Oh Dem Watermelons

'Oh Dem Watermelons' begins with a shot held in silence for over a minute and a half (a very long time in a film only ten minutes long) of a melon positioned like an American football (its green exterior exactly matching the grass surrounding it) before Steve Reich's boisterous arrangement of the title song kicks in and the melon is eventually replaced by an American football swiftly kicked offscreen. Thus is established from the outset the rough and manipulative treatment melons are going to receive from their masters (and mistresses) in this film; for which a total of 15 were depicted variously stamped on, stabbed, machine gunned, blown up, squashed by a mechanical digger, dropped into a toilet and used as a sex toy by a topless female. Finally, they tire of this treatment, turn on their tormentors and are last seen disappearing into the distance in hot pursuit of them.

Other directors who subsequently addressed the issues raised by Nelson's film included the Uzbek Elyer Ishmukhamedov (b.1942) with a lyrical sequence of melons unleashed during a flood cascading and bobbing down a mountain stream and over a waterfall in 'Lovers' (1969); while John K. Marshall's (1932-2005) 'Bitter Melons (1971), focused upon the importance of melons to a small band of /Gwi San living in the arid landscape of the central Kalahari Desert in 1955 Botswana, where the principal source of water is tsama melons. (The blind composer Ukxone paid homage to tsamas by composing several songs about them; of these, his favourite - 'Bitter Melons' - was about a woman who learned from her Bantu neighbours to plant melon seeds in the face of protests from agriculturalists that wild melons taste bitter).

Melvin Van Peebles' (b.1932) 'Watermelon Man' (1970) and Fred Zinnemann's (1907-1997) 'The Day of the Jackal' (1973) both appropriated melons on mainstream Hollywood's behalf as a metaphor, verbal and visual. In the case of 'Watermelon Man' the metaphor plainly lies in the title. Zinnemann follows in the footsteps of Sir Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980), who had already explored the more visceral aspects of the melon's flesh-like texture when he employed the sound of a knife being thrust into a casaba melon during the shower sequence in 'Psycho' (1960); Nelson extended this in 'Oh Dem Watermelons' with a revolting shot depicting the 'evisceration' of a melon being gutted and genuine entrails pulled out of it. The exploitation of melons as mere cannon fodder continues in 'The Day of the Jackal' - in which the fleshy interior of a melon is instead employed to represent brain matter rather than intestines - when Zinnemann subjects a melon suspended from a tree both to the ignominy of being strung up like a mere shooting gallery duck while paradoxically it simultaneously represents the president of the French Republic himself; the head of General de Gaulle also representing the head of a leading member state of the E. E. C. The more physical Hollywood pro Richard Fleischer (1916-2006) further extends this confrontational approach to melons as expendable collateral damage in a wider game in 'Mr. Majestyk' (1974); in which he invests melons with financial rather than political stature in a sequence of classic Hollywood overkill depicting a bunch of goons in the employ of gangster Al Lettieri employing the tactics of shock & awe by machine gunning a warehouse full of melons and with it destroying both the pride & joy and the livelihood of the eponymous melon farmer hero played by Charles Bronson.

Melons continue to this day to be harshly treated by their masters. In Japan square melons have for about fifteen years been routinely created by placing a square, tempered glass box around them, into which they then grow; which makes them easier to ship and to fit inside smaller Japanese refrigerators. Five years ago however, spraying the growth accelerator forchlorfenuron on melons in Jiangsu province in eastern China caused them to explode "like landmines". So the fightback may yet be only in its early stages...