From what I recall, most of their coworkers gave them no actual grief in the movie. They were just kinda there. Background drones. Parsons and Dunst served as the Unsubtle Faces of Racism, but were fictional characters that don’t besmirch any actual people. (Dunst’s character wasn’t that far-fetched to me, really.)
I’d prefer seeing a story much closer to actual events too, but the less dramatic, more subtle systemic racism they likely faced doesn’t make for a widely interesting movie.
I’m not saying Dunst’s character, or any of the characters, were “far-fetched”. What I’m saying is that according to the actual statements of these women, the actual engineers at NASA were surprisingly enlightened. Their reward for being enlightened is to be slandered because that wouldn’t make an interesting movie! :smack: You don’t see how unfair that is?
“Most of their coworkers” did not even have lines in the movie. So, yes: they were “just kinda there”. But in the big showstopping rant by Taraji P. Henson, intended for her Oscar reel, as she builds to her peak, she shouts “I work like a dog, day and night!” Then, circling to face ALL the engineers in the room, she continues, at full volume, “Living off coffee none of you want to touch!” Cut to a shot of various “background drones” looking down guiltily. That right there, that ten seconds of the movie (a very important ten seconds–no one can deny with a straight face that it’s intended as an Oscar reel) is vicious slander. Anyone whose relative was one of the white male engineers in that room has just had the family name besmirched, when in fact if anything they deserve credit for being unusually enlightened for the time!
More broadly, we should be glad to learn that something about working in that field seems to have led white men to be ahead of their time in terms of attitudes (the recent election proving it to be even more ahead than I would have previously thought). Science-y geeks should be able to feel good about that. But no, that would be too boring. :mad:
I’m fine with this kind of artistic license in service to a broader truth - that black women were generally treated like dog shit in the workplace at that time. And in my understanding even those anecdotes were at least partially from the women involved, even if it was earlier in their careers than the movie takes place.
So you’re fine with slandering a specific group of people for a “broader truth”? I wonder if you’d feel that way if you were involved in the space program, or some other idealistic endeavor that produced a huge, historic achievement–and were proud that you and your colleagues were notably not part of that lamentable “broader truth”.
This same complaint, BTW, goes for the movie Selma, which also portrayed nearly all whites in the movie as villains, most notably slandering Lyndon Johnson, IMO one of our greatest presidents. But at least in slandering a major historical figure, there are those who have come forward (as in that link) to object. These relatively anonymous engineers don’t have that luxury.
Because who is going to speak for the white men? Will no one ever portray them as decent people?
There was no “slandering a specific group of people”. Maybe it slandered two people (Parsons and Dunst’s characters), but they were fictional. And even they were portrayed as no worse than average white Americans of the time. Portraying someone as an average white American isn’t slander.
I watched it yesterday. It was good, but not THE.GREATEST.MOVIE.EVER like some people seemed to think it was.
I knew some variant of this would be coming. :rolleyes: In fact, many white men *are *decent people, and many were back then. In fact, there are probably more white men in America who are decent people than there are black women who are decent people (please note that I’m talking about raw numbers here, not percentages). And they–we–don’t deserve to be treated as though we’re all the same. Why would you not want to give credit where it’s due? Do you want to incentivize white guys to be chauvinist bigots, because they’ll be depicted as such regardless?
It’s almost like you didn’t read my comments about the big showstopping scene about the coffee, just upthread. That makes it awkward for anyone to mention, when the movie comes up in conversation, “oh yeah: my grandfather worked with Katherine Johnson at NASA”. Anyone hearing that will assume said grandfather was a bigot who wouldn’t touch any coffee she had touched, even though this is pure fiction.
I don’t think this follows at all. That was pretty damn standard bigotry for white Americans at the time.
And even at that particular Langley campus, if a decade earlier:
That campus was indeed segregated in the 40s, when black women started working there. Even with the bathrooms, Johnson had to use white segregated bathrooms and was challenged on it, but ignored it. That exact coffee incident may not have happened to Johnson, but so what? It’s a movie. They make scenes for drama, and in this case to represent the challenges due to racism that black women face. That’s really hard to represent in 2 hours without specific incidents like that.
Katherine Johnson saw the movie and said she really liked it. That’s good enough for me in terms of accuracy.
But these were not standard Americans! From an article in Smithsonian magazine:
“Shetterly" is the author of the book Hidden Figures which the movie is based on. What a deal, you live your life as a progressive idealist, and then millions of people remember you as a “standard American” bigot from an unenlightened era. But since you happened to be born white and male, who gives a shit, right?
And there’s a whole separate issue aside from the slander: I consider it really appalling, and depressing, to teach the public about important historical figures in ways that are grossly inaccurate. Even if the inaccuracies are completely benign, as they are not in this case.
It showed Langley in a pretty positive light overall. They got rid of the bigoted policies, very dramatically.
The movie had two major characters that acted in a bigoted way. One of them evolved, IIRC. That leaves one bigot. That doesn’t slander Langley or everyone who worked there. Neither does the coffee scene – it demonstrates the challenges black women faced at Langley (if a decade before) and in American workplaces in general at the time.
You can obviously keep making these assertions all day long. I think I have demonstrated clearly how specious they are, so I will just refer back to what I have already posted and leave it at that.
Okay, likewise.
People who get all their historical knowledge from movies are lost already. Personally, I believe it is more important to show what systemic racism looked like back when it was the norm than to avoid appearing to slander anonymous background characters. That was the point of the film after all; I am sorry the film makers did not meet your desire for a “not all white men working at NASA then” disclaimer.
I’ve read the book and from what I can tell, a lot of the racism was a holdover. There were laws being passed in Congress in the late 40s that were getting rid of segregation. When one of the women went to her grand boss with a chart showing how she and a white engineer were at the same level but he made more money, Grand Boss was floored. I think for a lot of them, it wasn’t something that occurred to them and in this case, he took steps to rectify it.
For me, the most horrifying thing was Prince Edward County’s absolute refusal to desegregate, which resulted in the entire school district being shut down FOR FIVE YEARS. Both white and black children lost five years of education and they were called the Lost Generation.
Fascinating story. I enjoyed both the book and the movie.
Oof, how awful. I hadn’t heard about this, and it really ought to be more well known, as it really served an important role to reify “Brown”, which could have become another toothless theoretical right that was gutted by yet more Jim Crow workaround sneakiness.
It reminds me of what happened with public swimming pools in many places not long after that. So many communities had nice, taxpayer-funded swimming pools; but then when integration was mandated, many got closed down and there was a boom in backyard pools and country club memberships. :dubious:
And even to this day, there is a tendency in these areas to have lots of white kids in private schools, and then white voters have little incentive to support robust funding for the public schools. I sure wish the whole education system could be federalized, but the ridiculous resistance to Common Core shows how far away that dream is. 
You going to tell me you knew all about these women before this movie came out? Pfffft. And this, like Selma, will be shown in classrooms across the country. Which would be great, if it were accurate!
They are not really anonymous, because they are *everyone *associated with a specific aspect of a historic effort.
That was the point of the film, to slander these characters? Funny, I thought the point was to celebrate these trailblazing women who had previously been little-known.
As for what you believe was “more important”, I find it chillingly Orwellian. Does this apply to what’s important in conveying present-day events too? If a video comes out that appears to show white cops killing an unarmed man, but subsequently another angle is found where the man is brandishing a gun at the cops, is it “more important” for a progressive newsroom to squash the video, or alter it to CGI out the gun? This kind of thing is not only wrong on its own merits, but it is counterproductive as it leads “alt-right” types to be able to argue that when the media or Hollywood portray systemic racism, it’s propaganda lies. And you are basically just offering them evidence to prove that! How can people believe *true *depictions of social problems if the same sources are offering provably false ones? :smack:
So far as I can see, it’s “not *any *of the white men working at NASA then”. Or close enough to that, that the exceptions dared not speak up. Which is the kind of office culture we should be celebrating.
BTW, this turns out to be more like *Selma *than I realized. The reason NASA was integrated from its inception was that LBJ (then a powerful Senate leader) insisted it be so. This man repeatedly insists on advancing civil rights for blacks faster than most in the country are comfortable with, and his reward in terms of legacy is to have all of it washed away because it wasn’t the average for the time and gets in the way of a good story that needs villains. Sickening.
I would add that all ethics and morality aside, even if this had been a completely fictional story: the hamhanded, cliched way this was portrayed was not good art–not subtle or nuanced in any way.
LBJ wasn’t even close to the villain in Selma. He was portrayed as a politician with political concerns who ultimately did the right thing. That’s hardly “sickening” or a slander.
Tell that to Johnson’s top domestic policy advisor:
By the way, the film recently had its theatrical release here in Japan. Since “Hidden Figures” wouldn’t really make sense in Japanese, 20th Century Fox announced a new title via SNS “ドリーム 私たちのアポロ計画” which translates to “Dream: Our Apollo Project”. Quite a few who read the book or about the movie pointed out that the film focuses more on the Mercury project than Apollo. Fox reasoned that most Japanese probably aren’t as familiar with the Mercury project as they are with Apollo, so they used that name to draw more interest. After some minor backlash, the distributor changed the name to just “Dream”.
Old white guy is wrong. Dog bites man.