We Need More Films like “Hidden Figures”
The film brings to light three Black female mathematicians as the unacknowledged reason NASA won the Space Race.
I saw Hidden Figures last night, and it’ll undoubtedly be a favorite of mine for years to come. The film is hilarious, heart-warming, and relentlessly truthful — and it’s about three of my favorite things: mathematics, space exploration, and racial and gender equity in STEM. Hidden Figures — finally in wide release — tells the story of three NASA mathematicians: physicist Katherine Johnson (Taraji P. Henson), aerospace engineer Mary Jackson (Janelle Monáe), and computer scientist Dorothy Vaughan (portrayed by the peerless Octavia Spencer). It’s based on the book of the same name by Margot Lee Shetterly.
First, a quick synopsis. The film opens to a sepia prologue, centering Johnson as a young mathematical prodigy. She counts off prime numbers, identifies geometric shapes in her surroundings, and solves a complex polynomial for her classmates. It’s clear she’s got a knack for math — the film refutes a stereotype of what mathematically gifted children look like before the main action even starts.
In 1961, our three leads now adults, we zoom from above on their car, broken down in the Virginia countryside—Vaughan under the engine, Jackson leaning on the trunk, adjusting her makeup, and Johnson (then Katherine Goble) lost in space (har har) in the passenger seat. A white policeman pulls up. He’s surprised to learn that the three work for NASA — and impressed that their work is helping the U.S. catch up to the Soviet Union in the Space Race. Vaughan having succeeded in fixing the car, the trooper offers to escort all three mathematicians to their workplace, NASA’s Langley Research Center — the bizarre situation serving both as a reminder of the cultural milieu and as a point of wry humor for the three women.
We find our heroes in the “West Computers Area” room at NASA Langley, where twenty or so Black women are gathered to receive their assignments. Vaughan, who hands out the assignments, is clearly in charge of the group. The women are “computers,” mathematicians who perform complex computations for NASA engineers using only their minds and basic calculators. Virginia’s Jim Crow laws, however, segregate the team from white computers and other employees in this remote building.
The heroes grapple with three separate scenarios, based on their areas of assignment. Jackson is sent to work for an advanced aerospace engineering group under Polish émigré Karl Zielinski (Olek Krupa), where she helps test the thermodynamics of the Mercury capsule. Zielinski encourages Jackson to pursue NASA engineering training — a feat socially and structurally impossible for her, even though she is essentially already doing the work of an engineer. He asks whether she would want to be an engineer if she were a white man. She responds, “I wouldn’t want to. I’d already be one.”
Having had this realization, Jackson petitions to take extension classes at the local all-white high school. Armed with a forceful argument — drawing parallels between herself as “a first” and the American project of getting to space first — and hefty judicial research, Jackson convinces a judge to let her take the classes — and, at length, begins training to become an engineer.
Vaughan, meanwhile, deals both with the microaggressive supervisor of the white computers, Vivian Mitchell (Kirsten Dunst), and with the arrival of an enormous, capricious IBM machine that threatens, when ready, to make her team of computers obsolete. On one front, Mitchell repeatedly turns Vaughan down for a promotion, even though Vaughan is already doing the work of a supervisor without the title or pay. At a gentler moment, Mitchell tells Vaughan, “Despite what you think, I don’t have anything against y’all.” Vaughan responds with an incredulous “I know you probably believe that.”
Meanwhile, Vaughan secrets a brand-new book on FORTRAN away from the “whites section” of the local library (“I pay taxes, and it isn’t stealing if it’s already yours,” she says to her sons, on their way home in the back of a segregated bus). Sneaking into the IBM room at Langley in the evenings, she cleverly fixes the machine and learns how to program it. In the daytime, she quietly teaches her computing group how to code. The team from IBM is initially angry to discover Vaughan working in their lab without clearance, but they’re impressed that she was able to get the machine working. Vaughan is reassigned to work on the machine, and insists that her entire team come with her. The women become NASA’s first programmers.
Goble’s story, however, is the center of the film. Our hero is assigned to the Space Task Group under director Al Harrison (Kevin Costner), where she will perform trajectory calculations using analytical geometry. She is flung headfirst into a high-stakes mathematical think tank, where she must use a separate coffee pot, run a mile across campus — in heels — to the “colored” restroom in the West Computing Area, deal with head engineer Paul Stafford (Jim Parsons), who tells her she’s the team’s “dummy test,” and face a hostile administrative assistant and colleagues — all while doing “math that doesn’t even exist yet.” Despite all this, Goble isn’t allowed to take credit for any of her work — Stafford admonishes her, “computers don’t author reports.” Goble’s only advocate is the director of the team, Harrison, but he’s oblivious to the challenges she faces. On her first day, he asks her to look “beyond the numbers” with him and see herself standing on the moon, where he sees himself — to which she responds, tellingly, “Can I go now, sir?”
The Space Race accelerates with the Soviets’ orbital launch of Yuri Gagarin, and the pressure on Harrison’s group to calculate manned-flight trajectories increases tenfold. One rainy day, Goble returns from the restroom, soaked from head to toe. Harrison berates her, “You’re never where I need you to be. Where the hell do you go everyday?” Goble breaks down in tears and yells, drawing the team’s attention:
The colored bathroom is a mile away. There are no colored bathrooms here, or anywhere except West Campus, and I can’t take a bike. “Dress code is a dress, simple sweater, heels, no jewelry — except a simple string of pearls.” Black women can’t afford pearls because you don’t pay us nearly enough! And I work like a dog living off a pot of coffee the rest of you don’t want to TOUCH! There is no bathroom for me here. Do you understand that? So excuse me if I have to relieve myself three or four times a day!
She then collects herself and stoically leaves the room. I’m paraphrasing above a bit, but Goble finally voicing her frustration is definitely the emotional highlight of the film (I’m hoping it wins Henson an Oscar). As a result of her self-expression, things start to get a little better: Harrison walks to West Campus and tears down the “colored ladies room” sign in front of both groups, walking away with the line, “Here at NASA, we all pee the same color.”
Goble begins to shine as the fastest and most inquisitive mathematician in her group, and self-graduates from checking others’ math to tackling entire trajectories. With Mercury fast approaching, Goble needs to incorporate constantly-changing mission parameters into her calculations, so she asks Stafford and Harrison again and again to be allowed into classified Pentagon briefings. Stafford says, “There’s no protocol for having a woman in there,” to which Goble replies, “There’s no protocol for men circling the earth either, sir.” Eventually, Harrison reluctantly allows her into one of the briefings — only for he and Stafford to turn to her at a loss when faced with difficult calculations of the Mercury capsule’s speed and splashdown vicinity — calculations she executes immediately and flawlessly on the briefing room’s blackboard.
Astronaut/celebrity/eye candy John Glenn (Glen Powell) is impressed — “That’s one hell of a speeding ticket,” he quips. Later, when Glenn is about to be launched into orbit on Freedom 7, and the Space Task Group finds a potential error in the IBM-computed trajectory, he insists that Harrison get Goble (who has been reassigned back to West Campus) to do the calculation herself. She does so at lightning speed, and runs the result back to Mission Control. Glenn is relieved, and the mission is a success. Freedom 7 turns the tide in the Space Race — all thanks to the unacknowledged hard work of these three mathematicians.
One of the main reasons I loved this film was the palpable authenticity of its characters. After a harrowing first day of work at the Space Task Group, Goble returns home to her three girls (under the care of their grandmother), and treats them with wonderful kindness and love. One of her daughters has drawn a picture of her mom in a rocket ship. Although Goble knows this is unlikely — as she had just been reminded by Harrison’s insensitive “see yourself on the moon” spiel, she compliments her daughter’s work and thanks her genuinely. She has no intention of stifling their dreams — or the dreams of children watching the film. And she’s a normal mom — she explains the Space Race to her girls, and assures them that a Soviet missile attack from space is unlikely. I was honestly surprised that Goble could be such a brilliant, hard-working mathematician and simultaneously such an incredible single mom. In fact, Jackson and Vaughan raise children of their own. Families and friends are a constant source of support throughout the film, highlighting this essential but universally unacknowledged solidarity of the oppressed.
Not to mention that the film has a beautiful score by Hans Zimmer (Interstellar), Pharrell Williams (“Happy”), and Benjamin Wallfisch, and an amazing accompanying musical album (left).
As Scott Tobias notes for NPR, the title Hidden Figures has three meanings: the three women hidden by history behind major figures like Glenn, Harrison, or NASA Administrator Jim Webb, the Black women physically hidden from view at NASA Langley in West Campus, and the intense numbers work performed behind the scenes by a few bright minds at NASA during the start of the Space Age. Hidden Figures uses impressive mathematics but explains that math and its significance in easy-to-understand terms. The film conveys a genuinely positive portrayal of mathematics — not as an esoteric field estranged from reality practiced by socially isolated white men (think A Beautiful Mind and Good Will Hunting, which are great films nevertheless) — but as an accessible, important discipline with an enormous role in history.
The film also, I think, underlines why generating and finding talent among the historically marginalized is so important. Goble, Jackson, and Vaughan, and indeed most of the women computers, were hired during an explicit NASA initiative to hire more women. Goble, Jackson, Vaughan, and others were recognized by colleagues, if not publicly, as far more talented than their “better-educated,” wealthier, white male counterparts. Their hard work was essential in getting humankind to space, and they wouldn’t have had that impact if NASA hadn’t explicitly sought to employ women. This is yet another powerful argument for affirmative action.
As Anna Silman wrote for New York Magazine, the film also suggests that the bathroom divide of Jim Crow is not unrelated to the battle over trans men and women’s access to bathrooms today. Segregation was not only unjust, it was seriously limiting productivity and progress, and it was solved in the movie by an institutional authority (Harrison) tearing down a barrier of access. Likewise, forcing trans men and women to use bathrooms that don’t correspond to their identities is unproductive, and must be resolved by leading institutional authorities, such as schools, workplaces, and states. After all, “we all pee the same color.”
Finally, I cannot understate the importance of having these three smart, talented, well-rounded, funny Black women so prominently represented in the media. Mae Jemison, the first African-American woman to go to outer space, has attributed her inspiration to become an astronaut to Lt. Uhura (Nichelle Nichols) on Star Trek in the 60s. Uhura was a fictional character. Katherine Johnson, Mary Jackson, and Dorothy Vaughan, on the other hand, were all real, living, breathing human beings who overcame insurmountable obstacles to become leaders in STEM fields — and in physical sciences research, no less. Imagine what just one young Black girl who sees their success will accomplish!
Now, I hardly think Hidden Figures is perfect — there are a few criticisms I do have. For one, it seems like white men sure do a lot of the key moral action for a film about three black women: Harrison pulling down the “colored ladies room” sign, Glenn asking for Goble’s confirmation of his trajectory before launch, the judge granting Jackson’s petition to take night extension classes, or Polish Holocaust survivor Zielinski encouraging Jackson to pursue engineering training in the first place. This has a sort of “white people aren’t bad, just inattentive” ring to it, that might seem to outweigh the discrimination our heroes encounter at every turn. The film also seems at times to put a gloss on racial violence. At one point, Vaughan and her boys see a protest across the street, and police dogs straining at their leashes, but Vaughan and her boys walk past, and nothing happens.
In another heart-breaking moment, when Goble has checked the calculation of Glenn’s trajectory, she and the assistant Harrison sent to retrieve her run back to Mission Control. The assistant enters, and the door to Mission Control shuts in Goble’s face. Goble, visibly disappointed, walks away. Yet a few moments later, Harrison walks out and motions her in with a spare pass. This, I think, is key to understanding how the film operates: it’s a feel-good film, and almost every issue is resolved, often by a facade of white generosity. This is not realistic, and it may have the side effect of fostering a white-savior complex.
But this is just a facade — the plot is really driven by how intelligent, kind, and perceptive our three heroes are. Goble’s speech, and adamant insistence on attending Pentagon briefings, motivate Harrison’s actions. Her obvious talent for numerical computation convinces Glenn to trust her with his trajectory. Likewise, Jackson’s self-advocacy is central to her becoming an engineer. And not every problem is resolved in the film — for example, Stafford eventually warms up to Goble (by then, Katherine Johnson), even bringing her coffee he made himself, but she still doesn’t get to co-author reports with him. Mitchell politely asks Vaughan to train some of her (white) female computers, but she never quite apologizes for underestimating and mistreating Vaughan. As Silman points out, this is especially significant because Mitchell’s racism is subconscious — exactly the way many people today claim not to be racist yet support racist policies, or claim not to be transphobic yet support transphobic policies. I hope that audiences pick up on that.
There are a few more issues I have. At a church picnic, Jackson and her husband (Aldis Hodge) have a brief argument about how to defeat oppression: he favors civil disobedience, while she focuses on getting ahead in her career. But that’s the end of the discussion. I would have liked to see this issue expanded upon in greater detail.
But these flaws are infinitesimal compared with the grace, humor, and intelligence the actors of Hidden Figures bring to the screen — and the importance of its message. The film not only makes mathematics interesting, it also bursts with subversive joy at the heroes’ realization of black girl magic: “This is what a mathematician looks like,” it says. We need more women and more Black folk in STEM, and Hidden Figures is exactly the right way to recruit them.
