Hidden Figures (2016)
Broadly speaking, Hidden Figures is a great compliment to The Astronauts Wives Club a television miniseries from 2015 that I previously reviewed. Like that miniseries, Hidden Figures offers us a glimpse into an aspect of NASA’s history that has gone unnoticed by most the public.
Behind the famous Mercury Seven were the mathematicians and engineers that helped design the rockets and calculate orbital trajectories. Of course, we see von Braun pop up often, both in documentaries and docudramas that cover the space program, and when we see other scientists working studiously on a space capsule or writing mathematical formulae on a chalkboard, we generally only see White men in these roles. As a casual fan of space history, it’s certainly something that I took at face value and never questioned. The America of the 60s was a turbulent time, and despite the space race being one of the many fronts in the war between the forces of Good and Evil, it was just an unfortunate fact of life that the forces of Good happened to practice systemic racism.
The Astronauts Wives Club certainly did nothing to dissuade from that belief, featuring a potential Black Astronaut who will never be given the chance to fly into space and a hotel maid who can only dream about a life outside of servitude. There was no mention of the women who contributed directly to the space program by performing calculations or running the newly installed mainframe computer. We are just left with the impression that Black Americans were left out of NASA in the 60s entirely.
This context makes Hidden Figures’ attempt to celebrate the contributions of Katherine Johnson, Mary Jackson, and Dorothy Vaughan extremely admirable. Feminist scholars often speak about the double burden that women of colour often face in America, and the film certainly shows us how these women have to suffer the indignity of not only being treated poorly because of their gender, but also because of their race. But despite all of these problems, all three women are able to find a way to defeat the systemic racism that seeks to oppress them in order to make important contributions to the space program and become integral members of the NASA team.
All of this is great, and I don’t want to take away from the important contribution that the film makes to adding to our understanding of the history of space exploration. But I think it’s fair to talk about the didactic manner by which the film explores systemic racism. Every challenge that the three main characters face is an opportunity for an authority figure to check their privilege, and the one moment that stands out the most was used as a trailer moment:
At 1:50 in the trailer, we see Kevin Costner, as the fictional leader of the Space Task Group Al Harrison, destroy a sign that reads “Colored Ladies Room”. What the trailer doesn’t show is Costner’s one-liner at the end of that scene: “Here at NASA, we all pee the same color.”
The film is filled with moments like this one (albeit not as dramatic), where a White authority figure comes to understand an injustice that one of the characters faces, and then learns to become a better person as a result. And while these lessons might still be important to learn in light of the political climate in the United States today, filling the film with so many of these moments can’t help but make the film feel heavy-handed in its approach.
Compare this to an earlier depiction of Katherine Johnson on the television show Timeless (in the episode “Space Travels”), which uses its time travelling premise to show us a contemporary character explain Johnson’s historical importance without having to tell us what we already know about race relations in the 60s:
The other criticism that I have, which is admittedly less important, is that math and technology is essentially rendered into Star Trek-ian technobabble. The film insists that these characters are smart by having them baffle and impress their White peers. Johnson’s math might as well be a series of scribbles, and we don’t get to see Vaughan write any FORTRAN code. She just takes a book from the library and learns the language off-camera. Perhaps this is just personal taste, because I enjoy it when a piece of fiction dives deep into the procedural nature of solving a problem — one of the reasons why Apollo 13 is so compelling is because it shows us how the engineers worked to solve the problem of bringing the astronauts home safely — and Hidden Figures simply excludes that aspect entirely. I can understand wanting to focus on the human drama and character building, since most people probably find mathematics and computer science sleep inducing, but I would have appreciated some insight into why these women were considered such pioneers in their field.
Despite these issues, I believe the film is required viewing for anyone remotely interested in the history of the space race. It adds a piece of the puzzle that for many, myself included, didn’t even know existed until very recently. If nothing else, I think it puts to rest some of the criticism that the space program gets from people who think the money is better spent elsewhere. We can only imagine where these women would have been if they didn’t have the opportunity to force the American establishment to recognise their talents and treat them as equals.
