Hidden Figures | Based on a True Story

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[Music] [Applause] [Music] hey cypher here I know hidden figures was a popular movie and has received ridiculously high praise from both audiences and critics alike but I thought it was simply all right nothing outstanding or deserving of particular praise just another mundane Hollywood biopic only with three characters instead of one unfortunately as with any Hollywood movie like this it undermines its own narrative by falsifying the story but I don't really see how that could have been avoided here these women's stories were not filled with enough drama to make for a particularly engaging story to begin with so the movie seems like more of fan fiction than anything else it's like one of those stories where they bring a bunch of characters from different stories into one connected one like any of these once upon a time or grim shows just with early NASA employees their story in reality was quite separate from one another as you will see [Music] Dorothee Vaughn was hired into NASA's predecessor organization the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics or NACA in 1943 Franklin Delano Roosevelt had issued some executive orders removing discriminatory hiring practices in defense related industries so she was hired into a segregated unit called the West area computers specifically to be one of those computers NACA had been segregated by Woodrow Wilson in 1915 and it remained in 1943 as a sidenote why is it always Wilson who's a blight upon our history why can't it be some other president anyway segregation continued in NACA until 1958 so Vaughn was one of those early computers and we have to understand is at this point in time computers were people rather than machines you'd give them a set of instructions to calculate and they would do the job that electronic computers do today but they would do it by hand because those kinds of computers were barely around at this point in time and incredibly cumbersome so computer was actually a job title I've seen some people taking offense to the word computer used to describe people but it's not derogatory in any way so to those people get over it that's like being upset that you called someone a butcher a baker or candlestick maker so the segregated computers were administered by a white woman until 1949 Vaughn replaced her becoming the first black supervisor in NACA since its inception in 1915 the West computers worked well for years under Vaughn until in 1958 NACA was disbanded and NASA was founded with the changeover NASA officially ended segregation in the workforce and combined the computer pools ladies we've been reassigned by the early 1960s human computers were beginning to be phased out because electronic computers were becoming more and more prevalent it's called an IBM a mainframe machine apparently you can do our calculations in a fraction of the time Vaughn became the computer programmer instead using the language called Fortran which is a computer language for scientific calculation still used to this day she retired from NASA in 1971 [Music] Catherine Johnson was an amazing mathematician from her earliest years almost a child prodigy she was only 18 years old when she received her bachelor's degree she was even chosen to desegregate a graduate school at West Virginia University complying with the first round of desegregation rulings from the Supreme Court in 1939 she was hired by NACA in 1953 where she worked under Vaughn as one of the computers when NASA disbanded the West area computers Johnson went to the spacecraft control branch essentially they were trying to calculate how to fly the space missions we bring him in too soon he burns up on reentry we bring him in too late he's pushed out of Earth's gravity any changes to mass weight speed time or a puff of wind would alter the goal no-go we start our calculations oh she was the one who calculated Alan Shepards flight in 1961 office cuckoo dot every mission that went out at that time the height the speed and so on it became a degenerative problem and was even asked by John Glenn to verify the electronic computer results for his flight in 1962 it took we Laila have to compute what the computer should given him turned out to be the exact numbers they had she helped construct threw her on the spot calculations nearly every trajectory of the Mercury and Apollo missions she was even instrumental in reconfiguring the flight trajectory in the Apollo 13 mishap she worked for NASA until 1986 in a number of capacities even co-authoring 26 studies she was even awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015 for all this Mary Jackson was hired as a computer by naka in 1951 in 1953 she took engineering courses from a school that she herself had desegregated earning an engineering degree by 1958 when she was promoted to being an aerospace engineer just after the NASA changeover she was the first black female engineer in NASA though there had been black men and white women before her Jackson jumped from being a computer calculating wind tunnel experiments to being the one who was actually designing those experiments she authored several papers and co-authored even more a lot of which has to do with supersonic flight she eventually took a demotion in order to become the administrator of NASA's Equal Opportunity Division in the 1980s which handled issues of race class or gender between NASA's personnel after being there for a few years she retired in 1985 so this movie is kinda weird scholastically it is the first time I know of in which the namesake of a nonfiction movie was made simultaneously with the movie itself 2001 a Space Odyssey did it back in 1966 but that's science fiction not history the relationship between arthur c clarke and stanley kubrick during the making of that movie and the resultant differences in tone and plot are somewhat similar to what happened here though in both cases the book came out near months prior to the release of the movie it's kind of weird and I've never heard of this ever being attempted before of course Margo Lee shed early the author of the book is in a very different position from arthur c clarke both as an Arthur and in genre with fiction you can make it up as you go along but history is not fiction so the story is already there shed early is acting more as an investigator than somebody just making it up also arthur c clarke was an eminent author in his field by 1966 shed early is just getting started as a historian this was her first work and she was a journalist beforehand not a historian basically she became a historian by completing this book which means the movie rights were sold to this history book by a person who was still becoming a historian very awkward indeed and it shows not only in the movie but in the intent of the book as well the idea behind the title hidden figures should be pretty obvious it's meant to point out people in which previous narratives have left out but still remain important to those narratives as in they have been hidden by history now saying that these people in which the movie depicts have been hidden by history is an overstatement to say the least if anything the thing that has obscured these computers from prominence is the fact that they were a few among many we don't talk about the numerous engineers and scientists who worked at NASA as being hidden by history for the most part let alone the computers who worked for them calling them hidden is to mistake the nature of their work now shedder lee's book actually focuses on a number of other computers not just the three in the movie but the problem remains it also is not as though there hasn't been previous scholarship on these women for sleek two out of the three were well published in their own right secondly all of them have been the subject of numerous works from oral history projects to the Obama administration's women's history forum there is a manuscript publicly available online which covers this subject and was submitted more than two decades prior to this also NASA has a cultural resources wiki which has been immensely useful in finding both primary and secondary sources on the subject all of this stuff pre-existed the book but that is all in tone the substance of the books scholarship as in its veracity meets what I've come to expect of newly minted historians and for the purposes of this review remains unassailable it is the movie's veracity that is in question for it seems more like somebody making a fan fiction out of shudder Lee's research I'm going to keep this short because there's basically nothing correct about this film that being said I'll get into why that's understandable later from the outset of the film were shown how little it will come to resemble reality so the beginning of the movie tells us that this is happening in 1961 highway in Hampton Virginia 1961 and it's all supposed to be progressing from there yet we see them immediately going to the West Computer Group which hadn't existed for three years by that point we're also treated to the three characters renting a car to work together which is patently false they are shown as being all buddy-buddy in this but in reality Vaughn was the other twos boss until 1958 when they all went their separate ways and they were never recorded as doing any of these things together they obviously knew each other but as co-workers not necessarily friends a great deal of this movie is based on these factual errors all of the history before 1961 from Ron becoming a supervisor in 1949 to disaggregation in 1958 is shown as though they happened at the same time years after the fact but what really bugs me on this squashed chronology is the fact that they make a bunch of big events like the first dog in orbit happened in this 1961 timeframe that happened in 1957 so don't even expect to get some good space race history out of this one also as a side thing that really bugs me as soon as I found out about it in the movie they showed Jackson's supervisor this engineered guy who says that he is Jewish and had actually been in one of the concentration camps and uses that to encourage Jackson to become an engineer I'm a Negro Lama I'm not going to entertain the impossible and I'm a Polish Jew whose parents died in a Nazi prison camp now I'm standing beneath a spaceship that's going to carry an astronaut to the stars I think we can say we are living the impossible if you were like me would you wish to be an engineer he wasn't even an immigrant he was born in Massachusetts for pete's sake crystal masked happened while he was in graduate school in Alabama I wasn't aware that there were concentration camps in Alabama he was American through and through yes he was Jewish but for some reason the movies producers decided that well Jewishness must automatically mean that they've been in a concentration camp that's kind of screwed up you shouldn't say that somebody was in a concentration camp when they never were don't do that we have to get off of that bits and pieces of this thing are combined into Johnson's individual story while Jackson and Vaughn are hidden by the plot so for instance this big thing about Johnson having to run halfway across the Langley campus just to get to a colored bathroom is something that happened but it was Jackson instead of Johnson Johnson in fact didn't notice that the bathrooms were segregated for two years and when she was confronted about it she paid it no heat continuing to use the white bathrooms for two more years before they were officially desegregated in 1958 in fact this awkward dating is meant to serve one central plot point that completely loses focus on the other two characters the climax of the movie when Johnson loses her job as a computer to the new electronic computer from IBM but then John Glenn demanded a recheck of the numbers saying let's get the girl to check the numbers but wasn't Vaughn one of the coders of that IBM so isn't that also somewhat of an insult to her story arc but the movie just subsumes her story for Johnson's a little hard to trust Tom he can't look in the eyes that's right Colonel Katherine did manage to calculate a few decimal points further than that hunk of metal well I would think every digit you got be sure thank you for me now this actually happened in 1961 for which the whole movie's plot revolves but is it enough to make everything else subservient to it well actually yes I think so this may be strange for me to say but I think that this movie would have been incredibly boring if it were more accurate now I normally advocate accuracy for the sake of making better movies for the truth is always better than fiction plus a you avoid distorting our understanding of the world by telling the truth but here the truth doesn't seem film about trying to communicate several different stories happening over the course of decades is not something Hollywood seems particularly capable of of course that begs the question of why even bother trying to film this when there are plenty of other stories to tell that could easily give that same point but that would mean that Hollywood would have to have a clue about the world it wishes to portray and we all know how out of touch they are it would take a truly gifted set of filmmakers to make that vision come to light and hidden figures was a movie made by committee because good filmmaking is always a risk the movie was perfectly engineered to take advantage of the current political climate pretty heavy stuff yes it is identity politics were already on the rise before the election so this movie would have done well no matter what because it plays to those sensibilities but then Donald Trump was elected surprising the entire Hollywood establishment instead identity politics continued to rise in prevalence but with seemingly more urgency into that climate this movie was released that is why it was so popular it told an inspiring story about overcoming racial bigotry from the perspective of those oppressed at the time the public most wanted it it plays to people's political proclivities tugging at everything that the nation most prizes in recent scholarship even the fact checkers were duped into praising it people were quoting Catherine Johnson as saying that the movie sounded accurate after having seen it that doesn't mean anything though that quote could easily mean quite the opposite of what these fact checkers were bringing up and then they always fail to mention that NASA had been desegregated for three years prior to when this movie is supposed to take place here at NASA we all pay the same color now that's not to say that there wasn't some sort of systemic racism having just desegregated despite what you may think I have nothing against y'all I know I know you probably believe but they're depicting it as being segregated which is false so I don't think the film deserves the praise that has been heaped upon it and certainly not the ridiculously high ratings it has gotten on Rotten Tomatoes it is an alright movie if you simply want fan fiction but that's pretty much all it is you're not going to learn anything out of this you're not going to actually be shown how people overcame racism or anything it's a simple story that holds no meaning after the fact or to put it more simply the history that this movie wishes to portray is the real hidden figure [Applause] [Music] [Music]

Info

Channel: The Cynical Historian

Views: 69,619

Rating: 4.7081642 out of 5

Keywords: history, documentary, Dorothy Vaughan, Vaughan, human computers, NACA, NASA, Katherine Johnson, Mary Jackson, Margot Lee Shetterly, Shetterly, Hidden Figures, truth, true story, reality, accuracy, John Glenn, hidden figures, hidden, nasa, segregation, Jim Crow

Id: iC1UelSFOlg

Channel Id: undefined

Length: 18min 8sec (1088 seconds)

Published: Thu May 11 2017

Reddit Comments

Oh, good, I was wondering when anyone of the mainstreamers would address it.

Fun fact: Glenn never mentioned that story; it increasingly looks like a massive act of historical revisionism.

👍︎︎ 5 👤︎︎ u/DDE93 📅︎︎ May 12 2017 🗫︎ replies

And it's a damn shame, too. Maybe it would have made a boring movie if it was more accurate, but I think the real stories about these woman give people more insight and pride in our predecessors than some made up thing.

👍︎︎ 5 👤︎︎ u/Zigarrenbar 📅︎︎ May 12 2017 🗫︎ replies

Identity politics in my media?

Hellz naw.

👍︎︎ 1 👤︎︎ u/SeaSaltSirens 📅︎︎ May 12 2017 🗫︎ replies