Essential Movies - Hidden Figures

Warning
This guide and all of my reviews contain occasional bits of rude language,
and opinions some people might find offensive but for which I won’t apologise.
                    Don’t read any further unless you are open-minded.
Also, hard as I try not to give away too much, I can't guarantee there are no spoilers. 

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Hidden Figures – Movie 2016 USA.

 

A Necessary, Powerful, Uplifting, Inspiring Movie

OR

why the white people are not the heroes in this story

The story of three African American mathematicians who helped NASA put astronauts into space in the 1960s: Katherine Goble Johnson, Mary Jackson and Dorothy Vaughan.

This is justifiably advertised as a “powerful feel-good story” – the 1950s and 60s in the USA provided some horrible footage and some horrible stories, no matter how much they were decades of enormous human courage and achievement.
This story is focused on reminding us that victories were earned by these three and other female “coloured computers”, not granted to them by whites. This is important, because we need to remember that people do not surrender privilege without being prompted to do so – at the very least we need to be aware of our privilege before we will surrender it.

Mary Jackson’s victory dance outside the courthouse is on its own enough to make this movie worth watching over and over, for she did what the Supreme Court of the United States had not been able to do. (You’ll have to watch the movie to see what I’m on about.) Awe inspiring stuff.  

 

Time and again in the Civil Rights Era women did things we might easily underestimate today (or which I easily could, as a white Australian) but which must have taken an inordinate amount of courage to even contemplate trying. It’s mind boggling, heroic stuff – in Mary Jackson’s case, in this story, her determination stands in great contrast to her husband’s perfectly reasonable response to an attack on a Freedom Bus.

Everything in this film is understated, but nothing has been left out.

Allow me to go off-script awhile here, because Hidden Figures illustrates perfectly something about economics I constantly struggle to explain.
It's an important point because it has touched just about every aspect of "recent" Western history and politics and culture we'd care to name. Just as the devil cites scripture for his purpose, Adam Smith has been MISrepresented by coalholes far too long, to justify economic horrors on a grand scale.

Adam Smith

Adam Smith was a Professor of Moral Philosophy – a discipline of which economics was only one part in the late 18^th century. His theories were published just as the American Revolution was about to come together, and the Industrial Revolution was gathering steam. Smith wrote primarily from a position of privilege and, to an extent, was only guessing how the Industrial Revolution might unfold and the impact it would have on lives. He was a deeply moral man but utterly clueless about how the other half lived.

In Smith’s crazy world, self-interest – not to be confused with selfishness – would benefit everyone.

Smith believed that “The rich...are led by an invisible hand … without intending it, without knowing it (to) advance the interest of the society”. He believed that by looking after their own self-interests rich people inadvertently helped everyone – that their economic priorities automatically led to moral outcomes. Unfortunately, he had it back to front – he thought by people putting money first, moral outcomes would follow. Smith didn’t realise people could not properly see what was in their best economic interest to begin with. In his mind, doing the right thing morally and doing the most sensible thing economically were synonymous.

Applying Smith’s simplistic standards and assumptions to the story told in Hidden Figures, the most logical thing would be for Katherine Goble to be afforded the same respect and dignity as all the other mathematicians working under Al Harrison, and as a result God’s Invisible Hand would steer the space project to completion much sooner; because she could complete her calculations with up to date data and without spending so much time away from her desk.

In the end, it was self-interest that drove Harrison to end the coloured bathroom policy, not a sense of decency. But if Smith had been right and people had any proper instinct of where their true self-interest lies, bathrooms would never have been segregated in the first place.

 

(Actually Smith’s “Invisible Hand” was just a spiritual explanation for his early version of systems theory – which I try to explain in my post about Sets & Systems. Put money and people together, Smith thought, and because  the whole is other than the sum of its parts, the result will be systemic justice and equity and other gifts from God.)

Back in the 1700s heaps of people were observing the division of labour and blah blah blah but Smith was the one who just happened to provide some lovely prose describing “systems” as God in an era where the Divine Right of Kings still had purchase, when Nathaniel Bacon's attempt in the U.S. tried to unite poor black and poor white indentured workers was still fresh in people's minds, and a heap of other stuff prompted a few to use Smith's prose as an excuse to abandon responsibility for their decisions.
In Smith's mind and in the larger context from which he has been quoted, doing the right thing morally and doing the most sensible thing economically were synonymous. Unfortunately the quote about the invisible hand reads as if he is saying "greed is good", which suits coalholes like Milton Friedman and others who continually quote(d) him out of context. At the very least they should acknowledge that the world he was describing was vastly different from the world on which they have foisted their Greed is Good philosophies and policies.

--o0o--

John Meynard Keynes

Humans are rarely logical or guided by a moral compass as strong as someone like Smith's. In fact, in his General Theory of Employment Interest and Money published in 1936 what John Meynard Keynes points out is not that people are immoral but that people tend to be quite irrational and clueless about where their best interests lie – so much so they will fight as a priority not to maintain real living standards but to maintain relative living standards.

Keynes wasn't claiming to have any idea what God intended, not the way Smith did, but the idea of relative living standards is important – it's the very thing that made Jim Crow work, the very thing behind the racist attitudes that we see in this movie, and the very obsession that has kept the basic wage for working class whites (the real bench-mark) in the U.S. unsustainable to the present day. (Relativity madness underpins systemic sexism, too.)

Many people don’t act for themselves, they’d rather work against someone else.

Indulge me again for a moment - re-watching this movie with a friend she observed the reason Harrison didn't twig why Katherine spent so long away from her desk was because he "didn't see her colour".

He didn't see that because of her colour Katherine was required to tramp 40 days and nights out into the desert to go to the loo. Presumably this was without any way of first making herself a nourishing Vegemite sandwich to sustain herself during her absence, which is just wrong.
This helps illustrate why it would be wrong for us to say we don't see colour. To really be oblivious to the positives and negatives of colour in an individual's life - it denies them their complete humanity.
I think when people go on about not seeing colour what they want to mean is that they can see more than just the fact a person appears "different" from themselves and actually judge a person, as Martin Luther King Jr proposed, solely for the content of their character. When MLK talked about this he was talking about his hopes for the future. Unfortunately, that future has not yet been realised. Yes, we might like to "be the change we would like to see in the world" but as the world is still unfair it is a rule we should not apply blindly.

Having ended my various digressions about this and that, I must return to my claim this movie’s focus is on asserting that all of the gains made by these women were earned, not granted to them by the dominant group(s). Does the fact that Harrison changed the bathroom policy without any obvious provocation from Katherine Goble contradict that claim?

Allow me to provide another mini-thesis: The challenge for any subjugated group is to be aware of how they are subjugated without falling victim to that awareness. Katherine Goble singlehandedly changed the bathroom policy by helping to create the pre-conditions that forced Harrison's hand:
i) being fully aware of how the system was stacked against her;
ii) refusing to let that awareness become her destiny; and by
iii) exploiting every crack in the system she could find all her life (e.g. working as a mathematician, holding redacted pages up to the light) even though it must have seemed disheartening.
She just refused to give up.
If she had not been the person she was, this chain of events would not have occurred.

She was a hero, not because her actions led to change, but because she was committed to being herself whether she could change anything or not. In Joseph Campbell's words, Katherine was a hero because she was "following her bliss".

Does this movie diminish the struggle it took for people of colour (or for women) to achieve something barely creeping toward equality in the middle of the 20^th Century? I don’t think so – quite the opposite, it seems to me. What the movie does is help show just how bloody stupid and widespread discrimination was/is and the subtle and not so subtle forms it took/takes.

 

 

 

I'd like to say if I were a woman of colour in this place and time … something. No, I don't have half the character of any of the women depicted in this film - I simply could not do it - I could not tolerate this shit. That sounds disrespectful to these women and so many others, as if I'm deluded or arrogant enough to believe I would have been the one person who could stand up to Hitler … but that's not what I mean. I'm just aware how often I did sabotage my own comfortable life, and of how many jobs I stormed out of when the cray cray got to me over the years - but I was lucky enough to live in Australia at the right time and so not to find myself homeless as a result of it.

It must take unimaginable forbearance to put up with this crap. I'm grinding my teeth just thinking about it.

The people who do achieve change in this world are those who know exactly who they are and have what it takes to be themselves without losing themselves - those who can't help but do what they are driven to do.
This is what makes a hero.
Whether being a hero actually changes anything or starts a movement on any given day is often random chance.
 
(Rosa Parks, for example, was not the first woman of colour to ever refuse to give up her seat on a bus, but she just happened to do so at the right time and place in history for someone else to act and this eventually led to a bus boycott).
Random chance is necessary for change, but so is integrity of character. Only this enormous integrity of character creates the conditions in which random chance has a chance to bring about change.

--o0o--



Despite her contribution to the space program, when Katherine Goble was replaced by an IBM computer, Harrison (via his secretary) gave her a gift as she left, but she was still ignored by the men in the room where she had been working. I don’t think the film pretends change was achieved easily, or that the struggle was/is over.

Although some characters are coalholes, the more inspiring characters make this a lovely, warm movie. I’ve enjoyed watching it a couple of times now and will enjoy watching it again at some point in the future.

Based on the book Hidden Figures: The Story of the African-American Women Who Helped Win the Space Race by Margot Lee Shetterly.