NILS VON KALM finds that ‘Hidden Figures’, set amid the civil rights struggles of the US the 1960s, has much to say to us today…
Hidden Figures (PG)
In a word: Confronting
“I found myself quite choked up most of the way through this movie, as it highlighted the cruel injustice that so many went through back then and that so many still go through today just because of the colour of their skin or their gender or their sexual orientation. In these days when racism and sexism is highlighted all the more in our political leaders, this is a movie for our time.”
Set amidst the tensions of the civil rights struggles in the 1960s, this is the story of three brave women who fought against the odds to gain recognition just to have what white people have always taken for granted.
Katherine Goble (played by Taraji P Henson), Mary Jackson (Janelle Monae) and Dorothy Vaughn (Octavia Spencer) were three women who faced daily segregation in their normal place of work and who were extremely gifted in their fields of mathematics.
Kevin Costner plays a role familiar to him, that of the white man sympathetic to the struggles of the oppressed. In this case, he plays Al Harrison, director of NASA’s Space Task Group, as they speed up the space race following the Soviet Union’s successfully sending Sputnik 1 into space and then, shortly after, successfully making cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin the first person in space.
When US President John F Kennedy challenges the nation to send a person to the moon by the end of the 1960s, Harrison tells his staff that this will mean calling their spouses to tell them there will be a lot of late nights at work coming up. This sets the scene for the struggles of Katherine Goble in particular to be exposed and confronted.
In the new hyper-stressful work environment, Harrison one day sees Goble return to her desk after being out for 40 minutes. Seeing that this has been happening every day, a turning point in the movie comes when Goble, drenched by rain and emotionally drained, responds to Harrison by pointing out to him that there is no coloured persons’ bathroom in their building and she has to run half a mile just to go the toilet.
When people are confronted by injustice that they benefit from, they often don’t know where to look or what to say. Harrison, shaken by how unjust this situation is in civilised America, proceeds to remedy the situation by telling Goble she can go to any bathroom she needs to.
I remember Australian preacher and God Squad founder John Smith saying once that people in control of unjust power structures never change their ways willingly. There always needs to be concerted pressure for change on behalf of the oppressed. This movie highlights the daily indignities that these three women experienced, from having to go to bathrooms for coloured people, to having to ride in the back of buses and experiencing the disdaining looks of white people when they dared to ask for equality.
The title of this movie becomes obvious at the end when it is revealed that it was only in recent years that Katherine Johnson was officially recognised for her extraordinary achievements in sending not just John Glenn into space, but Neil Armstrong to the moon as well as for working on the space shuttle program.
When you live in privilege you have no idea of how privileged you are until oppressed people tell you. I have had to learn that myself being a white, Western male. That is the power of this movie; it highlights how shameful and obvious the injustice of segregation was in the 1960s and how blind the majority of white people were to it, even if they became sympathetic when confronted with it.
I found myself quite choked up most of the way through this movie, as it highlighted the cruel injustice that so many went through back then and that so many still go through today just because of the colour of their skin or their gender or their sexual orientation. In these days when racism and sexism is highlighted all the more in our political leaders, this is a movie for our time.
