You “forgot” to mention that NASA didn’t exist when she faced that struggle. LBJ specifically insisted it be created as a nonsegregated organization.
And I just can’t with claiming NASA’s “progressiveness was well-demonstrated in the movie”. Maybe Kevin Costner’s was. Otherwise, in that Oscar-bait scene I linked to, it’s made clear that in the *movie *version of that room, every single other engineer was a bigot who didn’t want to touch coffee if she had drunk from the pot. (That’s exceptionally bigoted when you think of how many very racist Southern whites had black cooks and nannies.)
That campus existed, and their jobs existed, and the organization that became NASA existed, and there was still segregation and bigotry. Do you really believe that those women faced no bigotry at NASA?
No, that was not made clear. It was made clear that most of the engineers in that room weren’t especially courageous in desiring to overturn racist social conventions of the time, which sounds pretty damn likely. It was made clear that NASA actually made a ton of progress, even if that progress was shown later (in the movie) than it really occurred. No one appeared pissed at the progress in the movie – the racism and discrimination, as most in real history was, was more due to inertia than hatred. Which doesn’t minimize it in any way – it shows how decent people can still take part in a discriminatory system. Some asshole engineer (in the movie) made the “colored” coffee pot, and no one made a stink because in general humans don’t make a stink. If you think there weren’t any asshole engineers at NASA at the time, then you’ve got an unrealistic view of humanity.
What was portrayed in the movie was pretty exceptionally progressive for the time. NASA looked good in the movie. Not perfect, but good. If they looked a tiny bit less great than they really were in some ways, to enhance the drama and highlight the real struggles that those women faced, is just fine with me.
:smack: Giving you the benefit of the doubt that you’re not purposely being dishonest about what was in the movie, you really need to pay better attention. Upthread I linked to the big Oscar reel speech, when she’s standing there bedraggled from walking all that way in the rain back from the bathroom. She thunders, as she surveys the whole room (and we are shown various faces of engineers with nonspeaking roles to underline the point), “I work like a dog day and night, living on coffee from a coffee pot none of you want to touch!” That’s universal revulsion at her, like they all think she’s a dirty animal, which goes *far *beyond the simple social inertia you describe. (Interestingly, the original scripted line is not quite so sweeping: “I work like a dog day and night, living on coffee from a coffee pot half of you don’t want me to touch!”)
One of the things that so many otherwise decent Americans didn’t realize about segregation and similar policies and practices was that they sent a message of hate – that black people were disgusting – whether or not they personally had those feelings themselves.
The personal feelings of those engineers in the movie didn’t matter – revulsion and hatred is the message that segregation was sending, even though in all likelihood most of those engineers didn’t touch the coffe pot just because they didn’t want to make a stink. That’s the point.
So no, I’m not being dishonest, and I’m not misreading the movie, at all. This is perfectly consistent with my view of the movie.
There’s no reason for you to assume dishonesty or anything like that.
Huh? I’m not sure what you even mean, but the relevant section of my post:
She’s looking around and yelling at them for not being willing to even *touch *(much less drink coffee from) any pot that she has used. That’s the “universal revulsion” she is describing.
ETA: It would not be a choice between being unwilling to touch a coffee pot she has touched, and “making a stink”. There is miles of daylight between those poles. How about not making a stink (as in, not complaining to anyone or standing up for her), but simply being willing to touch the pot? And andy, I *specifically *said I was *not *assuming dishonesty, so once again you need to read more carefully.
BTW, even if the scene only established that the engineers didn’t want to rock the boat or “make a stink”–which is an untenable interpretation of what she was saying about the coffee pot–even that would be unfair to the real NASA engineers, according to the Hidden Figures author, Margot Lee Shetterly:
That is *not *a description of people who “don’t want to make a stink”. And it’s certainly not a description of people who won’t touch a coffee pot because it might have Negro cooties on it. FFS
If you didn’t want to insinuate dishonesty, you wouldn’t even have mentioned it.
The scene in question was a quite reasonable expression of anger. It doesn’t matter what the engineer characters actually believed, the anger would be the same no matter what. All that matters is that no one spoke up about the coffee pot.
The scene was a demonstration of the real challenges these women faced. It would have hurt the film to jump back in time for these challenges, so they put them at the same time as the triumphs, even if the progress in reality came earlier.
That shouldn’t be such a huge deal. NASA still comes off looking great. These women were accepted and advanced. No actual people were slandered. A few fictional people were made up to represent the real and true bigotry that these women faced at different times in their careers.
Now it seems like you don’t believe I’m being honest when I say I give you the benefit of the doubt.
In any case, what is going on inside your head, whether you believe your own spin, is irrelevant. I bet some of the Big Tobacco spokesman of yore believed theirs as well. What you are delivering to my screen is a constant barrage of distorted, misleading, or often flat out inaccurate statements, and I’m going to call them out as such.
Alright, I’m going to take the personal stuff out. From now on, I’ll only respond to the posts about the movies, and ignore personal sniping.
These are disagreements about movie scenes and their interpretations. I think the movie is great and accurately portrayed the struggles and triumphs of these women, which really did happen, even if the way these struggles happened had some differences from the movie. I think perfect accuracy would have resulted in a far shittier movie.
The fact that Katherine Johnson thought the movie was well done is good enough for me, and IMO should be good enough for everyone. Movies based on history always make some changes to better fit the screen, and I think the changes made for this one take nothing significant away from the true story.
If you disagree, these are opinion disagreements about a movie. Please keep that in mind.
Just a friendly reminder here to remember what forum you’re in, and to keep personal feelings towards others under control. Nothing has yet crossed any lines, but it looks like it’s heading in that direction.
Doesn’t this mean that, at the time of Grissom’s mission, NASA still didn’t know how to put a spacecraft into orbit??
From 1958 to 1961, NASA successfully put eleven satellites in orbit: Explorer Program Satellites.
From 1958 to 1959, the U.S. Navy successfully put three satellites in orbit: Project Vanguard.
Maybe the Mercury capsule had never been in orbit until Katherine Johnson (single-handedly) figured out how to do it before the Friendship 7 mission. Is that it?
A full month to write that? As commansense points out:
Also:
The capsule would not “spin around the Earth forever”.
If “we bring him too late”, he will not be pushed out of Earth’s gravity. Melfi is mixing up the Mercury capsule with the Apollo Command Module returning from the Moon.
Why mention changes in “mass” and “weight”, and how does “a puff of wind” affect the re-entry point?
Melfi uses the Pentagon briefing and “we work backwards from there” to set up the scene that I discussed in my previous post. Katherine found out about the recovery zone and instantly did the math …
And there’s still the silly wind tunnel scene and Glenn’s “scheduled seven orbit flight” …
Thanks, Paxx, for contributing this meticulously researched, argued, and organized post. I think particularly when Melfi sticks his neck out to make such strong claims about accuracy, it’s highly relevant and not just “an opinion about a movie”.
And although this was separate from the thrust of your argument, I continue to maintain that there is also a higher standard when a group of people is thrown under the bus even though in reality they were more enlightened than most Americans.
At the end of the movie, we see some captioned shots that are supposed to provide us with factual details about the real-life participants. We see this: “John Glenn successfully completed three of a scheduled seven orbit flight.”
The Friendship 7 mission was not scheduled for seven orbits. According to NASA, Glenn successfully completed his mission. See The Friendship 7 Mission and Mercury-Atlas 6.
The movie attempts to re-create the drama of Apollo 13 by exaggerating the heat shield problem and having it lead to an aborted mission. The shot at the end of the movie perpetuates the distortion and violates the very reason for having the captioned shots: They are supposed to tell us what happened in real life.
But, let’s say that the mission was originally scheduled for seven orbits. That means that the re-entry point would have been calculated for the seventh orbit. The Earth is rotating while the capsule is orbiting so the path moves in relation to the Earth’s surface. (See Mercury Control Center and John Glenn’s flight in real time.) This means that the landing co-ordinates and the re-entry point would have to have been recalculated when the mission was aborted. This didn’t happen. The original fake cooridinates were used.
According to Hanlon’s Razor, “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity”.
There’s another level: “Never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by ignorance”.
It seems to me that the movie makers are:
Deliberately deceptive
Incredibly stupid, or
Grossly ignorant
I’m leaning towards #1 but I’m not ruling out #3. Definitely not #2: They knew exactly how to manipulate viewers.
The problem with #3 is the claims of having each page of the script meticulously fact-checked by people at NASA. That makes dishonesty much more likely, unless the NASA people were being super lazy or total yes-men and yes-women.
While cleaning up my notes, I came across some comments that I wrote almost three years ago about the wind tunnel scene.
1. Mary walks through the wind tunnel towards the Mercury capsule. How did she end up inside the wind tunnel?
2. While she’s in the tunnel, the engineers start the countdown for the test. Really?? They couldn’t wait until until she walked out of the tunnel and was safe?
3. The chief engineer (Zielinski) says: “No shoe is worth your life.” WTF?! He was going to kill her rather than stop the countdown, which never should have started in the first place.
4. When she finally leaves the wind tunnel, she pushes a door to enter the control room. The door has no handle and it opens inward, which means that once the wind starts, it could push the door open.
5. Mary enters the control room on the same side as the men who were watching her and, once inside, she is on the opposite side of the room and walks over to where the men are.
6. During the wind tunnel test, the Mercury capsule is facing up instead of having the heat shield facing the wind.
7. The wind pattern itself: too narrow, too slow.
8. A shingle flies off the capsule and hits the control room window. No damage to the window. Then a second shingle flies off the capsule and hits the same spot on the window. Again, no damage. Why don’t they make the capsule out of the same material as the window?
9. When Zielinski and Mary examine the capsule, there are movie cameras on tripods in the wind tunnel, along with two guys getting film from the cameras which were supposed to have filmed the test. There were no cameras when Mary first walks into the tunnel. (Point 3 above.)
10. Zielinski and Mary talk about the heat shield but they are examining the sides of the capsule, not the bottom.
Later on, Harrison says “Why are we still losing shingles off the heat shield?” and a few minutes later he says: “I’m sure you can [handle all the math], Paul. I’m sure all of you can. But if that were the case, shingles wouldn’t be flying off the heat shield, now would they?”
(Apparently, the mathematicians working on the flight path were also the engineers designing the spacecraft.)
The Mercury capsule had shingles but not on the heat shield.
I’m not sure what you even mean, but the relevant section of my post: