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Hidden Figures: Calculated Responses to Sexism and Racism in 1960s America

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Hidden Figures: Calculated Responses to Sexism and Racism in 1960s America

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Sexism was very apparent throughout this movie through scenes such as the coffee machine and others that include intersectionality. I could include a analysis of this scene and include things we have learned from our week about intersectionality.

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When the women of ‘Hidden Figures’ needed The Man

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When the women of ‘Hidden Figures’ needed The Man

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After learning about allyship in the end of the semester this article explains about the important privilege this film was trying to get the viewer to understand. I could have a paragraph discussing how this film used privilege through the main NASA white supervisor to help the three women, especially Mary.

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December 23, 2016 The Reelist is a column featuring Kristen Page-Kirby's musings on movies. For Washington Post film critic Ann Hornaday's review of "Hidden Figures," click here.
I turned down an interview with Kevin Costner for "Hidden Figures" because I didn't want my only coverage of the film - a movie mainly about black women - to be about the white guy. So I feel a little awkward now, because I'm going to write about the white guy.

"Hidden Figures," opening Sunday, is based on the true story of three African-American women who worked for NASA in the 1960s. The three (played by Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer and Janelle Monae) are highly skilled mathematicians and scientists who have been relegated to lower-level jobs because of their race and gender.

One of them, Katherine Johnson (Henson), eventually joins the team responsible for John Glenn's orbital flight, working under manager Al Harrison (Costner). During the workday, she sometimes has to pee - this means running half a mile (in heels!) to the other side of the campus to reach the closest "colored" women's room. When Harrison finds out how much of Johnson's workday is spent running back and forth to relieve herself, he grabs a crowbar and tears down the "Whites Only" sign outside the building's bathroom. "We all pee the same color here," he says.

It's one of the moments in "Hidden Figures" where it's clear that, while the women can - and do - chip away at the bars that hold them back, it's much more efficient for a white guy with a crowbar to do it for you. That's the funny thing about oppression: You really need the people with power to tear down the very system that gives them that power.

Johnson acts, of course, primarily out of self-interest: It benefits him to have Harrison working, rather than taking 30-minute bathroom breaks. He has no problem with a system that helps him until that same system starts hurting him. In fact, before Johnson tells him about her predicament - which she only does after he browbeats her about her extended absences - it doesn't even dawn on him that having a place to pee is a problem for her. After all, his bathroom is right down the hall.

It's rare that a film is so explicit about privilege, both how easily it's assumed and how powerful it can be when wielded in the service of those who don't have it. Moreover, it's rare in that it doesn't really celebrate the moments when men step up, because they're doing things they should have done a long time ago. It's not portrayed as heroic that Harrison knocks down that sign - and it shouldn't be, because he walked past that same sign countless times a day and ignored it because it didn't affect him.

"Hidden Figures" is a tremendously moving film about tremendously powerful women, but it's also an incisive analysis of structural racism and sexism and a clear example of why neither of those systems will go away until white men get angry not just when they are affected (or when their "wives and daughters" are, as the patently irritating phrase goes), but when they are not. Too many people are quietly complicit in oppression; "whites only" signs are no longer visible, but the effects of them still linger, and it's just as easy to walk right by them. Crowbars - both literal and metaphorical - are helpful things. It's just sometimes they need to have been picked up a lot sooner.
More Reelists from Kristen Page-Kirby A new hope: Optimism wins out in 'La La Land' In 'Jackie,' Jackie Kennedy is a bad widow. That's good. As a critic, it's OK to wonder if you got it wrong

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When the women of 'Hidden Figures' needed The Man

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December 23, 2016 The Reelist is a column featuring Kristen Page-Kirby's musings on movies. For Washington Post film critic Ann Hornaday's review of "Hidden Figures," click here. I turned down an interview with Kevin Costner for "Hidden Figures" because I didn't want my only coverage of the film - a movie mainly about black women - to be about the white guy.

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Hidden Figures Shows How a Bathroom Break Can Change History

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Hidden Figures Shows How a Bathroom Break Can Change History

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Analyzing this small problem which is actually a issue could be important in my essay since one of my classmates mentioned I should focus on a few important scenes throughout the movie.

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It says something that the most memorable scenes in Theodore Melfi's Hidden Figures, the new biopic about the black women of NASA's Langley Research Center, take place not in the starry reaches of outer space, but in and around a women's bathroom.

Hidden Figures, based on the book by Margot Lee Shetterly, tells the story of three brilliant mathematicians - Katherine Johnson (Taraji P. Henson), Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer), and Mary Jackson ( Janelle Monáe) - who worked as "human computers" in the all-black "West Computing" group of NASA's Langley research lab in Hampton, Virginia, in the late 1950s and '60s. Confined to a cramped basement office on Langley's west campus (the white computers worked on the east campus), these women used their intellect and ingenuity to go where no women of color had ever gone before, while being routinely denied opportunities for advancement and confined to segregated dining areas and bathrooms.

Our protagonist is Katherine, a numerical genius who hand-calculated the spacecraft trajectories that helped astronaut John Glenn become the first American to orbit the Earth. (Her narrative is intercut with the amazing stories of her colleagues: Dorothy Vaughan became NASA's first black supervisor and an expert programmer in the early days of computers, while Mary Jackson would go on to become NASA's first African-American female engineer.) But it's not an easy road. When Katherine is assigned to help calculate launch and landing trajectories at NASA's Space Task Group on east campus, she asks her white female colleague (and the only other woman working there) where the bathroom is located. The woman chides: "I have no idea where your bathroom is." Thus commences Katherine's humiliating daily cardio routine. Each day, stack of papers in hand, high heels wobbling, Katherine must belt half a mile across Langley to use the dilapidated "colored bathroom" on west campus (often to the soundtrack of Pharrell's "Runnin'"). Saddled with a stack of calculations, we watch her hunched over on the toilet seat, pen in hand, as she tries not to waste even a second away from her desk. The film's brilliance lies in bringing the fundamental injustices of segregation down to a bodily level, manifesting its evils through the most routine of daily activities.

Co-screenwriter Allison Schroeder tells me that she was inspired by an anecdote from Shetterly's book, in which Mary Jackson's white female colleagues laughed at her when she asked where the bathroom was. "It just hit me, because I had just read about their dress code, that as a woman, it's Virginia summer: pantyhose, heels, walking half a mile to pee. And then Virginia winter: pantyhose, heels, and a skirt," she recalls. "It was just so appalling to me. There were bikes on campus that the guys could use, but the girls couldn't because they had skirts on. And it just struck me as the greatest indignity that you couldn't even pee, how disrespectful it is."

The impact of these scenes stems in part from the tension between Katherine's urgent work - racing against the clock to engineer one of the most grandiose achievements of humankind - and the illogical hurdles that bigotry puts in her way. Here segregation isn't just an injustice; it's an obstacle preventing America's best and brightest from achieving their goals. Watching other engineers put out a separate "colored" coffee pot for her, the audience can't help shaking their heads: You're building a rocket-ship and that's what you're worried about? No wonder you need Katherine to check your math.

Eventually, Katherine's superior, Al Harrison ( Kevin Costner), confronts her about her unexplained absences from her desk. The result is a scorching speech in which Katherine, soaking wet from running back and forth in the rain, lists the many daily humiliations that he and her other (white, male) co-workers fail to notice. "There are no colored bathrooms here, or anywhere except the west campus," she says, through tears. "And I work like a dog living off a pot of coffee the rest of you don't want to touch." This is a feel-good movie, so her speech has a feel-good conclusion: Harrison marches over to west campus, bashes the bathroom sign down with a sledgehammer, and declares, "Here at NASA, we all pee the same color!"

"I worried people would think this was the craziest story line, but for me it represented both racism and being a woman," Schroeder explains."Because of course the guys don't realize what's going on. [Harrison's] not an outright villain, he's just oblivious, and it would never occur to him in a million years that she didn't have a ladies' room."

In fact, it's not so surprising that a movie about breaking race and gender barriers would address bathroom politics. As we've seen in the recent debate over anti-trans bathroom bills, public restrooms are a unique liminal space where abstract ideas about justice and access play out in intimate ways. Public bathrooms have long been a key landmark in the civil-rights fight, a zone onto which people project their anxieties about social change, a locus where the personal and political intersect.

We see this again later in the film, when a women's bathroom becomes the scene of another pivotal moment: a confrontation between Dorothy Vaughan and her supervisor Vivian (Kirsten Dunst). It's the first time Dorothy has been allowed in the "white bathroom," and the difference is striking. The "colored bathroom" was gray and dilapidated, with no paper towels or soap. The "white bathroom" is clean and well-appointed, bathed in a lamp's rosy light - a visual embodiment of separate but not equal.

Throughout the film, Vivian has consistently disrespected Dorothy and failed to give her the promotion she deserves. But in this private women-only space, where everyone pees the same color, we see for the first time, Vivian engaging her co-worker as a human being. "Despite what you think, I don't have anything against y'all," Vivian says. It's one of the film's most resonant moments: America may not have racially segregated bathrooms anymore, but it's still rife with Vivian's way of thinking, with the cognitive dissonance that allows people to support racist policies while decrying racism, or to cheer a film like Hidden Figures while believing that trans people shouldn't be allowed equal access to public restrooms. In response, Dorothy fixes Vivian with a pitying gaze and delivers one of the film's most stirring lines: "I know you probably believe that."

Hidden Figures is an important act of counter-history, about inscribing forgotten heroines into the public record. But it's also an important reminder of how blinding prejudice can be: how many hidden things are actually just things we choose not to see.

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Hidden Figures Shows How a Bathroom Break Can Change History

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It says something that the most memorable scenes in Theodore Melfi's Hidden Figures, the new biopic about the black women of NASA's Langley Research Center, take place not in the starry reaches of outer space, but in and around a women's bathroom.

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‘Hidden Figures’ and the journey to celebrate NASA’s black female pioneers

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‘Hidden Figures’ and the journey to celebrate NASA’s black female pioneers

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In English 100 we learned a lot about gentrification and throughout this film I could see examples of gentrification. This article explained some of the example and this could be useful to include in my essay although this could be its own essay.

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If you're a person of color in America right now, it may feel like you're riding a carousel of darkness. Viral stories of black killings, once occasional events, morphed into déjà vu in 2016 - potentially triggering PTSD-like trauma. The rise of the alt-right, a white nationalist movement, echoes sentiments of public segregation once thought long gone. Meanwhile, Jim Crow-era restrictions on social, economic and political mobility have evolved new facades, namely gentrification and gerrymandering.

Hidden Figures offers a counter-narrative of hope and a prescient blueprint for unity against what feels like a vicious cycle of inequality. This bestselling biography-turned- Hollywood biopic reveals the untold story of Katherine G. Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson and hundreds of black female mathematicians who made crucial contributions to America's space program.

But the narrative also charts how Hampton, Virginia emerged as a driving force for aeronautics innovation and racial integration - even as the state fought against the rise of civil rights.
Hampton Haven
Writer Margot Lee Shetterly decided to pursue Hidden Figures in 2010, while visiting her parents for Christmas. After church one day, she and her father began chatting about his days as a scientist at Hampton's Langley Research Center - the first field facility for NASA's predecessor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). Eventually, the conversation drifted onto the black and white women who worked as mathematicians - so-called human computers - during the center's early years.

"I knew the women. Many of them worked with my dad, and I'd seen them growing up," Shetterly told NewsHour. "But I didn't know much about their particular stories - how they had come to work at NASA, or why there were black women working there."

Shetterly spent the next three years combing through historical documents. She checked local newspapers, especially ones for the black community, where she found her canvass for describing daily life in Hampton. One clipping went as far as reporting what Mary Jackson wore at her wedding, she said. Shetterly also sorted through heaps of archival material on NACA and NASA.

"So a Langley historian, this woman named Mary Gainer, is amazing. She and her staff put so many of the early documents online - photos, badges, artifacts," Shetterly said. At one point, Shetterly figured out which women had desks in the same room, based on a collection of phone books and floor plans. Meanwhile, she interviewed Katherine Johnson, now in her late-90s, Johnson's children, the surviving family members of Mary Jackson and Dorothy Vaughn as well as other people who worked with them.

Had I known these women existed, maybe I would have dreamed to be a rocket scientist?

The result is a time machine that marches, moment by moment, through the American aeronautics revolution and desegregation. NACA and the Langley Research Center were founded during World War I, as planes began to flex their muscles in warfare. As the aviation industry expanded over the next two decades and into World War II, so too did the need for aeronautics research - and human computers. As the pool of qualified male candidates fizzled, NACA departed from sexist norms, and Langley hired its first female computers in 1935.

After Franklin Roosevelt relaxed discriminatory employment practices for war projects, NACA trail-blazed once more in 1943 by considering applications from black women, as Shetterly catalogues in her book:

"No photo advised as to the applicant's color - that requirement, instituted under the administration of Woodrow Wilson, was struck down as the Roosevelt administration tried to dismantle discrimination in hiring practices. But the applicants' alma maters tipped their hand: West Virginia State University, Howard, Arkansas Agricultural, Mechanical & Normal, Hampton Institute just across town - all Negro schools. Nothing in the applications indicated anything less than fitness for the job. If anything, they came with more experience than the white women applicants, with many years of teaching experience on top of math or science degrees.

...

The black female mathematicians who walked into Langley in 1943 would find themselves at the intersection of these great transformations, their sharp minds and ambitions contributing to what the United States would consider one of its greatest victories."

The move transformed Hampton and Langley into a bastion of aeronautical supremacy, while also eroding racial divides over subsequent decades. Virginia was one of the last state's to abandon Jim Crow policies such as segregated schools, even after federal cases like Brown vs Board of Education and other legislation called for change. Shetterly traces Hampton's trail to integration, showing how America struggled with racial reforms through the lens of one progressive city and the nation's space race with the Soviet Union.

Dorothy Vaughn joined NACA's segregated West Area Computing Unit in December 1943 - a group she would run six years later thanks to her mathematical prowess and leadership tenacity. Mary Jackson and Katherine Johnson landed at NACA in the early 1950s. All three were math whizzes at early ages, but Shetterly exposes how these women juggled their love for numbers with desires for family life and battles against segregation.

Each would ultimately make major contributions to aeronautics. Vaughn mastered computer programming and helped the agency transition from human to IBM computers. Jackson became NASA's first black female engineer and a leader in research on supersonic flight. And Johnson made the crucial calculations that guided the late John Glenn and America's first manned missions into suborbit, orbit and beyond. Shetterly plans to keep documenting these biographies as part of a series called The Human Computer Project.
Movie Trajectories
The Hidden Figures movie took shape in 2014, soon after HarperCollins agreed to publish Shetterly's book. Film producer Donna Gigliotti (Silver Linings Playbook, Shakespeare in Love) caught wind of the story, auctioned the book proposal and recruited director Theodore Melfi to the project. He was fascinated by the story, but also shocked given the typical depictions of life in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s.

"You've never seen anything in film, or documentary, that tells you that women were involved in the space program at that time," Melfi told NewsHour. "Everything you see is an image of a white male."

Gigliotti also recruited musician Pharrell Williams, who was raised in Hampton, to co-produce the film and soundtrack. Williams was drawn to the story given this untold story with three female African-American protagonists happened so close to his childhood home.

"You recognize these three beautiful stories are victims of the era and circumstance. It's the 1960s, and the era is not one that necessarily celebrated, or highlighted a woman's contribution to a narrative," Williams said. He also enjoyed the premise due to a childhood fascination with space, NASA and rockets. (This influence percolates in his music as well. One of his earliest acts was called The Neptunes, while songs like Wonderful Place and Love Bomb carry space themes too.)

For Hidden Figures' music, Williams and his co-composers - Hans Zimmer and Benjamin Wallfisch - call upon 1960s-era styles. Doo Wop and rock melodies - performed by Williams, Hidden Figures actress Janelle Monáe and Mary J. Blige on the soundtrack - mirror the civil rights storylines from the movie.

Monáe said she leapt at the opportunity to play Mary Jackson when she first learned of the story. "It became a personal responsibility to me, to make sure that no young girl, no human being, no American went through life not knowing these true American heroes," she said.

Monáe, Taraji P. Henson (Johnson) and Octavia Spencer (Vaughn) capture key elements of their characters, such as Vaughn's leadership, Johnson's knack with analytical geometry and Jackson's barrier-breaking spirit. Spencer, whose performance is nominated for a Golden Globe, and the other members of the cast spent time with mathematicians to prep for their roles.

"For me, it was about knowing who she was as a woman, knowing who she was at work," Spencer said. "She not only had the mind of an engineer, but she was mechanically inclined. I was proficient at math, but this is rocket science."

Henson said she felt robbed by not knowing about these pioneers as a child: "Had I known these women existed, maybe I would have dreamed to be a rocket scientist? But growing up there was a universal understanding that math and science wasn't for girls."

Kevin Costner, who plays a forward-thinking NASA director, lamented that Katherine Johnson's contributions remained outside the mainstream as America's first rides into space were cemented into history. But he viewed Hidden Figures as a turning point.

"You'd like to think the best ideas are getting to the top. I think the beauty of our movie is that when you're done watching it, you can realize that, well, the best idea got to the top," Costner said.

The film takes liberties with timelines and events - creating amalgams of their mathematical achievements and the racial discrimination experienced across their careers. For instance, Johnson's landmark paper from 1960 - that described rocket trajectories for the Mercury missions - gets spread across multiple scenes with chalkboards...so many chalkboards. However, Johnson's ability to innovate new math and much of the film's climax involving her and Glenn are steeped in truth, according to Shetterly's book.

NASA engineer Shelia Nash-Stevenson, who wasn't involved with film's production, felt the depiction landed on solid ground even with the fudging.

"It's okay for them to take a few liberties, as long as they're 90 percent accurate," said Nash-Stevenson, who was the first African-American female in the state of Alabama to receive a PhD in physics. "Nobody wants to see you actually sit there for days on end calculating a formula or trajectory."

Plus, Nash-Stevenson said Hidden Figures would encourage children, especially young girls, to pursue science, technology, engineering and math.

"Dorothy and the rest of the ladies, Katherine, and Mary were brilliant," Nash-Stevenson said. "What these girls don't realize these days is that they, too, are brilliant."
Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race is available through HarperCollins. The cinematic adaptation opens in select theaters on December 25, 2016. Stay tuned for NewsHour correspondent Jeffrey Brown's interview with the cast and crew, which will air before the wide release on January 6, 2017.

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'Hidden Figures' and the journey to celebrate NASA's black female pioneers

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If you're a person of color in America right now, it may feel like you're riding a carousel of darkness. Viral stories of black killings, once occasional events, morphed into déjà vu in 2016 - potentially triggering PTSD-like trauma. The rise of the alt-right, a white nationalist movement, echoes sentiments of public segregation once thought long gone.

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This article explores the actual accuracy of this movie through the analysis of the math it used. This would be important to include since this entire movie was accurate in pretty much all of the events it showed the viewer.

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The movie gives a shout-out to Euler's Method -- a centuries-old math technique. Did it really help send astronauts into orbit?

Catherine Meyers, Staff Writer

(Inside Science) -- Math plays a starring role in the movie "Hidden Figures," which is nominated for three Oscars, including Best Picture, at this weekend's Academy Awards.

Adapted from a book of the same name by Margot Lee Shetterly, the movie chronicles the grit and ultimate triumphs of three African-American women working as "human computers" for NASA in the segregated south during the space race. The film's standout math whiz is Katherine Goble Johnson. During a pivotal scene, Johnson and a team of white, male engineers are staring at a blackboard, trying to solve equations for the trajectory of astronaut John Glenn's space capsule. They're stumped until Johnson hits upon a solution: "Euler's Method," she says. "That's ancient," says one of the engineers incredulously. "Yes. But it works," she counters. "It works numerically."

The scene -- and indeed the timing of key details in the film -- is clearly dramatized for Hollywood, but it raises the questions: What exactly is Euler's Method? And did Katherine Johnson actually use it to help send astronauts into orbit in the 1960s?

An "ancient" approximation technique

First off, Euler's Method is indeed pretty old, if not exactly ancient. It was developed by Leonhard Euler (pronounced oy-ler), a prolific Swiss mathematician who lived 1707-1783. "He was one of the greatest in history," said Po-Shen Loh, a mathematician at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. What has come to be known as Euler's Method is just a tiny fraction of his legendary contributions.

The method tackles what many people may not realize is a common challenge in math -- often the equations just can't be solved exactly. When that happens, mathematicians must figure out ways to approximate the answers for specific situations.

Euler's method is one such technique applied to what is called a differential equation. These equations often show up, among many other places, in physics problems that describe the path of a moving object subject to changing forces. For example, when a capsule is flying through space, gravity is constantly tugging at it. How hard gravity pulls is related to distance, so as the spacecraft gets nearer to or farther away from Earth, the forces on it also change.

One way to visualize the meaning of the equations could be as ocean currents, Loh said. As you travel through the water, the currents change direction and speed. If you're planning to navigate from a remote island on a raft, you'd want to determine exactly how you'd float through the water, which is a pathway made up of infinitely many points -- analogous to an exact solution to a differential equation.

Sometimes, however, it's impossible to get this comprehensive, ideal solution. Instead, as you drift along, you could measure the current at regular time intervals. By knowing your starting point and assuming the current stays roughly constant between readings, you could plot an approximate trajectory. This process of calculating solutions at discrete points and connecting them is essentially Euler's Method, Loh said.

The method works best when the points are close together and when the solution changes slowly and smoothly, because errors can accumulate at each step of the process.

Approximating a pathway made up of infinitely many points, by linking together a finite number of calculations, is an example of something called a numerical approach in mathematics. That's what Johnson's character in the movie means when she says Euler's Method works "numerically."

Euler's Method is one of the simplest of many numerical methods that now exist for solving differential equations.

Euler meets Glenn?

Rudy Horne, a mathematician at Morehouse College in Atlanta, was the math advisor to the movie, and it was he who suggested Euler's Method for the key blackboard scene.

"[Director Theodore Melfi] really liked that concept," Horne said in an interview with NPR station KGOU. "I didn't expect him to, but he actually put that into the script."

The scene focuses on how to get John Glenn's capsule back to Earth, and Horne says NASA had derived a set of differential equations in the late 1950s to describe the re-entry.

Euler's Method is one way to solve the equations, Horne said, which is why he proposed it for the film.

"The work for solving these coupled differential equations was done by the whole team of researchers at NASA and possibly in part by Katherine Johnson," Horne wrote in an email to Inside Science.

Katherine Johnson began work at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, the predecessor to NASA, in 1953. She analyzed test flight data and helped calculate the trajectory of the first American manned space flight, Alan Shepard's 1961 trip. In 1960, she became the first woman in the Space Flight Division to coauthor a published technical report.

In the report Johnson and engineer Ted Skopinski work through some of the key calculations needed to make sure an orbiting space capsule passes over a specified latitude and longitude on the Earth. Such calculations were essential so that the Navy could be at the right place to rescue the astronaut once he splashed down in the ocean, and are discussed in the movie "Hidden Figures" when Johnson's character is first allowed to attend a daily briefing.

Johnson and Skopinski's calculations draw upon multiple branches of math and require numerical methods. Complicating the picture is the fact that the Earth is not a perfect sphere, as assumed in idealized orbital mechanics calculations, but bulges slightly in the middle, like a squashed ball, which causes the capsule's orbit to shift slightly over time.

"It's really a heroic calculation," said Steve Strogatz, a mathematician at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, after reading the technical paper. "John Glenn isn't the only hero in this."

In the movie, highlighting Euler's Method works as a dramatic plot device. But the full extent of the math that Katherine Johnson and the other women and men of NASA used to send astronauts safely into space and back is much richer and deeper than any one approach.

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The movie gives a shout-out to Euler's Method -- a centuries-old math technique. Did it really help send astronauts into orbit? Catherine Meyers, Staff Writer (Inside Science) -- Math plays a starring role in the movie "Hidden Figures," which is nominated for three Oscars, including Best Picture, at this weekend's Academy Awards.

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The Most Powerful Part of Hidden Figures? The Women, Of Course

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The Most Powerful Part of Hidden Figures? The Women, Of Course

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Since we have learned a lot about gender and racism in this course I should include some of the gender racism that was in Hidden Figures. This article does a deep analysis of the representation of women in this film.

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In the early 1960s, three African-American female mathematicians who worked at NASA headquarters in Virginia as "computers" helped launch astronaut John Glenn into orbit. The behind-the-scenes actions of these unsung heroines helped put America ahead of the Russians in The Space Race, boosted confidence in the U.S. Space program, and changed history. But it wasn't until many years after their brilliant contributions that these women were finally recognized. Hidden Figures ( based on Margot Lee Shetterly's book of the same name) tells their true story.

Their journey was unsurprisingly fraught with rampant sexism and racism, from the opening scene in which a white cop pulls up to them on the side of the road and questions them as they attempt to fix their Chevy Impala, incredulous that a woman ( Octavia Spence r as Katherine Johnson) can repair a car. "It's the starter," she says triumphantly. He's even more amazed when the three women tell him they work at NASA.
RELATED: Taraji P. Henson Steals the Show in Flaming Red Gown at Hidden Figures Screening
Impressed, the cop ends up escorting them to work, prompting Mary Jackson (played by Janelle Monae) to quip, "Three negro women are chasing a white police officer down the highway in Hampton, Virginia, 1961. Ladies, that there is a God-ordained miracle." From there we see the three friends both in and out of the workplace, dealing with segregated bathrooms, coffee stations, libraries and buses, not getting credit for their work, being denied education and promotions, consistently being underestimated by men, and the list goes on and on.

Hopper Stone/ Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation

On her first day working a with a group of male engineers, one of them hands Katherine Johnson (played by Taraji P. Hensen) a trash can to empty. Her work partner (played by Jim Parsons) attempts to derail her by blacking out crucial numbers in reports she needs to analyze, insisting they are classified. He also removes her names from the reports they co-author.

While the film obviously presents racism and sexism in a critical light, it nevertheless portrays the time period itself in more of a Mad Men kind of nostalgia-from the colorful dresses and skinny ties to the rotary phones, gingham picnics and cat-eye glasses. There are also a few moments that feel a bit contrived-like when Mary almost gets stuck in a NASA lab where dangerous tests are being conducted because her high heel gets caught (Yes, we get it! She's a woman who wears pumps!). Or when Katherine's boss Al Harrison (played by an even keeled Kevin Costner) dramatically tears the "Colored" sticker off the coffee pot Katherine has been forced to use then destroys the "Coloreds Only" bathroom sign with a hammer, declaring, "Here at NASA we all pee the same color."
RELATED: Michelle Obama Hosts a Star-Studded Private Screening of Hidden Figures at the White House
Still, the history of conquering racism and sexism in America is about slowly chipping away at injustices-and the end result here is a feel good movie about an important subject and a fascinating moment in our history.

Here, we celebrate the most powerful part of Hidden Figures: the women.

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The Most Powerful Part of Hidden Figures? The Women, Of Course

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In the early 1960s, three African-American female mathematicians who worked at NASA headquarters in Virginia as "computers" helped launch astronaut John Glenn into orbit. The behind-the-scenes actions of these unsung heroines helped put America ahead of the Russians in The Space Race, boosted confidence in the U.S. Space program, and changed history.

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A historical tale of unsung NASA heroes that overachieves on the strength of its leading turns

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A historical tale of unsung NASA heroes that overachieves on the strength of its leading turns

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Since we have discussed critical thinking extensively in this course we have also learned that its important to see things from different views and constructive criticism is actually sometime more helpful. This article writes about small flaws this movie had.

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Hidden Figures is a feel-good movie that hurts, and the rare film based on historical events that feels both relevant and new. It's there in the title, see. The women of this film use their brilliant minds to see numbers that others can't - complex calculations for space travel, the language of computers, the math necessary to build a rocket - but they're hidden, themselves. This is a movie about American heroes, but many who see the film will never have heard their names.

So let's start there. It's 1961, and Katherine Johnson, Mary Jackson, and Dorothy Vaughan ( Taraji P. Henson, Janelle Monaé, and Octavia Spencer, respectively) work for NASA as members of the West Computing Group, a 20-person team made up entirely of women of color. Practically as soon as we meet them, the three are whisked off in different directions. Mary's assigned to a team of engineers, where she's encouraged by her supervisor to fight for the chance to become one herself. Katherine heads to the Space Task Group, an elite team headed by Al Harrison ( Kevin Costner) that's focused on, you know, getting a man into space. Dorothy, meanwhile, stays put, continuing to act as a supervisor despite not being given the title (or the pay), while eyeing the great new IBM that just rolled in the front door. All the while, they contend with racism and sexism - institutional and otherwise - and live out their daily lives, complete with kids, husbands, and even the odd suitor.

While director and screenwriter Theodore Melfi ( St. Vincent) expertly captures the fevered energy of a group of geniuses being outpaced by the Russians in the throes of the Cold War, much of what keeps the film from tip-toeing into maudlin sentimentality comes from its contemporary resonance. Adapted from Margot Lee Shetterly's book of the same name, Melfi and co-writer Allison Schroeder's screenplay shows exactly how damaging inequality and bias can be to society's progress, sparing time along the way to make math as exciting as any high-powered car chase. There are no moustache-twirling villains here, though Jim Parsons is only a few disgusted stares away from sprouting a handlebar as a disgruntled lead engineer. Instead, Melfi and Schroeder focus on black women who quietly excel while surrounded by white people who assume they're on the janitorial staff.

That dynamic is reflected in the superb cast; the film is dominated by the terrific, energetic, and often moving performances of its three leads, and bolstered by the quieter but still excellent work of the supporting players. As Harrison, Costner perfectly plays the role of the curmudgeonly mentor, and in the film's sole instance of a white person nobly taking down racism, he underplays it so superbly that it manages to bypass the chasm of cliché on which it balances. Kirsten Dunst, Parsons, and Kimberly Quinn fill in as well-meaning people whose biases, casual and otherwise, are worn as casually as a string of pearls, while Glen Powell radiates charm and courage as John Glenn. And Mahershala Ali shows up as a dreamy love interest whose romantic entanglement with Katherine is nearly tanked from the get-go, due to his early disbelief that women would be of use at a place like NASA.

Still, this movie belongs to the trio on the poster. Henson's nuclear-powered charisma works surprisingly well when tucked behind a pair of horn-rimmed glasses, and when the mild-mannered Katherine finally gets pushed past the breaking point, her explosive response is so thrilling and satisfying that it makes the moment's broad, Hollywood brushstrokes wholly forgivable. As Mary, Monaé gives her second terrific turn on the year (the other in Moonlight), imbuing the character with intelligence, determination, defiance, and what can only be described as sass (on seeing John Glenn: "It's equal rights. I have the right to see fine in every color.") Spencer, who'd land near the top of any list of cinema's most reliable performers, plays Dorothy as a woman of tremendous intelligence and composure, quietly demanding respect for her work, her family, and the women she leads. Separately, all three are terrific, but they're never better than when they're together. Their shared scenes are filled with a kind of electric energy that can't be faked. Just as Dorothy, Mary, and Katherine must have felt thrilled to be a part of something so momentous, it's clear that to Spencer, Henson, and Monaé, this film means a great deal.

Hidden Figures is so winning, in fact, that it's easy to overlook some of the film's shortcomings. While the movie earns a great deal of goodwill and generally avoids anything that could be considered eye-rolling, there's no denying that the film's approach to storytelling is formulaic. In an early sequence, a young Katherine sees math in everything around her, shapes floating out of a stained glass window as she names them. The film never again returns to anything that visually daring, instead turning to stock footage of Kennedy speeches underscored with sweeping violins and rooms full of white shirts in which Katherine's the only one wearing a vivid color. And while there's a certain sweetness in the fact that Ali's character isn't developed beyond the role of love interest - after all, that's a frequent occurrence for equivalent female characters - the fact remains that a terrific actor shows up mostly to be swooned upon.

Hidden Figures might have some familiar flaws, but they're part and parcel of the type of feel-good film it is: an inspirational, family-friendly, based-on-a-true-story tearjerker cooked up with a formula that's been working for many, many years. More importantly, it works within that formula better than any film like it in quite some time, an A+ in its subgenre. Hidden Figures might not be as groundbreaking as the women whose story drives it, but like those women, it does what it does very well. It might even inspire a few more young girls to reach for the stars, or at least for a pencil, and few things are more feel-good than that.
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Hidden Figures is a feel-good movie that hurts, and the rare film based on historical events that feels both relevant and new. It's there in the title, see. The women of this film use their brilliant minds to see numbers that others can't - complex calculations for space travel, the language of computers, the math necessary to build a rocket - but they're hidden, themselves.

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‘Hidden Figures’ and the power of pragmatism

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‘Hidden Figures’ and the power of pragmatism

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Since this is an academic essay this article goes in-depth into how this movie changed the minds of viewers without the use of connecting to the hearts and minds of viewers.

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We love a good space movie, don't we?

We've had some grand, engulfing ones make appearances in late fall/early winter over the past few years with 2013's Gravity and 2015's The Martian. I'm including the recent Arrival, too, even though, admittedly, it's more of an alien movie than a space one.

Black Excellence
This year, we have Hidden Figures, which opens nationally Friday, and has as much to say about our common humanity as it does about the space race and the previously unsung individuals who helped power it. However, its approach is more local in scope. Gravity, The Martian, and Arrival all dealt with humanity on a massive, existential scale, with the people of Earth pulling together to save one of their own (or, in the case of Arrival, the entire human race), because it's simply The Right Thing To Do. Hidden Figures, which is based on a true story, is decidedly less idealistic. Instead, it's a glimpse at how you win civil rights victories even if you don't win hearts and minds. It's about winning battles as a result of common interests even as your adversaries have trouble seeing you as a person who is just like them. The pragmatism that flows through Hidden Figures, combined with its upbeat-yet-straightforward approach to showcasing the racist nastiness that Katherine Johnson (Taraji P. Henson), Dorothy Vaughn (Octavia Spencer), and Mary Jackson (Janelle Monáe) endured while working at NASA's racially segregated Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, in the 1960s, provides a beacon of hope in a modern era that feels marked by uncertainty and despair.
It's a glimpse at how you win civil rights victories even if you don't win hearts and minds.

Johnson, Vaughn, and Jackson are friends who work as (human) computers for NASA. They compute complex math problems as part of a group of black women hired to do the same. The conditions of their employment are not ideal. They're segregated away from the white computers, they're hired on as temp employees, and Vaughn, the de facto leader of the black computers, isn't recognized as a supervisor even though she clearly performs supervisory work. But Johnson, Vaughn, and Jackson have a couple of factors on their side: confidence in their abilities that is reinforced by friendship, and the deadline pressure of an actual race to space with the Soviets.

Over and over, Hidden Figures demonstrates how these women, especially Johnson, were able to ascend through NASA. It wasn't because their white colleagues suddenly decided to stop being racist, but because it was in NASA's interest for them to do so. When Johnson is tapped to double-check the work of Paul Stafford (Jim Parsons), he tries his best to sabotage her. He barely conceals his contempt for her in their interactions. He redacts the calculations Johnson needs to see to do her job. Johnson's prickly boss, Al Harrison (Kevin Costner) comes to her aid in working with Stafford, not because he's sympathetic, or even aware of her specific plight as the only black woman in the department, but because he's in a hurry to put a guy in earth's orbit before the Soviets do.

When Johnson needs a security clearance to get her work done faster, it's Harrison who grants it over Stafford's protests because they have a common interest in meeting the government's stringent deadlines.

When Jackson needs a court order to allow her to take night classes at an all-white school so that she can enter NASA's engineering program, she appeals to the ego of the judge in the case. "Out of all the cases you hear today, which one's gonna make you the first?" Jackson asks, making his decision a question of judicial legacy. She convinces him that they both have an interest in history not remembering him as a retrograde bigot. This, by the way, is precisely what Slate's Lara Bazelon recently argued may save the Roberts Court from becoming a rubber stamp for the incoming Trump administration.

And so she pushes, and she keeps pushing, even when it's impolite, even when it makes white people uncomfortable.

Maybe it's not heartwarming, but it's certainly realistic. The country pulled together to best a common enemy at the behest of a young, photogenic president who inspired optimism, even as it was wrestling with an internecine conflict over civil rights. Johnson even manages to needle Harrison into letting her attend Pentagon briefings to provide up-to-date calculations when it becomes clear that they have a common interest in not killing astronaut John Glenn.

While Hidden Figures illustrates that good that can come of dismantling barriers in the pursuit of common interests, it doesn't offer white absolution. Johnson, Vaughn, and Jackson don't allow the cruelties of living in a racist country to permanently steal their joy - Mary's saucy demeanor feels like a direct rebellion against it - but Hidden Figures also acknowledges the difficulties of working in a place surrounded by white people who barely tolerate your presence. That's a shift from just 10 years ago, when Sony Pictures released The Pursuit of Happyness.

Hidden Figures and Pursuit of Happyness heavily feature their protagonists constantly running - it's a recurring motif of both films. Will Smith's character, Chris Gardner, is running to acquire shelter, running to acquire clients, running to sell the bone density scanners that earn him a living, but mostly running to keep his white employers happily ignorant of his plight as a homeless, unpaid intern at Dean Witter. Johnson, on the other hand, must run from her new office, with white colleagues who won't deign to share a coffeepot with her, half a mile every time she has to use the restroom, because that's the distance to the closest facility designated for black women.

Both films feature white people who are oblivious to the struggles and lives of their black colleagues, but there's an enormous difference between what the two movies have to say about that obliviousness and the way white people have walled themselves off with segregated housing and education. Unlike Pursuit of Happyness, which offers no critique of such willful oblivion, Hidden Figures implicates it in a jarring, tearful, pissed-off monologue from Johnson. When Harrison asks where Johnson disappears every day for 40 minutes, there's an office showdown in which a dripping wet Johnson, who's had to run a mile in the rain just to use the restroom, explodes, not just about the restroom but about an entire workplace structure that's built to reinforce her inferiority.

The only jewelry she's expected to wear is a string of white pearls, but NASA doesn't pay her enough to afford them. She's in violation of a sexist dress code that mandates she wear skirts and sweaters, but not blouses, because she doesn't make enough money to buy a new wardrobe, again because her pay and position are not commensurate with her work. She's expected to double-check the math of a colleague who redacts his work because he can't countenance that a black woman might know just as much, if not more than he does. All of Johnson's frustrations come tumbling out in a scene that is utterly human.

Johnson is no silent martyr who grinds until her white colleagues finally recognize her genius and decide to gift her with the recognition and respect she deserved all along. She realizes that's a pipe dream. And so she pushes, and she keeps pushing, even when it's impolite, even when it makes white people uncomfortable. Where Pursuit of Happyness didn't bother suggesting any sort of moral deficiency on the part of do-nothing, know-nothing white people, Hidden Figures shouts it. Harrison takes it upon himself to desegregate the restrooms, mostly because he can't afford for his top computer to waste 40 minutes a day running back and forth.

Hidden Figures demonstrates why sneering dismissively at "identity politics" or using the term as a pejorative amounts to little more than hogwash.

The black women of Hidden Figures are constantly pushing - whether it's Johnson pushing Harrison to allow her to attend Pentagon briefings, or Vaughn stealing a library book to learn Fortran, the programming language for the IBM computer threatening to put her out of a job. After a librarian informed her that the book came from a part of the library restricted only to whites, Vaughn tucked it away and took it anyway, because how else was she going to learn?

But even common interests can't serve those who can't see them, and in that regard, Vivian Mitchell, the obstructionist head of the white computers played by an icy Kirsten Dunst, becomes a cinematic metonym for the 53 percent of white women who voted for Donald Trump, an admitted sexual assaulter who said women who have abortions must be punished for doing so. Mitchell is so determined to block Vaughn and her fellow computers from achieving any sort of progress - and so interested in maintaining a racist status quo she's convinced benefits her - that she ends up undercutting herself in the process. When NASA needs programmers for its new IBM computer, it's Vaughn's team who is armed with knowledge of Fortran, while Mitchell's group is left in the cold.

Besides communicating about the power of common interests, Hidden Figures demonstrates why sneering dismissively at "identity politics" or using the term as a pejorative amounts to little more than hogwash. When you stand in the way of progress for women and people of color, you are only hobbling yourself. Hidden Figures offers a beautiful illustration of how hollow the call to "Make America Great Again" really rings, because an America without black women isn't just an America without the women who birthed, nursed, and raised so many white children at the expense of their own. There will be no white ethnostate like the one white nationalist Richard Spencer dreams of creating because an America without black women is an America without its most educated demographic in the workforce. It is an America devoid of a group, who instead of pouting and throwing hissy fits as automation threatens to make its jobs obsolete, instead picks itself up, dusts itself off, and answers with steely resolve and a thirst for more education, as Dorothy Vaughn did.

An America without black women is an America lacking the energy, the bravery, the optimism, and the determination to power its wildest dreams, like sending a man hurtling into space to orbit the earth and then bringing him safely back home - you know, its moon shots.

Soraya Nadia McDonald is the culture critic for The Undefeated. She writes about pop culture, fashion, the arts, and literature. She's based in Brooklyn.

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'Hidden Figures' and the power of pragmatism

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We love a good space movie, don't we? We've had some grand, engulfing ones make appearances in late fall/early winter over the past few years with 2013's Gravity and 2015's The Martian. I'm including the recent Arrival , too, even though, admittedly, it's more of an alien movie than a space one.

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This source has an excellent synopsis of the movie and the different issues it was trying to get the viewers to see. Including parts of this in my synopsis will help me make it brief and to the point without giving a synopsis for the entire essay.

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Launching a bright, rousing entertainment about a real-world subject onto thousands of movie screens is a major feat. The creators of Hidden Figures, a fictionalized history of the black female math wizards who helped get NASA off the ground in the 1960s, make it look as easy as one, two, three. The director, Theodore Melfi ( St. Vincent), imbues his complicated narrative with a three-part clarity that allows his cast-not just his gifted leads, Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, and Janelle Monae, but also ace actors Kevin Costner and Mahershala Ali-to glide engagingly and intelligently from drama to comedy, from irony to uplift. Melfi's showmanship puts a gloss on the material while retaining its freshness. The movie sets off revelatory tingles as it chronicles NASA's exploitation of its female calculators-known as "computers"-and then its adoption of electronic computing with a massive IBM mainframe.

First, Melfi smartly collapses much of the history of these stellar number crunchers into 1961 and '62. Americans, not used to playing catch-up, worry about the Soviets conquering space with Sputnik satellites and cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, but are also thrilled at the prospect of putting U.S. citizens into orbit-thanks partly to the soaring rhetoric of President John F. Kennedy, who proclaims, in a newsreel clip, "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." The concentrated chronology allows Melfi to bring home the message that an appeal to national ideals in one area, like the space race, can open up new frontiers in others, like civil rights. (Right before he delivered the quoted line, JFK said, pointedly, "There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in outer space as yet.") The contest for the cosmos also supplies the film with some ticking-bomb suspense. The archival footage reminds us that astronauts ride into space on the force of quaking, timed explosions.

Second, Melfi never loses sight of his heroines' dual struggle, as women and as black people. He encourages his actors to play on that duality with wisdom, anger, and a nuanced sort of farce. At the start of the story proper, Henson's Katherine Goble (later to become Katherine Johnson), a grownup prodigy now working as a "computer," Mary Jackson (Monae), a computer with the brain and drive of an engineer, and Dorothy Vaughan (Spencer), their unofficial supervisor, are having car trouble when they see a Virginia state policeman heading their way. "No crime in a broken-down car," says the sage and steady Vaughan. "No crime in being Negro neither," says tough, outspoken Mary. When the cop asks for identification, he learns they're en route to NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, where, Vaughan adds, they do "a great deal of the calculating getting our rockets into space." When the cop begins "I had no idea they hired-", Vaughan quietly cuts in: "There are quite a few women working in the space program." The women end up racing to work with a police escort. This scene sets the movie's comic-dramatic rhythm on track, and Melfi never jumps the rails. He keeps alternating risk and humor, tension and release, with a jolly and exciting forward motion. Even the repeated sight of Katherine racing from the Space Task Group on the white East Side of NASA's campus to the "colored" rest room on the West Side, half a mile away, adds to the film's seriocomic momentum. These 880-yard dashes in high heels as she carries stacks of documents testify to her solid middle-class grit.

Third, Melfi turns these three women into a group hero representing a bigger group-the dozens of black female computers, as well as the far greater groups of under-respected brilliant women and disrespected African-Americans, without slighting their individuality.

This director is no flashy stylist, but he has a true showman's instinct for setting each character in our mind visually as well as dramatically. Katherine, the first African American woman to attend graduate school at West Virginia University, is a wunderkind who must learn how to work wonders as an adult. She becomes a catalyst for NASA elevating its black female employees. Even as a little girl Melfi shows her on the move, practicing prime numbers as she ambles through the woods, then teasing geometric shapes from the designs in a stained-glass window. Three decades later the Space Task Group will need her expertise in analytic geometry. Now a widowed mother with three daughters, she enters her new job humbly, anxious to prove her worth. She endures obstructionism and an almost sadistic condescension from the lead engineer (Jim Parsons) as well as the casual racism and isolation of being the sole black and second woman in the room. She looks throttled behind her desk, then frantic as she sprints to the restroom. Forced to check the math in reports redacted beyond recognition, she discovers a work-around that allows her to predict a rocket failure. Melfi and Henson depict her stepping up a ladder in a state of hyper-concentration to chalk out equations on a mammoth blackboard. Her work gains her a no-nonsense ally in the Task Group chief, a composite character named Al Harrison (Kevin Costner), who values her dedication and ingenuity as well as her analytic wizardry. Melfi's production team places Harrison up a flight of stairs in a glass office, with a panoramic view of his department. Costner plays against this grandeur with a first-rate portrait of a pragmatist as hero, intense and brusque, boasting plainspoken eloquence and deadpan sensitivity and wit.

Costner and Henson's cerebral pas de deux generates the film's subtlest passages. Bespectacled and restrained, Henson leaves vanity behind as a woman with the intellectual faith that "numbers don't lie," while Costner crafts an authority figure without any taint of sentimentality or paternalism. These characters recognize each other's excellence. Their unspoken bond emboldens Katherine to nudge Harrison into opening doors for her-and once she walks through, Harrison is canny enough to push her to her limits. Together, Henson and Costner convey the magnetism of total professionalism.

With Mahershala Ali as Colonel Jim Johnson, an Army man and National Guard honcho who becomes Katherine's second husband, Henson puts across something different, something soft yet formidable-the sensual allure of refinement and formality. Katherine's romantic distance proves to be direct, not coy: she's frank about taking Johnson's measure as a man. Ali, an instantly persuasive actor (as he shows in Moonlight) as well as a superb romantic partner (as he shows in House of Cards), conjures a charismatic understatement as the suitor who's ready to meet her challenge. In Moonlight he's loose and individualistic as Juan, a drug dealer from Cuba, while in Hidden Figures he's commanding and courtly yet also endearingly stiff as a career military man. In both movies Ali's silences are as warm and charged with meaning as his characters' hard-earned statements of wisdom and stirring declarations of feeling.

Melfi frequently views Dorothy close to the ground, enabling Spencer to draw on her own rootedness. On first sight, we see only Dorothy's legs-the rest of her is under that broken-down car, repairing it. She's a genuine Ms. Fix-It, even with that mysterious, recalcitrant new IBM contraption. Passed over for a managerial promotion that white men would receive as a matter of course, Dorothy doesn't mince words about her impatience with her coolly impersonal white counterpart, Vivian Mitchell (Kirsten Dunst, lending texture to a thankless role). She's been at NASA longer than her sisters-in-arms, and she's tired of practicing her well-honed survival skills. But Dorothy doesn't let her frustration get the best of her. She moves shrewdly, gracefully, and implacably through NASA's corridors, whether surprising Mitchell at her desk or invading the IBM office and learning how to work the machine without any IBM men even noticing her. Friendships and family life fuel her resilience. (The real Vaughan had six children; here we get to know two.) Spencer's gift for suggesting the hidden layers of underestimated women makes her the perfect actress to play a model of strength and endurance. In Hidden Figures, her combination of fortitude and sneak-attack intelligence makes her deeply funny and inspiring.

Monae has tremendous zest as Mary; with any luck, this Afro-futurist singing star will become a major movie actor. Melfi and Monae depict her as both an unmovable object and an irresistible force. Even when she's standing still she sets off good vibrations. She gives the entire film a livewire, contemporary spark without being anachronistic or narcissistic. Fifteen years younger than her co-stars, Monae imbues Mary with a youthful attitude that sometimes drives the other computers crazy, as when she ogles the visiting astronauts and says, "It's equal rights-I have the right to see 'fine' in every color." (When the gentlemanly John Glenn saunters over to meet the black computers, Mary shakes his hand in both of hers). Monae pulls off Mary's ebullience and her wisecracking form of resignation with élan. By the end, she also shows enormous range, voicing Mary's belief in the necessity of smashing precedents with an unselfconscious conviction that comes from the marrow and can't be faked. In Moonlight, Monae plays Teresa, Juan's romantic partner, with unreserved emotionalism and informal grace. In Hidden Figures it's hilarious, provocative, and exhilarating to see Mary's fearless temperament-and Monae's-confront Jim Crow laws and NASA protocols.

The three stars interact beautifully. Their confidence in their different body types and their generosity as performers make it satisfying to watch them walk together. It's a little bit of ecstasy to see these friends dance together. Melfi and his cinematographer, Mandy Walker, deftly choreograph their movements through NASA's hallways, counterpointing claustrophobia with awe, and the whole movie takes a breath of fresh air when they attend a Sunday service and an outdoor church lunch. When it comes to the astronauts and outer space, the moviemakers simply borrow from the best-several scenes are like more conventional remakes of episodes from The Right Stuff. Glen Powell proves to be amusingly boyish as Tom Wolfe's "squeaky-clean Marine," John Glenn, and Melfi builds the arc of the astronaut's trust in Katherine's calculations toward a gratifying payoff.

The film occasionally stumbles in its storytelling, notably when Katherine abruptly and temporarily gets demoted, and in its staging, especially when Dorothy joins a roadside group listening to a broadcast of Glenn's risky re-entry with a wobbly heat shield. What matters most, though, is that the flight of Friendship 7 becomes a grand summing-up of the film's major ideas, including its beliefs in positive group efforts and organic consciousness-raising. It will be an ideal film for Martin Luther King Day because it's about being judged on the content of our character. After his lead engineer balks at having Katherine review his math, Costner's Harrison demands, "America's greatest engineering and scientific minds are not going to have a problem with having their work checked." He concludes, "So let's have an 'amen,' damn it."

Amen.

Michael Sragow is a contributing editor to Film Comment and writes its Deep Focus column. He is a member of the National Society of Film Critics and the Los Angeles Film Critics Association. He also curates "The Moviegoer" at the Library of America website.

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Deep Focus: Hidden Figures - Film Comment

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Launching a bright, rousing entertainment about a real-world subject onto thousands of movie screens is a major feat. The creators of Hidden Figures, a fictionalized history of the black female math wizards who helped get NASA off the ground in the 1960s, make it look as easy as one, two, three.

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I could possibly include some of the themes and quotes this article used in my essay. This could be a great source in identifying themes and symbols in Hidden Figures.

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Margot Lee Shetterly was raised in a middle class black community in Hampton, Virginia. Her father was a climate scientist at the NASA-Langley Research Center and her mother was an English Professor at Hampton University. She attended the University of Virginia, where she studied business, and then she moved to New York, where she worked at several prestigious investment banking firms and media startups. After marrying writer Aran Shetterly, the two moved to Mexico in 2005 to start a magazine for Anglophone expats in Mexico, and Shetterly began writing and researching Hidden Figures while living in Mexico in 2010. To support her writing, Shetterly has received fellowships from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and from the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. Hidden Figures was released as both a book and an Oscar-nominated movie in 2016. Shetterly is also the founder of the Human Computer Project, which aims to be a complete record of women who contributed to research at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics.

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Margot Lee Shetterly was raised in a middle class black community in Hampton, Virginia. Her father was a climate scientist at the NASA-Langley Research Center and her mother was an English Professor at Hampton University. She attended the University of Virginia, where she studied business, and then she moved to New York, where she worked at several prestigious investment banking firms and media startups.

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Well I Don’t Own Pearls: The Heroic Costumes of “Hidden Figures”

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Well I Don’t Own Pearls: The Heroic Costumes of “Hidden Figures”

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Each of the main actresses in this film has their own style of clothing, but along with that the film takes into account the clothing to focus your attention to different parts of the screen at different times. In our discussion of how clothing is a part of identity, this film makes a great effort in the clothing of each actor. This will help me further write about the roles of gender.

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When we came up with the idea to do this " Mid-Century Women" series of costume design posts, we wanted to provide distinctly different versions of costume design along with the distinctly different types of women being highlighted. But when we got to Hidden Figures, we almost abandoned the idea, mainly because we didn't think there was enough material to support a deep analysis.

This is not a criticism of the approach taken by the film's costume designer Renee Ehrlich Kalfus, however. First, she had the task of bringing actual people to life onscreen, with some sort of nod to historical accuracy being required of her choices; something not needed in the other two films. Second, the film itself is a lighter, more overtly inspirational form of entertainment than or , both of which displayed different degrees of a heavy seriousness that occasionally dripped with symbolism. Hidden Figures has something far more direct in mind with the story it's telling and subsequently, the costume design itself is direct, basic, and fits itself well within the style of the film.

The story of the black women who worked behind the scenes at NASA doing incredibly difficult and important work at a time when their own civil rights were not assured and the very institutions they worked for routinely stripped them of their full humanity is a serious and important story that deserved to be told. But director Theodore Melfi also wanted a film that popped with energy, style and music, in order to give the film a lightness that matched the energy of the three actresses at its center. In response, the costume design is pretty, stylish and abundant. It is not necessarily realistic, however. And that was the main reason why we almost dismissed it - quite wrongly.

But before we get further into that, let's look at the three women in the story, Katherine Johnson, Mary Jackson and Dorothy Vaughn, to see how each of them were portrayed through costume design.

Katherine favors full skirts, defined waists, prints and traditionally feminine detailing. It's that latter phrase that sums her style up best: traditionally feminine. This helps render her as the somewhat romantic figure the film positions her to be while at the same time giving her a look distinct from the other two women and setting her as far apart as possible from the men who surround her.

Note the large bead necklace she wears the first time she reports to the Task Force lab, a reference to the stated dress code and a foreshadowing of her own furious declaration that NASA doesn't pay her enough money to put her in the pearls they expect her to wear.

Dorothy dresses the most business-like of the three women, a tip of the hat to her ambitions to land a supervisor role and her skill with computers, not to mention her more go-along attitude (on the surface, at least). Note how she tends to dress mostly in one color, with highly coordinated detailing. She gives off an overwhelming sense of being utterly composed and professional. She has an admirable collection of brooches, to boot .

As the youngest of the trio, Mary Jackson's costumes tend to have just a bit more energy and even sex appeal to them. She favors body-skimming dresses with bold print details, like oversized plaids, stripes or paisleys. She also favors brightly patterned head scarves, which tend to position her as the more youthful and forward-looking of the women, adding to that overall "sixties" feeling of her style. And she's the only of the three to wear pants in the film.

Note how she smartly tones it all way down for an appearance before a judge, however. The boldness and bright colors are ditched for a smart but sober suit.

Okay, beads, brooches and headscarves. Feminine, professional, and modern. Now let's see how those themes and others played out in various scenes.

First, we see Katherine playing out the theme we call "Sticking Out."

Note how color is used to force your eye directly to the very few women in all of these man-heavy scenes, playing on the fact that men of this period and class rarely wore anything but white dress shirts to work. This is a good reason why Katherine's silhouette is so feminine. She's not just a different color, she's a different shape in all these scenes; a shape delineated by the use of bright, eye-catching color.

Note that Dorothy, in one of the only character-based color motifs in the film, consistently dresses in pink whenever she tries to advance her career:

Color is used consistently throughout the film to single out the black characters from the white ones:

Quite literally: People of Color. As we'll see, this can have several undertones to it, from racial to institutional to cultural. You could see it as the African-American community being portrayed as a vibrant and rich one, full of life and culture, as born out by the use of several distinctly African-American forms of social events, from church to cookouts to house parties. And while we think that's at least part of it, there's also a way of reading it as a way of denoting privilege. Put a pin in that.

As noted, the men at NASA dress solely in grey suits and white dress shirts in order to draw this line of distinction, but the white women of NASA tend to dress no more colorfully than the men do:

In every scene with white and black people in it, your eye is directed to the black people through color selection and costume design. This is of a piece with a point we're going to make at the end of this post. All of this: the silhouettes, the bold, racially based color motifs, the differences in each woman's style, and the fact that they seem to have limitless wardrobes plays into the one main directive of the costume design for this film. Put a pin in all of that too.

Note how Mrs. Mitchell's relentless black ensembles (which tend to imply she's a widow) suddenly change to lighter and even patterned suits after Dorothy gently reveals her own biases to her, forcing her to change her perspective. She literally sheds the dark parts of her to become more of an ally. She doesn't suddenly start wearing bright colors, because that would break the theme already established, but she does change and, pardon the pun, lighten up a little. Character growth through costume design.

The flipside of this racially based color motif; the view that it's about privilege rather than racial differences, comes during those times that Katherine and Dorothy are both dressed in order to look like they belong where they are. First, when Katherine finally loses her shit and all but demands she be taken seriously, in a dress that swirls with a pattern that underlines her emotional turmoil, but more importantly, is rendered in a business-like gray:

The effect is even more obvious when she's finally allowed into the meetings and stands up to wow a room full of suited and uniformed men with her skill and her right to be in the room - all while wearing a sober gray suit that matches Kevin Costner's.

The "Privilege of Colorlessness" motif was picked up again when Dorothy was caught figuring out and fixing the mainframe:

When the women encroach on male spaces or white spaces and make advancements on those fronts, the costume design sheds the colorful motifs that set them apart for one that speaks of the rightness of their advancement. In that sense, the neutral dresses and gray/white suiting of the white characters are less about their race than the privileges that come with it. In other words, it is a privilege to live and work among the institutions and levers of power and not have to think about color.

As we said, we originally found a lot of these motifs somewhat obvious on the surface. Coupled with the eye-candy fashions of the main characters and the fact that they had way more clothes than most middle or working class women of the time would have had, left us thinking we didn't have much to say outside of noting a few things about their differences and pointing out that the lightness of the film's style practically begged for a lightness in the costume design.

But it occurred to us that there's a specific way of costuming your protagonists; one that we haven't actually touched on in all our writing about costume design analysis. Which is kind of ironic, because it's the most common approach to costume design: the heroic one. This became most obvious to us when we started examining what happens when the three main characters are together. We've already noted how they're dressed to show their differences, but take a look at just how meticulously rendered those differences are:

It's not just that they're dressed differently, it's that every element of each look is distinct from the same elements in the others. Every neckline, sleeve, waist, skirt length, silhouette, jewelry choice and color story differs from the other two. Not just different; meticulously distinct. In this way, when they stand together, there's something broadly rendered, almost iconic about the image. They become the figures the title refers to.

The stylishness and well-curated details of their looks elevate them, giving them the heroic status the film works so hard to highlight and bestow upon these women, but the way each of them are so broadly rendered in such distinctive ways raises them even further. It took us a while to truly figure out what it was we were feeling when we noted all of this, until it just clicked. Bold, distinct, eye-catching, flattering, iconic, pedestal-raising looks that set the heroes apart from everyone else? Of course the approach to the costume design is simplistic and maybe even unrealistic.

These are superhero costumes.
[Photo Credit: 20th Century Fox]

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Well I Don't Own Pearls: The Heroic Costumes of "Hidden Figures" | Tom + Lorenzo

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When we came up with the idea to do this " Mid-Century Women" series of costume design posts, we wanted to provide distinctly different versions of costume design along with the distinctly different types of women being highlighted.

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HIDDEN FIGURES' octavia spencer breaking barrıers.

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HIDDEN FIGURES' octavia spencer breaking barrıers.

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This piece combines the actors being a minority in the space field along with the issues of racism they would experience. Also interviews the main actress to get her point of view of being in this controversial film. This resource from our college library combines two main issues this film is trying to inform us about, and I could use this in my further research about  the other issues this film is trying to bring to our attention.

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Contra Costa Community College District - Portal Login

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Director Theodore Melfi on Why He Dropped ‘Spider-Man’ to Board ‘Hidden Figures’

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Director Theodore Melfi on Why He Dropped ‘Spider-Man’ to Board ‘Hidden Figures’

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Even though the spider man series have been very popular the director of Hidden Figures withdrew because he wanted to direct a film that had actual meaning. Getting more information about who the director is and why he picked this film over one that probably made more money will be something I would discuss in a certain part of my essay.

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NASA scientists landed in Hollywood on Wednesday evening for a special panel held by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' Science and Technology Council.

The panel, titled " Hidden Figures/ Modern Figures: A Journey of Breakthroughs in Cinema and Space Travel," featured the filmmakers behind the 2016 film " Hidden Figures " as well as NASA scientists, who joined to discuss math, science, and diversity in the context of the cinematic exploration of space.

During the discussion with the filmmakers, the film's director and producer Theodore Melfi explained how he withdrew being in consideration for the 2017 iteration of "Spider-Man" to get on board with "Hidden Figures." Days after reading the script, the concept of which he called "the most incredible thing he'd ever heard," Melfi made a no-brainer decision: "I told them to get me out of 'Spider-Man.'"

On tackling racism in the film, Melfi explained that he wanted to deliver a fresh perspective on "the little things" that cinema had not previously touched on thoroughly. "We've all seen so many movies that surround racism, or deal with slavery," he said. "But I had never seen a movie where it dealt with the everyday slights of racism, the things that still happen today."

Following the conversation with the filmmakers, three "modern figures" took the stage: Tracy Drain, Powtawche Valerino, and Jennifer Trosper; key leaders at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) who shared highlights of their work, and how they've drawn inspiration from the female pioneers portrayed in the film.

Also in attendance at the panel were "Hidden Figures" editor Peter Teschner, cinematographer Mandy Walker, and NASA chief historian Dr. Bill Barry. The panel was moderated by former Deluxe Entertainment executive Beverly J. Wood.
(Pictured: Tracy Drain and Theodore Melfi.)

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Director Theodore Melfi on Why He Dropped 'Spider-Man' to Board 'Hidden Figures'

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NASA scientists landed in Hollywood on Wednesday evening for a special panel held by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' Science and Technology Council.

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“Hidden Figures” Is a Subtle and Powerful Work of Counter-History

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“Hidden Figures” Is a Subtle and Powerful Work of Counter-History

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This piece gives the background of the roles of women in the engineering field. With our extensive discussion about gender, it's easy to identify the issue of gender in this film and the background of the history of it.

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The basic virtue of "Hidden Figures" (which opens on December 25th), and it's a formidable one, is to proclaim with a clarion vibrancy that, were it not for the devoted, unique, and indispensable efforts of three black women scientists, the United States might not have successfully sent people into space or to the moon and back. The movie is set mainly in 1961 and 1962, in Virginia, where a key NASA research center was (and is) based, and the movie is aptly and thoroughly derisive toward the discriminatory laws and practices that prevailed at the time.

The insults and indignities that black residents of Virginia, and black employees of NASA, unremittingly endured are integral to the drama. Those segregationist rules and norms-and the personal attitudes and actions that sustained them-are unfolded with a clear, forceful, analytical, and unstinting specificity. The efforts of black Virginians to cope with relentless ambient racism and, where possible, to point it out, resist it, overcome it, and even defeat it are the focus of the drama. "Hidden Figures" is a film of calm and bright rage at the way things were-an exemplary reproach to the very notion of political nostalgia. It depicts repugnant attitudes and practices of white supremacy that poisoned earlier generations' achievements and that are inseparable from those achievements.

"Hidden Figures" is a subtle and powerful work of counter-history, or, rather, of a finally and long-deferred accurate history, that fills in the general outlines of these women's roles in the space program. Its redress of the record begins in West Virginia in 1926, where the sixth-grade math prodigy Katherine Coleman is given a scholarship to a school that one of her teachers refers to as the only one in the region for black children that goes beyond the eighth grade. She quickly displays her genius there-but the school's narrow horizons suggests the sharply limited opportunities for black people over all.

The nature of those limits is indicated in the very next scene, which cuts ahead to a lonely road in Virginia in 1961. There, a car is stalled, its hood open. Katherine is there with her two other African-American friends and colleagues. She's sitting pensively in the passenger seat; Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer) is beneath the engine, trying to fix it; and Mary Jackson (Janelle Monáe) is standing impatiently beside the car. A police cruiser approaches. They tense up; Dorothy says, "No crime in a broken-down car," and Mary responds, "No crime being Negro, neither." Their fearful interaction with the officer-a white man, of course, with a billy club in hand and a condescending bearing-is resolved with a comedic moment brought about by the women's deferential irony. What emerges, however, is nothing less than an instance in a reign of terror.

Dorothy is the manager and de-facto supervisor of a group of "computers"-about thirty black women, all skilled mathematicians-that includes Katherine and Mary. Dorothy is awaiting a formal promotion to supervisor, but a talk with a senior administrator makes clear that it's not to be; the clear but unspoken reason is her race. (Tellingly, Dorothy addresses that official, played by Kirsten Dunst, as "Mrs. Mitchell," who, in turn, calls her by her first name.) Mary, endowed with engineering skill, is summoned to a team led by an engineer named Zielinski (Olek Krupa), a Polish-Jewish émigré who escaped the Holocaust and who encourages her to seek formal certification as an engineer. To do so, Mary will have to take additional classes-but the only school that offers them is a segregated one, whites-only, from which she's barred.

When NASA astronauts ceremoniously arrive at the research center, the black women "computers" are forced to stand together as a separate group, conspicuously divided from the other scientists. (Only John Glenn, played by Glen Powell, greets them, and does so warmly, shaking their hands and lingering to chat with them about their work.)

As for Katherine-now Katherine Goble, the widowed mother of three young girls-she's plucked from the pool of mathematicians to join the main research group, headed by Al Harrison (Kevin Costner). There, she's the only black person and the only woman (other than the secretary, played by Kimberly Quinn). She once again rapidly displays her mathematical genius, but not before being taken for the department custodian; forced to drink from a coffeepot labelled "colored"; treated dismissively by the lead researcher, Paul Stafford (Jim Parsons); and compelled to walk a half-mile to her former office in order to use the "colored ladies' room." (Moreover, the contrast between that depleted and dilapidated facility and the well-appointed and welcoming white-women's bathroom proves the meaning of "separate but unequal.")

Each of the three women has a particular conflict to confront, a particular focus in the struggle for equality. Mary's struggle takes place in a public forum: she petitions a Virginia state court for permission to take the needed night classes in a segregated school. She's not represented by a lawyer, and speaks on her own behalf; but, rather than making her case in open court, she makes a personal plea to the judge that's as much about him and his outlook as it is about her, and her work and its usefulness. What her plea isn't about is law, rights, or justice.

The omission is no accident; it's set up by dramatic contrast with the angry insistence of Mary's husband, Levi (Aldis Hodge), a civil-rights activist, that she not bother pursuing a job as an engineer: "You can't apply for freedom. . . . It's got to be demanded, taken." Mary says that there's "more than one way" to get opportunities, but the deck of this debate is stacked by the terms in which Levi couches it, saying that there's no such thing as a woman engineer-at least, not a black one-and blaming her for not being home often enough to take proper care of their children.

Dorothy's pursuit of a formal promotion to supervisor also takes place against the backdrop of the civil-rights movement. She learns that her entire department of human "computers" will soon be replaced by an electronic computer-an enormous I.B.M. mainframe that's being installed. A gifted technician, Dorothy seeks out a book from the local library (a segregated library from which she's thrown out), in which she'll learn the programming language Fortran; she soon becomes NASA's resident expert. On that trip to the library, in the company of her two sons on the cusp of adolescence, they witness a protest by civil-rights activists chanting "segregation must go" and see police officers, with police dogs, approaching the protesters. Dorothy and her sons pause and look, until she tells them to "pay attention that we're not part of that trouble." But, sitting in the back of the bus with them, she emphasizes that "separate and equal aren't the same thing," and adds, "If you act right, you are right."

Katherine, too, fights for her dignity and for opportunities at work. Her calculations very soon prove indispensable to the effort to put the first American astronaut, Alan Shepard, into outer space. (The scene in which she displays her calculations to the entire office of scientists features a small but brilliant stroke of film editing, which suggests that she envisioned the effect of that bold step before she took it.) She's fighting prejudice against blacks, against women (none has ever been admitted to a Pentagon briefing, where she can get the information she needs for her analyses), and against bureaucracy itself. Paul, who has been the department's resident genius, and to whom she reports, is resentful of his subordinate-a black woman, for good measure-outshining him in mathematical talent and analytical insight.

Eventually, upbraided by the head of the department, Al, in the presence of the entire staff, Katherine explodes with rage, setting forth the full litany of indignities to which she's subjected because of her skin color, before storming out. But this sublimely righteous outburst is posed on a solid meritocratic basis. Katherine isn't the only black woman to have worked in the main research department under Al; there has been a veritable parade of black women "computers" stationed in that department, and each has been found wanting and has been sent back to the pool. As a result, none has effected any change in the status of black employees or of women at NASA. Katherine's outburst is effective because Katherine, unlike her predecessors, is indispensable. Taking her claims to heart, Al plays a heroic role, championing Katherine's work and treating her with due respect-but his heroism is a conditional and practical one, spurred by his single-minded devotion to the space program.

In "Hidden Figures," the civil-rights movement isn't just a barely sketched backdrop; it's in virtual competition with the efforts in personal advancement and achievement heroically made by the three women at the center of the film. In the movie, the three women never speak directly of civil rights. In the warmhearted romance at the center of the movie-Katherine's relationship with Col. Jim Johnson (Mahershala Ali)-the subject never comes up. (Katherine Johnson is now ninety-eight; a title card at the end of the film declares that she and Johnson recently celebrated their fifty-sixth wedding anniversary.) The movie presents three women whose life experiences have been extraordinary; their work, their personal lives, and their struggle for justice are uncompromisingly heroic. What the movie is missing, above all, is their voices.

These women are not in any way submissive or passive. On the contrary, each one speaks up and takes action at great personal risk. (For instance, Dorothy steals a book that the library won't let her borrow and then speaks sharply to the guard who hustles her and her sons out.) The movie's emphasis on individual action and achievement in the face of vast obstacles is both beautiful and salutary, but its near-effacement of collective organization and political activity at a time when they were at their historical apogee-for that matter, its elision of politics as such-narrows the drama and, all the more grievously, the characters at its center.

What the women at the center of "Hidden Figures" lived through in their youth, in the deep age of Jim Crow, and, later, at a time of protest and of legal change, remains unspoken; their wisdom and insight remain unexpressed. For all the emotional power and historical redress of the movie-above all, in the simple recognition of the centrality of its three protagonists to the modern world-it pushes to the fore a moderation, based solely on personal accomplishment, in pursuit of justice. This is different from the civil-rights goal of a universal equality based on humanity alone, extended to the ordinary as well as to the exceptional. This is, by no means, a complaint about the real-life people on whom the movie is based; it's purely a matter of aesthetics, a result of decisions by the director and screenwriter, Theodore Melfi, and his co-writer, Allison Schroeder, about how they imagined and developed the characters. (I found myself thinking, by contrast, of recently published stories by the late filmmaker Kathleen Collins, with their incisive observations regarding participants and observers of civil-rights activism.)

Melfi and Schroeder are white; perhaps they conceived the film to be as nonthreatening to white viewers as possible, or perhaps they anticipated that it would be released at a time of promised progress. Instead, it's being released in a time of resurgent, unabashed racism. The time for protest has returned; for all the inspired celebration of hitherto unrecognized black heroes that "Hidden Figures" offers, and all the retrospective outrage that "Hidden Figures" sparks, I can only imagine the movie as it might have been made, much more amply, imaginatively, and resonantly, linking history and the present tense, by Ava DuVernay or Spike Lee, Julie Dash or Charles Burnett.

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"Hidden Figures" Is a Subtle and Powerful Work of Counter-History

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The basic virtue of "Hidden Figures" (which opens on December 25th), and it's a formidable one, is to proclaim with a clarion vibrancy that, were it not for the devoted, unique, and indispensable efforts of three black women scientists, the United States might not have successfully sent people into space or to the moon and back.

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What Sets the Smart Heroines of Hidden Figures Apart

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What Sets the Smart Heroines of Hidden Figures Apart

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This writing starts dissecting the role of racism in this movie relating to people in the engineering field. This article will be helpful when I start writing about the different issues this film is trying to inform the audience.

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What Sets the Smart Heroines of ‘Hidden Figures’ Apart

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Movies about brilliant scientific or mathematical minds often focus on their subject’s ego—not so with a new film about three African American women who worked at NASA in the ’60s.