If you haven’t heard of “Hidden Figures” at this point, I would like the address to the rock you’ve been living under.
Omitting the three Oscar nominations, the film is also the first movie with multiple female leads to remain at the top of the box office since 2011. Not to mention it surpassed “Rogue One” at number one at the box office.
That’s right. This movie beat “Star Wars” at the box office.
The movie tells the virtually unknown story of Katherine G. Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson, three black, female scientists who played a monumental role in the Space Race. While the movie follows fairly close to the biography it was based on, there were a few teensy eensy changes, pertaining specifically to a certain scene. Said certain scene refers to Johnson’s boss, played by Kevin Costner, standing up for Johnson’s right to use a “white” restroom which was much closer than the “colored” stalls over a mile away.
The scene involves Costner symbolically destroying the “colored” sign in a fit of racially charged justice.
There’s only one problem — it never happened.
That’s correct. One of the most iconic and praised scene of the movie didn’t actually happen. If it were staying true to history, Katherine Johnson just went into the “white” restroom, breaking the law on her own accord without her boss’s help.
When questioned by VICE news about the change, the director, Theodore Melfi, said he didn’t see a problem with adding a white hero.
“There needs to be white people who do the right thing. There needs to be black people who do the right thing,” Melfi said. “And someone does the right thing. And so who cares who does the right thing, as long as the right thing is achieved?”
When this fabricated scene was realized, the “White Savior” conversation was quickly brought to the forefront.
The “White Savior” complex is a very tired and overused film trope. Dexter Thomas, a VICE culture correspondent, explains why it could be used so heavily.
“That’s the purpose of the White Savior trope — to provide a white character that allows white viewers to feel good about themselves,” Thomas said. “In this case, it means that a white person doesn’t have to think about the possibility that, were they around back in the 1960s South, they might have been one of the bad ones.”
Whether or not this is a case of easing “white guilt” or prompting white people to become more active allies, one cannot deny that “Hidden Figures” is a phenomenal movie about phenomenal women.