hidden figures film analysis essay

The Hidden Figures Film Analysis Essay

Hidden Figures is a 2016 American drama film directed by Theodore Melfi and written by Melfi and Allison Schroeder based on the science-fiction book of the same name by author Margot Lee Shetterly. The film was named one of the best ten films of 2016 and garnered several honors and nominations, including three Academy Award nominations (Cramblet Alvarez et al. 85). Starring Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, and Janelle Monet in the lead roles. The film was inspiring and gave me hope and faith that anything is possible if a person wants it and tries a little bit.

This film takes the viewer into NASA’s mysterious and fascinating Cold War universe. The story is told through the eyes of three black women working at the Langley Research Center (Cramblet Alvarez et al. 85). In this film, the viewer learns about all the difficulties Americans face in sending their astronauts into space and the black people who face the racism that prevails in the company. Since they live in the shadow of their male counterparts and a society rife with inequity, these girls’ experiences go undetected for a long time, but everything changes.

The picture is based on real people and events, the cast of the play is perfectly matched, and the high-class performance of the actors transports the viewer to another century in difficult times for America. Taraji P. Henson met with Catherine Johnson, who was 98 then, after signing a contract for the lead part to explore the character she would play (Cramblet Alvarez et al. 84). Each character in this motion picture has a different destiny. However, they are all bound together by a desire to change their country’s history, and connoisseurs follow their case with interest and admiration.

Pharrell Williams wrote the songs for this Theodore Melfi biographical film, and Benjamin Wallfisch and Hans Zimmer wrote additional music. These soundtracks help to be transported and fully immersed in the atmosphere of the times during which the events unfold. The attempts to beg for a promotion and to change the working conditions of the heroines show how much the problem of inequality was. Women could not even buy a string of pearls with their salaries, which all female employees of NASA wore, which means that their profits were very different from those of the other races. The costumes are perfectly matched, immersing us in the atmosphere of those events.

All white characters, except for Al Harrison, are portrayed as helpless in science and hardened in disgusting racism, which is implausible. The movie itself is shot and acted rather academically. In places, though, it can create tension and empathy and provoke angry emotions toward Kirsten Dunst and Jim Parsons’ characters. However, even though the movie is written from real biographies and events, one gets the impression that everything is relatively easy for the heroines. If the film had been made now, the main characters’ story would have been more confusing and complicated. The movie flowed well from scene to scene; all the moments made sense to me. The director could have portrayed more of the hardships of the black women’s journey, which would have helped to bring it closer to the real story.

Thus, the film is dedicated to real women, their work successes, and their contributions to space exploration. The documentary proves that anyone can achieve anything if they work on themselves. The strong point is that the actors played well, transporting the viewer into the atmosphere of a time filled with inequality. The movie is surprisingly balanced: it has room for human relationships, families, children, love, friendship, and camaraderie, which are present in one way or another in everyone’s life. The film symbolizes that people should learn, develop, achieve, seek different ways to solve problems, and not be afraid to stand up for themselves. However, the downside may be the implausibility of some details in the film, namely the quick success of women and the incompetence of white employees. That is why my rating for this movie is nine points.

Cramblet Alvarez, Leslie D., et al. “ Psychology’s Hidden Figures: Undergraduate Psychology Majors’ (in)Ability to Recognize Our Diverse Pioneers .” Psi Chi Journal of Psychological Research , vol. 24, no. 2, 2019, pp. 84–96., Web.

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

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 by Theodore Melfi: Movie Analysis

Introduction.

The movie “Hidden Figures,” explains the story of three bright African-American ladies working at the segregated West Area computer division of NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. The three experienced a lot of discrimination at work and in their daily lives. The story revolves around empowerment and breaking barriers of color and gender during an important period of the Civil Rights Movement (Melfi). The minds of these ladies were of great help to John Glenn, one of the Astronauts. While orbiting around the Earth, they ensured that the mission was successful and that the astronaut returned home safely (Melfi). Therefore, the film’s primary focus is inspiring people working to attain workplace inclusion, equality and diversity. In this regard, this paper explores various leadership lessons learned from the film that help attain employee inclusivity.

How the Film Works To Inform the Audience

The film is a story is about perseverance and triumph over adversity. It informs the audience about the barriers encountered by women in their lives, such as inadequate access to education the challenges their exceptional intellect and offers them with tools for highly skilled work. These barriers only become apparent as women continue to encounter them. Since women are accustomed to being twice as good as their white counterparts, they become highly prepared for the professional obstacles they will face later when technological changes require them to pivot to remain important to Langley’s operations.

The Relevance of the Writer

The author explains how racism and racial tension at Langley and the surrounding towns against black people are in existence throughout America. In addition, the film provides the audience with a historical context, such as changes in hiring practices. The story is truly a perseverance and triumphant trajectory because the lives of the three women are on contact upward trajectory and is the arc of the story.

Writers Choice

Leaders should eliminate employee barriers.

The author presents AI Harrison tearing down the sign used to identify the single washroom mainly allocated for African-American women using a crowbar and then comments that they pee the same color at NASA. These actions successfully removed a big obstacle that was getting in the way of Goble’s work. Thus, AI Harrison removes a huge stumbling block for many talented individuals by identifying and resolving an issue affecting one person (Melfi). These little things often make a huge difference; just because one cannot see a disability does not mean that an employee is not affected (Melfi). The author tries to convey that it is important to meditate on how certain organizational policies and processes may remove obstacles for other people.

Make Efforts to Be More Diverse and Access a Large Pool of Talents

The author encourages leaders to make all efforts to be more diverse and access a large pool of talent. In the film, Harrison Space Task Group was looking for a new computer which is the plot that supported Katherine in being hired. In 1935 women were recruited first at Langley, but by 1943, there was an increased demand for skilled personnel (Melfi). President Roosevelt issued an Executive Order to merge the defense sector. Thus, Langley was able to include Africa-America women in the process of searching for talents. With the availability of large labor pools to Human Resource Managers, companies are making diversity a top priority (Melfi). In this regard, the film tries to show how Longley attracted different and well-qualified applicants by requesting internal applicants through an open invitation.

Small Gestures Go a Long Way in Creating a Sense of Belonging

The author reveals that small gestures go a long way in creating a sense of belonging. When a group of astronauts arrives at Langley, the crew makes a line to welcome them home. At this time, the African-American women are at the end of the line, and John Glen goes and shakes their hands (Melfi). Although the act might seem small, such a gesture gives women a more remarkable impression and provides them with the feeling that they are also valued and belong to the entire team. Showing the other person little kindness provides a sense of inclusion and belonging because such an act can change their perception (Melfi). It also provides emotional healing and creates stronger relations with other people.

Biasness Makes an Employee Feel Unwelcome

According to the author, biasness can make an employee feel unwelcome even with the best intentions. As one gets used to the shocking representations of discrimination powered by bigotry and racism, the film throws the audience in a bit of a curve. Colonel Jim Johnson discovers that Katherine works as a computer expert at NASA while trying to win her over (Melfi). “That is pretty heady material; do they allow women to manage that sort of work?” he blurts out without thinking (Melfi). Such gender biasness in the middle of the film shows that discrimination can take different forms. Reduction of biasness in the workplace requires the management to spot them. Therefore, it is the role of leaders in an organization to create an environment that promotes equality.

Apologizing After Making Mistakes Is Crucial

The author further presents the idea that it is important to apologize after making a mistake. Katherine responds to comments by Colonel Johnson in an angry manner. Although Colonel’s first apology worsens the situation, he subsequently apologizes sincerely and wins her over (Melfi). Even though it is almost difficult to eliminate our unconscious prejudices, being ready to accept responsibility for them helps avoid potentially damaging situations. When a leader makes an apology, it does not mean that the authority held is jeopardized. Being apologetic as a leader to the other team members is a sign of humility and a vital element of transformative leadership (Melfi). The team is always aware of an error committed, and a respected leader will be ready to apologize.

Using Privilege to Empower Someone in the Workplace

The author uses the film to advocate for the use of privileges to empower other people in their places of work. During the preparation for the historic flight, John Glenn asked AI Harrison if Katherine Goble had checked all the numbers (Melfi). The film pivots in this scene because Goble, who had moved to the firm recently, is suddenly given a prominent role. She would not have been part of the Space Task Group without the assistance of Glenn. Empathy is vital in helping one understand privilege functions in the workplace. Therefore, the creation of a less harsh working environment requires leaders to acknowledge the existence of privilege.

The Most Effective Way to Help Oneself is Helping Others

According to the author, the best way to support oneself is by helping others. The current news is that robots are replacing human roles very fast. An African-American lady working as an official supervisor of a group of African-American women encounters a similar problem (Melfi). After the arrival of a brand new IBM mainframe computer on the site, the lady realizes that that machine will automate the manual calculations. Building the team placed her in a position of strength when Langley managers realized they needed people who could operate the new computing devices (Melfi. Therefore, the basis of authentic leadership is assisting others; thus, those who commit themselves to genuinely supporting the development, accomplishment and well-being of other are finally the ones who find success in their leadership and places themselves for increased influence.

When Concentrating On Performance, Diversity Develops Intuitively

Finally, when concentrating on performance, diversity develops intuitively. The main idea passed in the film is that neither gender nor skin tone should matter when striving for achievement (Melfi). Performance is the only factor that can change anything. Hence, the labor of individuals such as Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, Katherine Goble and countless other black women started opening doors for increased equality in the workplace. In the real sense, performance at the workplace is the natural equalizer. Employees are more likely to enjoy their work and desire to stay long in an organization that promotes inclusivity. However, there is more creativity in an area where different people from diverse backgrounds, ethnicities, and experiences exist.

Conclusively, the film “Hidden Figures” is a fantastic one at my level, and it is worth watching. It is an excellent social analysis providing historical lessons. The main point passed is that strong leadership at all levels might facilitate amazing feats such as space travel or the dismantling of societal obstacles. These women not only inspired not only space travel but also a future generation of leaders in space.

Melfi, Theodore, and Margot Lee Shetterly. Hidden figures . Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2017.

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