Theodore Melfi’s Hidden Figures has a wonderful story. In 1961, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, NASA, hired a number of African-American women mathematicians to do complicated calculations. This is pre-computer time. A bunch of these women, who were called computers, calculated things like rocket trajectories, questions of thrust and payload, and they did the math on major problems like why the Redstone rocket failed to attain orbit.
This was also a time of pervasive segregation in government agencies as well as in Virginia, where the women lived. The women were kept in one specific work area. There were separate bathrooms for whites and for colored, as they were labeled, on water fountains and even coffee percolators. But as a group, they did crucial work on the early space program, and several of the women made unique contributions to the projects.
The story is largely unknown. Daphne Brooks, an African-American Studies scholar at Yale, who is much attuned to such things, says that she didn’t know about the black women mathematicians and physicists at NASA until 2015, when President Obama awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to then- 95-year old Katharine G. Johnson She alone had figured out the crucial math so that astronaut John Glenn could get back to Earth alive from his historic orbital mission.
Hidden Figures, which is based on a book of the same title by Margot Lee Shetterly, offers a pretty good history lesson for those who don’t know how segregation worked in the John Kennedy era, but it’s a better lecture than it is a film. It shows the dismissive attitudes toward black women from whites at NASA. The women are assumed to be cleaners and told outright not to squawk about things because they should be thankful to have jobs at all. The movie shows how whites recoiled at the thought of sharing a toilet or a room, or even pouring coffee from the same percolator. And happily, Hidden Figures celebrates the ferocious intelligence of these women along with their rich life outside of NASA, away from white supervisors who expect submission.
But Hidden Figures doesn’t have the filmmaking skill or the understanding to make the women powerful as characters on a movie screen. The picture centers on three women – Dorothy Vaughn (Octavia Spencer), Mary Jackson (Janelle Monáe) and in particular on Katherine G. Johnson (Taraji P. Henson). The three have all the sparky lines in the film, and, of course, they get to be right and honorable and decent in the face of shameful treatment. They get their story told, but they don’t get the cinematic power of the movie.
The people who break down the segregation practices are two men – the astronaut John Glenn (Glen Powell) and Al Harrison (Kevin Costner), the head of the department where Katherine Johnson did her great work. Historically, Glenn and Harrison may well have done what the film claims, but some imagination in the building of the film could preserve the history and still make the women cinematically the heroes of the movie.
Ultimately, Hidden Figures paints the women as cute and amusing rather than formidable. They dance together at home; they make funny, telling comments. But these characters don’t control the film; they’re acted upon more than they act. Early in the movie, Katherine Johnson has to go to the bathroom. There’s no facility for colored women in her building, so she has to run a long way to another, her arms full of papers that she drops and has to pick up. Running in skirt and heels, she’s a comic figure, and the film repeats her run three or four times. It demeans the character. It doesn’t show her as a person of good humor; it makes her the joke. Let the audience laugh at the characters who already have social power, not the ones fighting to live. But typical mainstream movies are stuck in the old story patterns – that’s the racism.
