Bruna. 28. Bisexual. Brazil. I've got a film degree.
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That awkward moment when you find out another occasion that TPTB were bullshitting the fans to cover their own animosity.
Re: Jadzia not appearing in finale memories sequence.
"Avery wanted that look from day one. For us, the notion of the white man ‘holding us down’ is not a thing, but for Avery it was. I can’t even imagine what the poor man went through with those guys. With Rick Berman. It’s like they stripped him of his power. But then as soon as he got to be his physical image and stopped looking like a black Ken doll - I’m sorry, it’s true! - and got to look like his vision of Sisko, it was like night and day. He was suddenly a powerful cat and it was, like, ‘Whoa, I wouldn’t fuck with him!’"
—
Terry Farrell, discussing the change in Sisko’s look at the beginning of season 4 in Star Trek DS9
I’m at the part of The Fifty Year Mission in which the DS9 cast and crew are talking about how finally by season 4 Avery Brooks was allowed by the studio powers to look the way he wanted to look (aka the great hair migration). I had always stupidly bought the official explanation that Paramount didn’t want two different captains to be bald-headed. And I figured it was just executive stupidity. But reading this book with so many comments similar to the ones Farrell gave, I can see that the studio execs were fearful of the image of a powerful black man. That is still executive stupidity but of a significantly different and very problematic nature.
Thinking about it further, you can say that Benny Russell’s battle to bring Benjamin Sisko to life in the episode Far Beyond the Stars is similar to the battle that Avery Brooks had to wage to present Sisko in the way he believed was the correct one.
When I watch Ds9, I’m sometimes struck by how physical Dax’s character is. Terry Farrell walks with wide strides, she leans back on her arms, she sits down on chairs backwards. She’s using these little things that are coded male, but not in an obvious or stereotypical way.
Star Trek has a tendency to be stereotypical with male and female behavior. But Terry Farrell is using that, by making just these small changes in body language. So we don’t get outspoken (traditional and stereotypical) masculinity, like you might expect from some tv shows.
It’s only when I looked at the show for maybe the third time that I realized how much of Dax is created by how Terry moves. She is constantly laying the ground work for viewing Jadzia Dax as someone that is comfortable being man, or a woman, or neither, or both. Which is an important part of her character.
“Women are either good actresses or they’re beautiful.” - Rick Berman, at some point post 1993, speaking about the difficulty in casting Jadzia Dax in Deep Space 9
I’m just… dumbfounded. Really, truly, dumbfounded. Not that someone in Hollywood would think this, or even say it - we all know Hollywood is full of sexist morons. But that he’d let himself be quoted on it? Which at some point he did, because it was compiled into this book - The 50 Year Mission: Book 2 - and its got tons of quotes from everybody involved in Trek, living and dead.
I’ve only just scratched the surface of the book; its 864 pages. But just… wow. What a dumb thing to think, let alone say, you know? And this was the dude in charge of Star Trek for 19 years! Wondering what else I’ll find as I read…
