What’s Hidden from Hidden Figures

I can’t say I in any way watched a full slate of Oscar films this year; I almost never do. I am excited to go see I Am Not Your Negro tomorrow. Anything I’ve ever read by James Baldwin has struck me as incredibly poetic and profound, and I know I haven’t seen enough film of him to understand what he was like in his own voice, so I look forward to starting to rectify that.

I have already made time for La La Land (I have a soft spot for both musicals and romantic comedies, and I was pleasantly surprised to see this one deviate a bit from the normal boy-meets-girl tropes); Moonlight (A friend one described Rachel McKibbens’ poem “The Widower” as an emotional bitch slap; there’s a reason I use that poem to teach figurative language. If I taught film study, I would teach this film for the same reason; it’s that powerful); and Hidden Figures. 

I suppose I could have started with that. I could have started with “I just came home from watching Hidden Figures…” but that opening doesn’t make sense to me for several reasons. One, I didn’t read exhaustively about the film before I went to see it because I wanted to experience it as a movie before I decided to pick it apart, but I did do enough pre-reading to know that “based on true events” is, as always, an admission that liberties have been taken with the narrative. The resulting omissions and edits left me feeling decidedly bittersweet about this particular success story.

SPOILER ALERT … I feel like that’s maybe not necessary for a movie based on historical events; but, nevertheless, I feel compelled to say that the following paragraphs contain some details about the film that not all readers might want to know.

Two, I walked away fully appreciative that this story has been told, and I do not, in any way, want to bash this film. The three female protagonists are fierce, witty, independent, and determined. They are allowed to be both pragmatic and idealistic. They are grounded without being defeatist. They get doors shut in their face (literally…we’ll talk about that more later) and heels stuck in the floor (I can’t help it – the Polish engineer saying “no shoe is worth your life” is one of my favorite lines in this movie. The situation – she trips just as a wind tunnel test is about to start – is borderline ridiculous, but he’s so matter-of-fact about it that the moment totally works. Can we all, in 2017, agree that heels are completely unnecessary as “professional” attire? Can we make anyone who doesn’t agree wear heels to work every day for the rest of their working life? I feel like some dress codes might change) and they manage to maintain both their dignity and their sass.

Three, I’m more than a little uncomfortable with the fact that this movie makes me uncomfortable. On some level, I wish I was the kind of person who could watch a feel-good, triumphant movie and walk away cheering without any reservations. On a much more ingrained level, I wish fewer people were willing to clap at a feel-good moment without questioning whether or not that particular moment ever actually happened.

So here’s the inevitable reality check: The first moment that drew cheers from tonight’s Hidden Figures audience was the moment Kevin Costner’s character tears down the Colored Ladies Room sign and walks away saying, “At NASA, we all pee the same color.” That never happened. 

The segregation faced by the human computers who worked on the West Campus of the Langley Research Center was very real. The way it was portrayed in the film, however, doesn’t actually match the lived experience of the women who were there to do a job.

In this 2011 interview with WHRO TV, Katherine Johnson said she “didn’t feel the segregation at NASA, because everybody there was doing research. You had a mission and you worked on it, and it was important to you to do your job and play bridge at lunch. I didn’t feel any segregation. I knew it was there, but I didn’t feel it.”

In the film, Johnson is portrayed as someone who is blocked by the sexist and racist attitudes of her coworkers (exemplified by Jim Parsons, who plays a fictitious chief engineer who behaves as male authority figures who feel threatened often do – refusing to share credit with female employees and trying to bar women from important meetings) but who is empowered by her boss, played by Kevin Costner, who hits full-on white male savior mode in the aforementioned bathroom scene.

In this Today Show interview, Costner explains that the director and writer of the film could not get the rights to the person he wanted to portray, so he made Costner’s character a composite of three different administrators.

In real life, Johnson didn’t need a white male savior to allow her to do her work, let alone to physically break down a bathroom sign. The need to create composite characters is a fact of film making – an organization like NASA completes complex projects through massive, highly delegated teams of people, not all of whom can be shown to an audience without the narrative thread being completely lost. That said, the bathroom sign moment in particular feels like a moment in which the film veers from its source material in a troubling way.

As this fact checking blog reports, the repeated scenes of Johnson running across campus to use the colored restroom are actually taken from another woman’s story:

In Margot Lee Shetterly’s book, this is something that is experienced more by Mary Jackson (portrayed by Janelle Monáe) than Katherine Johnson. Mary went to work on a project on NASA Langley’s East Side alongside several white computers. She was not familiar with those buildings and when she asked a group of white women where the bathroom was, they giggled at her and offered no help. The closest bathroom was for whites. Humiliated and angry, Mary set off on a time-consuming search for a colored bathroom. Unlike in the movie, there were colored bathrooms on the East Side but not in every building. The sprint across the campus in the movie might be somewhat of an exaggeration, but finding a bathroom was indeed a point of frustration.

As for Katherine Johnson herself, Shetterly writes that when Katherine started working there, she didn’t even realize that the bathrooms at Langley were segregated. This is because the bathrooms for white employees were unmarked and there weren’t many colored bathrooms to be seen. It took a couple years before she was confronted with her mistake, but she simply ignored the comment and continued to use the white restrooms. No one brought it up again and she refused to enter the colored bathrooms.

That’s the moment I want to see on film. Not Costner’s fictional supervisor playing the hero (and creating alternate history) by tearing down a sign so all the NASA restrooms can be integrated. Not a door being slammed in Johnson’s face before Costner’s character runs after her, bearing a security clearance badge, so she can be in the room during John Glenn’s launch into orbit. I want to see her being confronted by a colleague and then deciding to just get on with her work.

That’s the real-life empowerment moment the filmmakers missed: Johnson walking right past the colored bathrooms because in that moment their existence didn’t matter as much to her as her work did. Does that mean she wasn’t affected by segregation? That it didn’t take an emotional and physical toll on her and colleagues? Of course not – but she didn’t let that segregation define her life. That’s the point.

Why do we feel the need to create a moment in which the white male authority figure realizes that segregation is wrong and decides to heroically act on that epiphany? Is that just a handout to Hollywood egos, considering Hollywood is still a white male dominated space? Or does that speak to something deeper about our need to believe that America has transcended the racial sins of its past?

We haven’t. Listen to anything President Trump has ever said about inner cities, immigrants, or Muslims. Then tell me again that it’s OK to feed the myth that progress is linear and that those in power will eventually concede their own bigotry when confronted with a sharp enough intellect, an emotional appeal (particularly one involving female tears, which Johnson sheds when finally confronted by Costner’s character about her bathroom breaks), or just indefatigable charm.

Johnson and her female coworkers had to fight to make space for themselves. They kept their head down and focused on their work when they had to; they spoke up when confronted with one too many obstacles on the path to achieving their dreams; they went to court when necessary; and they completed daily acts of resistance, such as when computer Miriam Mann decided to stuff the Colored Computers sign from the cafeteria into her purse each day it appeared until one day the sign no longer appeared.

In the aforementioned WHRO TV interview, the reporter asks about NASA’s belief that women should be hired as computers because they would be more accurate. Johnson argues that men aren’t interested in small things, saying  that men aren’t interested in how you complete a problem, they just want the answer. That’s a generalization, and Johnson acknowledges that attitude isn’t unique, arguing that too many teachers follow that same fixed mindset.

As a teacher, Johnson said she never taught students answers. She gave them problems, taught them how to attack the problem, and then knew that they’d eventually find the answer. She taught herself and her students to value learning. She believes that there are no dumb questions, but that it is dumb not to ask when you have a question.

I think perhaps that’s the real answer, for people of all genders, as they are trying to sort through the implications raised by the racist and sexist attitudes shown in Hidden Figures, knowing those attitudes have shifted, but have not in any way disappeared from American society. Johnson calls on us to be curious. Ask questions of this movie, and seek out the original source material in your quest for answers.

As we get set for the Oscars tomorrow, remember this: Movies are big, shiny things. Everyday reality is small and messy. No one gets a big, shiny victory without fighting the small, messy, everyday battles.