lyrics: “People run through the streets, blood streaming from where they been beat, and declaring, ‘Naw, this ain’t America, you can’t fool me’”. George Floyd reminds us that the hard irony of these words remains relevant today.

Audacious for its time, this film would achieve some commercial success, but Van Peebles preferred to opt for independent cinema, refusing a three-film contract from Columbia Pictures. His career in film would remain linked to the Blaxploitation genre with its African American leads, music and themes, going on to influence Spike Lee and John Singleton.