Race, Gender  And Space-The Black Women’s Place-“Hidden Figures” (2016)-A Film Review     

DVD Review

By Sam Lowell

Hidden Figures, starring Taraji Henson, Octavia Spencer, Janelle Monae, 2016  

Come on now when you are thinking  about the super-duper advanced mathematicians, computer whizzes or aerospace engineers who put men and women into space and to the moon  you are thinking about short-haired crew-cut  white guys in white shirts with those plastic sleeves in their shirt pockets filled with off-hand pens sitting in mission control at Houston calling the shots as part of a vanilla team of anonymous figures (except the head guy whose head was always being fitted for the platter with each early rocket failure back in the late 1950s and early 1960s after the red scare Cold War Russians put an object and then a man in space leaving the United States of America flat-footed and looking kind of foolish what with all the expertise and dough around).

Yeah, you are thinking in those days, somewhat still true now as well of guys who went to big time science schools like Cal Tech and MIT maybe an oddball from Stanford (although now you will see at least at MIT which I am most familiar many Asian guys and gals filling the classrooms with their computers at the ready but also with those plastic sleeves still holding their pens-the gals too.) What you would not be thinking about is three black women (complete with kids at home something you don’t associate with those white-shirted guys too busy figuring out the latest orbital trajectory) who did not go to Cal Tech, MIT or even an oddball at Stanford but in the case of one Podunk West Virginia and another having to attend night school at some previously all white high school to get up to speed in order to become an aerospace engineer. But that hard if long delayed acknowledgement is what drives the film under review Hidden Figures about those three black women who were pioneers in a man’s world (along with help from other black women from the “colored” pool of human computers from which they were selected). Hell there weren’t even that many white women come to think of it but this film is a black-etched story not a generic women’s story.          

Here’s the way the plot-line played out and why we should admire the tenacity and their sense of patriotism of those women. As mentioned above the U.S. was caught flat-footed by the Russians in the late 1950s with Sputnik first of all and so NASA down in Virginia was pushed hard, pushed hard politically to show some results-to catch up and surpass the Ruskkies (with the object of winning the big prize-landing on the moon not in the distance future but as per Jack Kennedy by the end of the 1960s). So everybody needed to pull some weight-all those highly prized Cal Tech and MIT guys had to push the envelope. Aided of course by those human computers who if you can believe this in the age of the personal computer and an average eight year old’s ability to handle the damn thing with ease used adding machines and pocket calculators-maybe slide rulers too. They appear to have been mainly women-“colored” (hey that is the term of the time so let’s let that stand here as well) and white women working in separate areas of the complex at Langley.           

That seemingly ancient situation which may seem weird in our so-called “post racial” society was however the social reality in early 1960s Virginia due to the Mister James Crow laws and their strict enforcement  in that state despite whatever the courts had proclaimed in the 1950s (or for that matter the 13^th, 14^th and 15^th Amendments to the Constitution from the 1860s). This is the “race” part of the “race and space” title of this review. Those laws and “customs” extended right up to those highly educated white- shirted guys who in a very  telling scene put a separate “colored” coffee pot in their break area (and in another scene it took almost a second civil war to get convenient restroom facilities against the previous distant “colored” women’s restroom- Jesus)               

Why was all this breaking down of the social norms of post-bellum Virginia necessary beyond the national goals and pacing set in far-off Washington? Well one Katherine Johnson, played here by Taraji Henson, a natural and brilliant mathematician, was put on the team on her merits which would be fully tested as the white guys were behind the curve most of the time on the critical trajectory tight numbers needed to insure a safe reentry from orbit to “splash down.” One Dorothy Vaughn, played by Olivia Spencer, who was in charge of the “colored” human computers and for a long while not given her due with the actual rank of supervisor who brought her “girls” over after learning the Fortram computer language which was the wave of the future in the computation world. And one Mary Jackson, played by Janelle Monae, who at great effort would become the first African-American (not “colored”) aerospace engineer at NASA. Their neglected contributions to the space program and their having to facing with dignity the skewed racial ethos of the time made this an enjoyable and thoughtful two hours. Yeah, move over Cal Tech and MIT the sisters are in town.