A ‘Hidden’ Tale
How new flick adds to story of America
‘HIDDEN Figures” pulled off a surprise victory at the Screen Actors Guild awards last week, making it the most serious challenger to Oscar favorite “La La Land” for best picture. But “Hidden Figures,” about three black women working as NASA mathematicians in the early days of the space race, has an edge of its own. It’s a movie for anxious times, offering patriotic balm for the fractured body politic.
Cultures are held together by the stories they tell about themselves, and America is struggling to find a new national story, one that can acknowledge past injustices without becoming defined by them.
The old all-or-nothing morality tale of Good America has too often been superseded by an all-or-nothing morality tale of Evil America, which proclaims that every apparently positive accomplishment disguises a sadistic reality. Industry despoiled the earth, the great universities were built on slave labor, the land itself was stolen.
Neither morality tale is true, and neither is sustainable. American history has its blemishes and horrors. But self-hatred can’t provide the basis for a viable culture, and demanding it only feeds resentment and division.
“Hidden Figures” offers an alternative. “The idea that black women had been recruited to work as mathematicians at the NASA installation in the South during the days of segregation defies our expectations and challenges much of what we think we know about American history. It’s a great story, and that alone makes it worth telling,” writes Margot Lee Shetterly in the book on which the movie is based.
The women are the heroines, of course, but the country that recognized their talents — and that united behind the astronauts they supported — is equally honored.
Like her protagonists, Shetterly is a well-educated black woman, the daughter of a NASA research scientist and a Hampton University English professor. Her goal wasn’t to replace or subvert the American story but to enlarge it.
“What I wanted was for them to have the grand, sweeping narrative that they deserved,” she writes, “the kind of American history that belongs to the Wright Brothers and the astronauts, to Alexander Hamilton and Martin Luther King Jr. Not told as a separate history, but as a part of the story we all know.”
History is an open-ended epic. And epics are complex — just as America’s western expansion or the Pacific War was complex. That’s why readers can still argue over the merits of Achilles versus Hector or whether Milton’s Satan is the hero or villain of “Paradise Lost.”
For understandable commercial reasons, however, Hollywood likes its dramas clear-cut. And “Hidden Figures” is definitely a commercial film.
The transition from book to screen inevitably brought changes. To heighten the drama, the movie unfortunately adds white villains who didn’t exist in real life and grossly distorts what working at NASA was like for its heroines.
In the movie, the male colleagues of Katherine Goble Johnson (Taraji P. Henson) are sullen segregationists who never converse with her and won’t even drink from the same coffee pot.
They’re also much older and stuffier than their real-life counterparts, who were, Shetterly writes, “an opinionated, high-energy bunch, and best of all, as far as Katherine was concerned, they were all as smart as whips.”
The admiration was mutual: “Katherine’s confidence and the bright flame of her mind were irresistible to the guys in the Flight Research Division. There was nothing they liked more than brains, and they could see that Katherine Goble had them in abundance. As much as anything, they responded to her exuberance for the work.”
Working at NASA gave bright black women a blessedly meritocratic respite from the daily indignities of everyday life in preCivil Rights Act Virginia. Indeed, Shetterly notes that one reason they found the facility’s segregated cafeteria and restrooms so offensive was that they felt equal in the office. Eventually, the institutional culture wouldn’t sustain the state-mandated segregation.
The truth, in other words, is more inspiring than the movie.
But the movie is a start. For all its distortions, it presents a story of women defined not by their victimhood but by their merits.
And the big stuff ’s true: Katherine Johnson did develop math to calculate John Glenn’s re-entry, and the astronaut did say, “Get the girl to check the numbers.”
Mary Jackson (played by Janelle Monáe) did have a NASA mentor who encouraged her to study engineering and did get “special permission” to take a night class in the white high school. Dorothy Vaughn (played by Octavia Spencer) really did learn Fortran and reinvent her career at 50.
By the end of the movie, they all receive the recognition they deserve. Their ingenuity and triumph enlarge the American epic.