![]() At this point, Nasa manager Al Harrison, played by Kevin Costner, comes into the frame.ĭespite being an amalgam of three different Nasa employees, Harrison somehow seems to do no actual work. While this makes her into the film’s hero, it also puts her into direct contact with many of the white, male Nasa engineers who see her as a black woman first and only secondarily as a person and coworker. Photograph: NASA photographer Robert Nye/NASAĪs the women race to complete the needed calculations, Johnson is promoted, owing to her exceptional mathematical talent. She is played in the film Hidden Figures by Janelle Monáe. Mary Jackson at work in NASA’s Langley Research Centre. By the time of Glenn’s orbit, the US was desperate for a win in the space race, and – by extension – the Cold War. In the early 1960s, the US was falling behind the Soviets in the space race: already the USSR had launched the first satellite and put the first person into orbit. The film follows Vaughan, Johnson, and Jackson as they work feverishly on the calculations for the launch and re-entry of John Glenn’s 1962 mission as the first American to orbit the Earth. Henson (who plays Katherine Johnson), Janelle Monáe (who plays Mary Jackson), and Octavia Spencer are hindered by the film’s framing. ![]() ![]() But the film based on Shetterly’s book straddles the line between allowing these women to be the protagonists of their story and crowding them out of the spotlight. It casts them as protagonists in the grand drama of American technological history rather than mere details. Margot Shetterly’s groundbreaking book, Hidden Figures, reorients our view of the space race by telling the stories of Nasa’s black women mathematicians. In writing history, the devil is always in the details. It reminds us how these women were made to feel like outsiders in their own country in small and large ways, even as they helped the nation succeed on the global stage. Although the scene goes on to establish the deep racism of the time in more direct ways, the small detail of the stockings tries to put viewers in the shoes of someone like Vaughan. ![]()
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