There are a few movies that stay with you long after you’ve seen them. Hidden Figures is one of those movies! A story of individual perseverance and the way it shines through institutionalized discrimination, the film stands apart in both heart and talent.
The story details the lives of three brilliant African American NASA workers: Katherine Johnson, a mathematician played by Taraji P. Henson, Mary Jackson, an aspiring engineer played by Janelle Monáe, and Dorothy Vaughan, a supervisor played by Octavia Spencer. As was common in segregated, 1960’s America, they toil away, underappreciated and ignored by their coworkers and bosses.
The film takes place at the height of the “space race” – Russia seems to be winning and NASA is desperate to put a man into space. This is where Katherine Johnson has her time to shine; unparalleled in her mathematical ability, she eventually becomes integral in the efforts to put John Glenn (Glen Powell) into orbit. Of course, she is initially hired to act as a “computer”; a fact checker that makes sure the rest of the team’s calculations are accurate. It is only through the burgeoning realization of her abilities by Al Harrison (Kevin Costner), the leader of her team, that her excellence is allowed to save the day.
It’s in these moments that the movie truly shines. The plight of being black in segregated America was a self-evident truth that the film does justice in representing, but it is in its portrayal of secondary white characters as products of their time rather than evil racists that brings nuance to its depiction. The small, daily injustices that these women face are interspersed in the larger picture of how segregation demeaned them. The uplifting moment when Mary Jackson was allowed to attend classes in an all-white school was compounded by the unfairness of her not being allowed to attend in the first place. But this bitterness was equally apparent in Katherine Johnson running half a mile across NASA to go to a colored bathroom – the painful injustice of which her coworkers did not even consider until she screamed it in their faces. The product of this was that Al Harrison knocked down the ‘Colored Bathroom’ sign, and stated, somewhat simplistically, that “at NASA, we all pee the same color.” This same confrontation of prejudice occurs when Dorothy Vaughan reproves her boss Vivian Michael (Kirsten Dunst), into becoming aware of her own denial of bias; a realization that eventually prompts Vivian to start seeing Dorothy with respect. This running thread throughout the movie highlights an often overlooked grassroots avenue for progress: individualistic, local, and with smaller bravado than a march or a protest.
The poignancy of this film, reiterated again and again by its effort to highlight small injustices as well as the large, is perhaps compounded further by its release in this day and age. These women’s stories are true – and unheard of by most until they saw the trailer! It acts as a reminder to us all, in this supposedly post-racial country, that retrospect can often act as a mirror. Just as those women challenged the normalcy of denigration present in their society, so should we in ours; only then can we truly stretch the parameters of progress as they did.
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