Forbes and Fifth

Hidden Figures

Based on the eponymous non-fiction book by Margot Lee Shetterly, Hidden Figures is a semi-biographical drama film that boasts Theodore Melfi (of "St. Vincent" fame) at its helm. A modest 127 minutes in length, the film functions in equal parts as a chronicle and a social commentary of the struggles endured by female mathematicians at NASA during the 1960s, when both the Civil Rights movement and the Space Race were at their zenith. At its most basic, Hidden Figures is a counter-narrative that offers illuminating insights into the lives of these pivotal African-American women, whose efforts undergirded one of America's crowning achievements—but who were swept into obscurity by the tide of mainstream history, the flow of which is arguably dictated by white androcentrism, i.e. the practice of giving precedence to the masculine point-of-view. At the same time, the film masterfully interweaves the parallel trajectories of the aerospace industry and the Civil Rights era in such a way that they complement, rather than negate, one another in order to catalyze some of the most conspicuous manifestations of globalization. Their scope includes the launching of satellites for both global surveillance and rapid channels of communication, to the birth of information technologies that sparked trends in global networking and organizations built on international cooperation, to new platforms for social movements championing equality, which re-scaled the contentions around racial justice to worldwide dimensions. 

These advancements are significant not only for their historical clout, but because the undercurrents continue to carry through in social dynamics and technological achievements today, offering potent clues about human societies and their continued survival. Indeed, Hidden Figures, at its crux, is about survival—whether through individual ingenuity in the face of blatant prejudice and subtle microaggressions, or through the slow but deliberate erosion of hierarchical structures entrenched in racism, sexism, and tribalism. 

Tackling any one of these issues on its own would prove an enormously tall order. Exploring all of them, concurrently, runs every risk of dissolving the plot into a chaotic tangle of hopelessly overambitious themes and saccharine, oversimplified messages à la Hollywood. Yet, for the most part, the film avoids them with both cleverness and panache—largely by never losing sight of its premise, as both a foundation and a fulcrum. More than an amusing pun on the infallible logic of numbers when used and applied correctly, or the deliberate erasure of those who made those same complicated calculations possible, Hidden Figures explicates, via its three main characters, the nuances of power, tension and belonging in segregation-era America, while each woman moves through varying social structures. They are hidden figures not merely in the context of their underappreciated work, but because they are invisible, yet immensely influential widgets cultivating broader social change—even if said change may not be fully visible until years, or even decades, afterward. We meet Taraji P. Henson's indomitable Katherine Goble, who first steps with trepidation into the cluttered, all-white, nearly all-male whirl of the Space Task Group Office, and is alternately ignored or demeaned by her colleagues. Yet Goble ends the film in the tracking control-room, shoulder-to-shoulder with the rest of NASA's most brilliant minds, as John Glenn is launched into space. Moving forward, we are introduced to Janelle Monáe's zesty and plainspoken Mary Jackson, who successfully petitions the Hampton County Courthouse to attend an all-white school, despite her husband's well-meaning skepticism, then goes on to become NASA's first black female engineer. Finally, we get to know Octavia Spencer's salt-of-the-earth Dorothy Vaughan, who gathers the mettle to demand a promotion after being perpetually taken for granted, and ultimately triumphs as the first black woman to supervise a staff at NASA's center. The film makes it clear that these women are pioneers not simply owing to their individual merits, but because they represent the larger group of black female mathematicians who toiled tirelessly in their offices, unrecognized, yet integral, to winning the Space Race. 

Detailing the struggles each woman endures is daunting enough, yet there are far more subjects successfully interwoven through the fabric of the film. There is U.S history, global politics, social disorder, gender dynamics, professional uncertainties, and mutually encouraging friendships, in a kaleidoscopic mélange. These are tackled through the film’s exploration of the awkward position Katherine occupies as the only African-American woman in her workplace, and simultaneously, as a single mother of three daughters at home. They are further highlighted in the myriad of obstacles women of color, and in this particular context, African-American women, had and continue to struggle against, owing to both gender-and-racial-biases. Finally, they are present in the film’s palpably tense portrayal of life in Cold War America, and in the violent social disruptions that characterized an era of rising Pan-Africanism, giving voice to bitter complexities of black social and political identity, but also to the technological leaps that were seminal to the globalization process. 

Many might argue that Melfi has bitten off more than he can chew. The film is brimming with clips and offhand references to historical events—from Russia's successful launch of Sputnik, to snippets from Kennedy's iconic speech, ("We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard,"(Kennedy).) to references to the landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education in the context of Virginia's dogged adherence to segregation, to footage of the KKK firebombing of the Freedom Riders' bus in '61—yet the outcome is atmospheric rather than forced. The characters portrayed by Henson, Spencer, and Monáe are not bland placeholders within a didactic history lesson, but dynamic players in a social drama that they also have the power to shape. Their victory is not exclusively in the swiftness of the short-term outcome, but in the new avenues it forges, allowing these women, and others like them, to march forward and push for greater change in the future. In his work, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, Robin D. G. Kelley remarks that when examining groups that advocate for social progress, there is a tendency to view them through the lens of whether or not they "succeeded in realizing their visions rather than on the merits or power of the visions themselves (9)." Not only does this encourage audiences not to succumb to the “horse-race” fallacy of prior historians, but also to remember that change is not always apparent and instantaneous. 

With that in mind, another commendable aspect of the film, despite its inherently busy narrative, is that the individual and social changes rarely feel forced and come across as natural to real life. For instance, Katherine does not receive respect and recognition for her efforts overnight (indeed, the fact that the original Katherine Goble did not receive an Astronomical Society Walker II Award until 2016, is meta-level irony at its finest—or cruelest). Instead, the film makes it clear that it is the pivotal launch of Sputnik, and America's frantic efforts to play catch-up, that lead to the Space Task Group, under pressure from the top, to recruit an Analytic Geometry specialist: "You know what's dangerous? Inaction. Inaction and indecision. The Russians have a spy satellite lapping the planet… No more delays… just get us up there" (00:09:16). In his work, The Unraveling of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960s, historian Allen Matusow remarks that Sputnik "...struck a devastating blow at America's self-regard and sense of security. If the Russians had Sputnik, a host of commentators concluded, they probably had intercontinental ballistic missiles. If they beat us into space they must be forging ahead in science, technology, education." In the wake of this unsettling new reality, Americans were forced to confront real or perceived failings in their systems. Social criticism "…became fashionable again” (9). Small wonder, then, that there was a dramatic shift in the nation's educational policies, and that African-American groups were vociferous in their demand that black students receive both academic resources and recognition, as ignoring such an "untapped resource of intellectual and scientific brainpower would be a foreign policy disaster for the U.S during the Cold War” (Thompson 20). 

Within this volatile social climate, the demand for math wizards like Katherine arises out of brute expedience rather than genuine meritocracy—a fact that is further testified by the prejudicial and obstructionist treatment she receives from her colleagues. NASA's milieu of cutting-edge technology, blackboards covered in complicated equations, suited men in sleek office spaces and gravely-dignified meetings filled with an implicit drive to achieve the unachievable, juxtaposed with the disrespect Katherine is subject to, all highlight the gulf that exists between America's technological advancements and its social equalities. More to the point, they are reminders that NASA cannot justifiably break barriers in space without addressing the insidious, but no less damaging ones that exist within and among its own people. In his book Apollo in the Age of Aquarius, Neil Maher discusses the tendentious relationship between the Civil Rights movement and the Space Race during the 1960s, intimating that the failings of one could not be corrected without addressing the needs of the other: 

“In an attempt to appease criticism … NASA engineers and scientists reoriented some of their space technology toward more pressing urban problems, especially those affecting African-Americans, including air and water pollution for sewage and garbage disposal and unhealthy living conditions. The Civil Rights movement, in other words, was bringing the Space Race back down to earth. ... [Ultimately, NASA] transformed Civil Rights, by shining an extremely bright public relations spotlight on the movement. In the Kennedy Space Center VIP viewing area, as they waited for hours for the Apollo 11 countdown, [Ralph] Abernathy and the families joining him consciously worked the captive audience. ‘This is really Holy Ground,’ he stated during an impromptu address to the politicians, foreign dignitaries, movie stars, and, most important, the dozens of reporters who were all waiting for the rocket to roar into the air. ‘But it will be even more holy once we feed the hungry and care for the sick and provide for those who do not have homes’” (50-51).

Yet, for these bleak and lopsided social dynamics, the film's message is tinged with hope. Time and time again, the protagonists are told, "That's just the way it is," yet they respond not with passive resignation, but a quiet resolution to take matters into their own hands. At each turn, Melfi reminds audiences that ironclad conceptions of reality within specific societies and their surrounding notions of naturalness are in fact arbitrary constructs that can be shaped and re-shaped according to human efforts. At the outset of the film, Katherine's boss, frustrated and stymied by their team's repeated failures to launch ships into orbit, questions whether it is even possible to make his dreams of reaching the moon a reality. By the climax of the film, although NASA has not achieved the desired moon-landing, they have nonetheless launched John Glenn into space—a series of ascending leaps that can only guarantee they will soar higher. In the process, the organization has also made small, but hugely significant steps towards an environment of greater equality and acceptance: from desegregating the bathrooms, to hiring Mary as their first black engineer, to allowing Katherine, as the first ever woman, to attend the highly-classified NASA briefing. Each time, the achievements are quiet, understated, yet carry potent resonance: a reminder that human beings have the capacity to shape the space around them, on both an individual, national and ultimately global scale. The film's ultimate scene—where Katherine sits in the near-empty Space Task Group Office, typing up a report bearing both hers and her initially-hostile colleague Paul Stafford's names in tandem, while Paul himself, in a gesture of matter-of-fact camaraderie, brings her a cup of coffee—is touching not only for its redemptive warmth, but for the lack of fanfare that characterizes it (01:58:14-01:58:20).

Similarly, the film does not aggrandize NASA's technological breakthroughs, but calls the audience's attention to the innovators who not only made such achievements possible, but who are the literal and metaphoric “hearts” that keeps it alive. In an earlier scene, Katherine, Mary and Dorothy nervously discuss the eventual operation of the IBM—the first transistor-based computers, meant for the scientific computing that was previously done by their department. They are prepared to accept the machine's superiority to them in terms of efficiency and speed, but are nonetheless determined to understand and master its intricacies: "It'll run eventually. We have to know how to program it once it does. Unless you'd rather be out of a job?" (00.59:22). The IBM computer, and to an even greater extent, the satellite, are both NASA-spawned innovations that were perfected during the Cold War, yet instrumental in ending it as they ushered in what sociologist Robert Roland defines as the "fifth phase" of globalization, within which the world came to be defined not "in itself" but "for itself," with all the uncertainties and possibilities that go hand-in-hand within a transnational realm of shrinking boundaries. 

Yet, as the women in the film remind us, the march of globalization does not necessarily trod humanity underfoot, but can be mastered as another extension of our dreams, whether individual or collective. Similarly, societal haves and have-nots do not exist as a disembodied vacuum, but as an expression of symbolic, political and economic disparities, allowed unchecked reign. The women in Hidden Figures are presented as under-respected harbingers of an era that dissolves these borders, in no small part thanks to their own convictions that such dreams can become reality. Yet Melfi's message is neither cloying nor moralistic; the film is a critical reminder that the struggle towards equality and unity is far from over. At the same time, there is an implicit exhortation to never stop fighting for that change. Within an increasingly globalized sphere, birthed by the innovations—technological, social—of NASA, change is the only constant, and the transformations sparked by globalization are not simply part of the world, but, conceptually, an ever-breathing, ever-expanding imprint of it. It is an imprint that we ourselves can shape, through both the existing wisdom of those who fought before us, and also through the clarity and knowledge that any phenomenon that fails to bring true equilibrium, inward and outward, will ultimately collapse beneath its own weight. 

For Hidden Figures, it is not enough to interweave the parallel trajectories of the aerospace industry and the civil rights era to highlight globalization in its most pivotal manifestations. Rather, it is to ensure that we, as the audience, understand that those manifestations are thanks to individuals too-easily forgotten within a fast-paced and self-serving world—but who must be remembered, lest we forget the very lessons our future is built upon, and our capacity to see the world as one.

Works Cited

Kelley, Robin D. G. Freedom dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. Boston, Beacon, 2002.

Kennedy, John F. “Moon Speech at Rice Stadium.” Rice University, 12 September 1962, Houston, TX.

Maher, Neil M. Apollo in the Age of Aquarius. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2017.

Matusow, Allen J. The Unraveling of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960s. Athens, Ga, University of Georgia Press, 2009.

Melfi, Theodore. Hidden Figures. 20th Century Fox, 2016.

Robertson, Roland. Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture. London, Sage, 2000.

Thompson, Mark A. Space Race: African American Newspapers Respond to Sputnik and Apollo 11. Dissertation, University of North Texas, 2007, UMI: 1452031