In my view, the biopic is a great way to teach history if it can portray the historical persons and events properly. Biopics and other history movies are able to make most of the people get access to tedious historical subjects enjoyably. Meanwhile, as visual information is easier to be imparted to the brain than text, biopics can equip the audience with a basic understanding of historical persons and events quickly. However, it shall be noted that cinema, with its strong power of spreading, can easily shape the way the public thinks about history, especially for biopic which is closely connected with the historical person’s reputation. Limited by the length, the biopic usually can present the historical person or event only from one specific aspect instead of discussing it thoroughly. Therefore, it is important for the audience to do their own research beyond the biopic to avoid being misled.
Personally, I prefer the biopic which suggests an unconventional opinion against the cliche. One example is Hidden Figures, loosely adapted by the non-fiction book of the same name, which tells the story of 3 black female mathematicians -- Katherine Johson, Mary Jackson, and Dorothy Vaughan -- who worked at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) during the Space Race between the Soviet Union and the United States. The specialty of this film lies in its subject matter about “Negro Women”, as Mary Jackson defined themselves. This group was special as it was the combination of two minorities in the 1960s: the blacks and females. They were suffering from two types of discrimination: outside the black community, the discrimination to colored people from the whites; inside their community, the discrimination from men to women. One stirring scene is that when Katherine walked into the room of the Space Task Group, she was surrounded by dozens of white men. It can be regarded as a miniature of American society at that time where white men were in charge and the voices of the black and the female were overlooked.
This film really impresses me as when it came to black people’s fight for equal rights before, I used to think of Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement. I have never known what those excellent black females had done to strive for equality and improve their status by their outstanding capabilities in such a peaceful but powerful way. The contribution of this group has been underrated and even ignored for a long time while biopic like Hidden Figures provides a window to the hidden history for the public.
One commendable part of Hidden Figures is that most of the shocking plots presented in this film were not excessively exaggerated. All the portrays about the racial segregation in this film like the segregated working units, bathrooms, and even canteens did exist in Langley Research Center. It was adopted based on the Jim Crow Laws since 1943 when NASA began to hire African-American women. In general, the experiences of Katherine, Mary and Dorothy displayed in the film do comply with the history. In history, Dorothy Vaughan was the first black female who became a department supervisor in NASA, though the actual date is different from the film, and Mary Jackson was the first African-American female engineer in NASA’s history and the lawsuits in the film did take place. Katherine also authentically took an important role in the calculation of John Glenn’s orbit, and the dramatic plot that Glenn requested Katherine to check the numbers before he flew is exactly what happened in history. More importantly, Hidden Figures masterly connects these women’s endeavours for equal rights with other significant historical events like the Cold War, marked with the Space Race, and the Digital Revolution, marked with the application of electronic computers. Any historical event is not isolated; each of them interrelated with all the other.
However, it has to be realized that most filmmakers do blend fact and fiction to highlight the messages they are trying to convey through the biopic film. They may create characters and events that did not exist in history to make up dramatic conflicts. In Hidden figures, for instance, the three main white characters, Al Harrison, Vivian Mitchell, Paul Stafford, are all fictional. They represent different types of stereotypical images of the white in biopics of the black, especially the ones directed by white male directors. One can be regarded as the “savior”. These roles are usually senior males. In the film, Al gave Katherine lots of “privileges” that black women usually cannot enjoy including something that had never happened like the removal of the “Colored Bathroom” sign. Another example is that Mary’s mentor, Karl, strongly encouraged her to become an engineer. On the contrary, black men depicted in this film showed contempt to these women in the film. The other image is what Stafford and Mitchell represent which reflect common social views and attitudes of that time. They are mean, conceited, and take the discrimination to females or the colored people for granted.
I do not deny that Hidden Figures is a typical Hollywood biopic with its cliches, but I still consider it as a great work because it provides me with a brand new perspective to look at the history with which I was not familiar.
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