Watermelon Man, Transparency and Andy Bernard

Today in class we talked about transparency, which is when your identity or membership in a certain group is present but you don’t see it. Professor Parham asked us to think about when we are transparent to our own selves. I think that at one moment in particular in Watermelon Man this idea comes across, when Jeff Gerber goes to visit his doctor…

“It’s a nightmare!”

Did anyone else think Watermelon Man was absolutely terrifying? I found the whole viewing experience to be jarring, with the weird fast cuts and stilted dialogue and manipulations of color and the nutty honky tonk-ragtime fusion soundtrack.

I guess I ask a question that is a lot like my exam question: do you think the director made the movie like this on purpose, or was he just experimenting with style and ended up making a choppy movie?