"Tell Them I'm Coming!" - Go See the Movie "Hidden Figures" Today!

Mike Victor  January 2, 2017

Happy New Year! 

Three pieces of advice to start the new year off right:

1.) Go see the movie Hidden Figures. 

2.) Go see the movie Hidden Figures.

3.) Go see the movie Hidden Figures.

Repeat as desired. There is no maximum dose.

I saw this film yesterday with my wife and younger daughter and her friend and must tell you - had I three thumbs, all would be solidly up. One of the best films I have ever seen, no question.

If you don't know the setup, it's based on a set of true stories about a pioneering group of African American women in segregated 1961 Virginia who managed to challenge, overcome, and eventually change institutional and cultural racism that said that they could not do what they were in fact doing. The central character - whose real life details are even more amazing than the film had a chance to portray - is an African American math whiz named Katherine Johnson whose parents recognized her extraordinary aptitude when she was in the 4th grade, pulling her out of the segregated school that only went to 6th grade (whose material she already mastered) and putting her into one of the few African-American private schools in West Virginia. She entered high school at age 10 and graduated from college at age 18 (summa cum laude in 1937, with degrees in math and French), then pursued graduate work in mathematics.
At NASA,John Glenn was so impressed with her that he personally insisted that she double-check all of the numbers as part of any pre-flight checklist. "If she says the numbers are good," Glenn said. "I'm ready to go." It would take her a day and a half to double-check the computer's numbers but when they were the same, Glenn was ready to launch. 

Katherine Johnson literally wrote the book on the complex math of space travel and orbital trajectories.

Earlier, she had calculated the trajectory of Alan Shepard's Freedom 7 May 1961 flight from liftoff from splashdown, creating a new mathematics in the process. She did the same for the Apollo 11 moon shot and the start of the Space Shuttle program before retiring. 

"I computed the path that would get you there," she said of the moon shot. "You determine where you were on Earth, when you started out. We told them how fast you would be going and the moon would be there by the time you got there." [IBD]

NASA recently commemorated her with a new building built in her honor, saying that she "literally wrote the textbook on rocket science... Few Americans have impacted the cause of human exploration so extensively." 

 One of the critical problems she solved was calculating the exact time that the lunar landed needed to take off from the moon in order to dock with the orbiting command and service module. 

 On November 24, 2015, President Obama awarded her the highest civilian award, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. 

Today she is 98 years old.[IBD, NASA]  

This movie hit on every issue near and dear to my heart: 

• social justice and progress; 
• the fight against racism; 
• the fight against sexism; 
• the fight against ignorance;
• mathematical and scientific triumph; 
• the ability of a society to do anything it puts its mind to when it comes together and is willing to fund the effort;
• the wisdom of children.

Sure, the movie sticks to a well-trodden formula, but does so with such deftness and understatement - it always pulls back before getting intolerably maudlin or heavy-handed - that it really, really works. It portrays in a very visceral way the extraordinary, mind-numbingly stupid racial desegregation laws and mindset in a Virginia whose state laws ignored the recent Brown v. Board of Education ruling, a "states right" anti-federal government mindset sadly very much alive today in the South. Everything is segregated from library books to water fountains to coffee pots to restrooms - that last leading to a fantastic scene with an infuriated Kevin Costner character taking a sledgehammer to the Colored Restroom sign. 

I know this history but to see it so graphically portrayed on screen is breathtaking in its shock effect. I kept shaking my head with real shame that this happened almost in my lifetime (I was born just a couple years after the events in the film). There was nothing preachy about the director's approach, which was perfect, just laying it out there as part of the backdrop with the principal characters arguing among themselves about how much to fight and how much to accept, with all going through a certain learning process (as per the formula for this sort of film).
My response in seeing the movie was the same as that of Taraji Henson, the actress who portrayed Johnson when she first read the script:  "I just remember initially being angry," she told NBC News.  "Here we have these women who changed the course of America, the history of this nation and we don't know about them." 

As an added plus, a cute crop of kids - the children of the protagonist - cheer along a budding romance that is done with such tenderness that it really gets you. I usually roll my eyes at such parallel plots, understanding their necessary role in the genre while wishing the film would just get on with the main story, but this romance was well-thought-through and beautifully-executed. I am no sap, in other words, but it worked for me.

The movie also reminds us that our federal government - so maligned by the right - actually does many things pretty damn well. NASA has to be Exhibit A (with the CDC and NIH not far behind) but close behind is the pioneering role the feds - starting with the military during the Eisenhower administration - played in leading the charge against segregation (as an added bonus, we are also reminded that not all things private are good, as when the boneheads sent over from IBM to get their massively over-budget and behind schedule mainframe computer to work can't even anticipate the size of the door needed to install the machine, much less actually get it to function.

I had only three minor disappointments with the film.

Only one mathematician was in the credits (10 NASA consultants were) which was perhaps why the math shown was not always convincing in its authenticity. Certainly, she would have used a slide rule at least in a scene where she wows an audience with a calculation that goes from position to displacement to re-entry velocity to splash down latitude and longitude; this could not have been done in the limited space allotted or without consulting some additional source - latitude and longitude mathematics are quite complex, involving sines and cosines and a correction for the bulge in the Earth around the equator and you cannot just do these things in your head. Would it have hurt to have her sneak a peek at a slide rule, a book of logarithmic values, or some other reference? I always feel a bit cheated when a movie-maker assumes that no one in the audience knows enough to know what is possible and impossible to do unaided. But I will withhold this criticism if the purpose was to make mathematics look cool.
Katherine Johnson was no wallflower, hesitant and deferential as portrayed in the film.  Instead, she peppered engineers with questions, always insisting that she understood the why of any problem, something the (white male) engineers reportedly respected and welcomed, not shot down as in the movie:

Katherine once remarked that while many of her colleagues refrained from asking questions or taking tasks further than merely ‘what they were told to do,’ she chose instead to ask questions because she ‘wanted to know why.’

For Katherine, finding the ‘why’ meant enrolling in high school at the age of 10; calculating the trajectory of Alan Shepard’s trip to space and the Apollo 11’s mission to the moon; and providing the foundation that will someday allow NASA to send our astronauts to Mars. She literally wrote the textbook on rocket science. 

We are all so fortunate that Katherine insisted on asking questions, and insisted on relentlessly pursing the answers. We are fortunate that when faced with the adversity of racial and gender barriers, she found the courage to say ‘tell them I’m coming.

  - NASA Deputy Administrator Dava Newman

The other disappointment had nothing to do with the film itself but with the audience. In the limited release screening I saw on a rainy New Year's Day, the theater was only half full and the audience was predominantly African-American, a group that doesn't need to see this film to be reminded of what is at stake if we pretend we live in some post-racial, color-blind, merit-based society, of what we have to go back to if Trump lives up to his promise to Make America White Again. I hope every young black girl (and boy) sees this movie and is inspired, but I also hope the rust belt blue collar whites chanting All Lives Matter! see this film and understand how recent and cruel institutionalized racism is in America and how maybe, just maybe the stereotypes reinforced by centuries of such thinking might persist today (and therefore require active federal oversight of the former states of the Confederate States of America as they draw up voting districts and impose voter ID barriers to voting).

But the audience cheered and clapped - when was the last time you saw that? - and at times I felt more that I was in church than a movie theater. It's that kind of movie.

Take a friend. Take a child struggling in mathematics or who thinks that science is only for boys. But go. And enjoy!