Hidden
Figures Calculates
the Sum of a Story Untold
Nov. 17, 2016
Hopper Stone—FOX Katherine Johnson
(Taraji P. Henson), Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer) and Mary Jackson (Janelle
Monáe) are three brilliant African-American women working at NASA, who served
as the brains behind one of the greatest operations in history: the launch of
astronaut John Glenn into orbit.
Katherine Johnson was always running.
She ran, several times a day, the half mile from her desk at NASA to the
“colored ladies'” restroom on the other side of Virginia’s Langley Research
Center, toting binders full of calculations so as not to lose precious time
that–this being the height of the space race–the Soviets no doubt were using
well. She ran around her home, chasing three daughters whose father had died of
a brain tumor. And she ran, on a February afternoon in 1962, from the West Area
Computing Unit back to Mission Control when John Glenn refused to take off on
his orbit around Earth until Johnson, and only Johnson, double-checked his
launch calculations.
When Taraji P. Henson, who plays
the sprinting space scientist, read the script for Hidden Figures,
Theodore Melfi’s drama about the black female mathematicians, engineers and
programmers who helped get Americans into space, her knee-jerk reaction was
anger. “I was like, What?” she recalls. “I’m 46, I went to college, and I don’t
know this?” Henson’s co-stars–Janelle Monáe, who plays engineer Mary Jackson,
and Octavia Spencer, who plays supervisor Dorothy Vaughan–both assumed they
were reading a work of fiction.
“It’s cognitive dissonance,” says
Spencer. “Black women being recruited to work as mathematicians at NASA’s
southern installation defies what we think we know about American history.” Not
to mention how Hollywood, historically, has depicted it. Consider movies about
geniuses, like Good Will Hunting, A Beautiful Mind, Amadeus, The Theory of
Everything, The Social Network. The brainiacs at the chalkboard, the piano and
the computer are almost always white, almost always male. Consider films about
accomplished black women–like Tina Turner, Josephine Baker, Billie Holiday–all
singularly talented, but all entertainers. “We are tired, as consumers, of
seeing the same protagonist be the hero,” says Monáe. “We need new heroes, and
these women are new heroes for us.”
The phrase colored computer may
bring to mind the candy-hued
Apple iMac of the late
1990s, but in the early 1960s, it referred to the African-American female
mathematicians who performed calculations and plotted data in NASA’s research
divisions. Although white women had been employed in these roles since the
1930s, black women were not considered for them until 1943. With men at war and
an Executive Order from President Roosevelt prohibiting discrimination in the
defense industry, doors began to open for talented black mathematicians.
The story of Johnson, Jackson,
Vaughan and their comrades in computation surfaced thanks to Margot Lee
Shetterly, whose father worked at NASA with them, and who began work in 2014 on
a book about them–now a best seller–also called
Hidden Figures. Producer
Donna Gigliotti optioned the rights the day after reading the proposal, Melfi
backed out of talks to direct a Spider-Man movie, and Pharrell
Williams, a space junkie who grew up near the
subjects’ homes in Hampton, Va., signed on to produce and work on the score.
Filming in the Georgia heat this
past summer, the actors formed a sisterhood inspired by their characters. “You
saw these women vent to one another, encourage each other,” says Monáe. “They
were dealing with obstacles and had reason to give up. But the relationships
they had with one another gave them fuel to go on.”
There is more than a whiff of the
classic American up-by-the-bootstraps narrative in each of their stories.
Jackson petitions the city of Hampton to take courses at its whites-only high
school so she can qualify to train as an engineer. Vaughan teaches herself
programming when the arrival of computers threatens to make her job obsolete.
But Hidden Figures, which will hit theaters on Christmas Day, downplays
individual success in favor of the collective: these women pull one another up.
Vaughan, in limbo as an undercompensated “acting” supervisor, laments her
stagnation but rejoices in Johnson’s promotion to work on the calculations that
will get Glenn, Alan Shepard and the Apollo 11 astronauts into space. “Any
upward movement,” she declares, “is movement for us all.”
“NASA: Fast with rocket ships,
slow with advancement.” This is how the women of Hidden Figures describe
their employer, an agency that relies on inertia to keep its shuttles on their
flight paths but maintained a different kind of inertia on the ground–one that
kept the colored computers stalled at the intersection of sexism and racism.
The movie’s white characters are
not monolithic villains but humans whose attitudes toward their black
colleagues fall on a spectrum: there’s the mission-driven color blindness of
the boss (Kevin Costner), who doesn’t care who does the calculations as long as
they’re correct. There’s Jim Parsons’ head engineer, who can’t decide whether
he’s more threatened by Johnson’s gender, her race or the possibility that she
might be better at math. And then there’s Kirsten Dunst’s supervisor, perhaps
most insidious of all, whose claims of goodwill are not backed by a genuine
belief in equality.
When Dunst’s character has a
run-in with Vaughan in the bathroom (more than a few critical moments take
place there), she tells her, “I have nothing against y’all,” to which Vaughan
replies, “I know you probably believe that.” Spencer sees, in their
confrontation, a lesson. “A lot of people don’t see that their views could be
hurtful. The only way you find out is if you have discourse. When you point a
finger at somebody, all they see is the finger in their face.”
Fifty years later, Americans find
themselves living with divisions wider than the passage of half a century might
suggest. “We still have unfinished business,” says Monáe. “Right now in
America, sexism and racism are alive and well. We can’t just hit the cruise control
and think we’re going to get there in time to save this next generation.” For
Henson, Johnson’s story is an appeal for unity and mutual respect: “You’re in a
war, you’re fighting with a soldier, and he saves your life. Do you give a damn
what color he is? What bible he reads?”
When we watch movies to learn
about the past, we’re also scanning for insight into the future. Johnson,
Jackson and Vaughan could be to young girls what Cicely Tyson and Oprah Winfrey
were to a young Spencer, who dreamed of acting–to borrow a phrase from transgender
activist and actor Laverne Cox–possibility models. Confirmation, in other
words, that a path has been walked before and is available to those watching,
too. For women of color, those onscreen models were, for so long, limited–to
the maid, the jezebel, the sassy friend. The greatest equation Hidden
Figures leaves unsolved may be whose story we’ll see next, and what
moonshot she’ll be running to achieve.
Partway through the film, the
cadre of mathematicians learns that rather than getting laid off as a result of
the new
IBM, they’ll be reassigned to help process its
endless data. As they exit the windowless room in which they’ve toiled for
years, headed for the center of NASA’s Virginia universe, trumpets blare as
though they’re marching into battle. But it’s kitten heels, not combat boots,
tapping cadence on the linoleum floor. And instead of firepower, they’re armed
with brainpower.
This appears in the November 28, 2016 issue of TIME.
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