Of course I enjoyed the film, uplifting, superficial and
exceedingly well-made as it is, but my purpose here is less to talk about the movie
than to think about the nature of storytelling. In common with many films that take
their inspiration from historical events, Hidden Figures manipulates time,
personalities and circumstances in order to build a more compelling narrative.
The characters in it who voice racial prejudice are, in the main, capable of
having their minds changed, which makes us feel better about ourselves, and the
problems the main characters faced in professional advancement against the fact
of their race worked out completely differently in reality. It is not just that
storyline which is bent to fit a more heroic and comforting pattern, but the business
of the launching of John Glenn’s rocket, too: it is true, for instance, that
Katherine Johnson was called on to recalculate the landing co-ordinates for the
flight, but she had three days to do it rather than the tense half-hour or so
the film gives her.
There is no sense in complaining about any of this, of
course, because storytelling is not life. Film, in particular, is such an
exciting medium precisely because the constraints of the form force the
messiness of actuality into a shape it doesn’t have in life. Cinematic accounts of
the life of an individual are often very unsatisfying, because they must either
sacrifice truth or narrative energy; movies that focus on one particular
episode in a person’s life have a better chance of producing something memorable.
I enjoy reading biographies, but such books, too, often have a strange sense either
of anti-climax, or unease as you can see the author interpreting the whole of
their subject’s life through the lens of a particular part of it in order to
create a coherent narrative structure which isn’t always there. The latest
examples were Anthony Holden’s The Wit in the Dungeon (about the writer Leigh
Hunt) and Anne Sebba’s The Exiled Collector, an account of Dorset landowner and
art connoisseur William Bankes. Leigh Hunt’s life frankly went very quiet after
the excitement and drama of his trial and incarceration for seditious libel,
and its last few decades were marked by universal respect coupled with gentle
and uneventful penury, about which there is very little to say, although Holden
has a good go. Ms Sebba’s book is more impressive because she focuses very
little on the most dramatic event in her subject’s life – his arrest for gross
indecency and consequent flight to the Continent – instead concentrating on his
lifelong work of filling the great house of Kingston Lacy with artworks:
nevertheless, there’s very little known about what Bankes was up to during his
exile, and so verisimilitude demands that the story sort of tails away and
concludes in a cloud of unknowing.
Most people’s lives, even those of well-known people, don’t
follow the narrative arc that we want from them. Hidden Figures’s story is one
of good, quietly heroic human beings achieving things against the odds, and
even if the historical truth was blunter and less colourful, that’s a myth we
need eternally to tell and re-tell; if we don’t believe goodness and quiet
heroism are at least possible we’ll never achieve anything at all beyond bare
survival. But conducting funeral services for a great variety of human beings
teaches you, if nothing else, that everyone’s life is messy, contradictory, and
ends in one of a limited number of variations on the same theme, and that’s not
something we very much want to have relayed to us in the narratives we compose.
Why we itch to compose narratives at all is a deeper and
stranger matter. I imagine at root it’s an unlooked-for function of the
redundantly-developed human brain: the ability to perceive patterns and
structures in events confers some evolutionary advantage, and storytelling is a
consequence of that ability. Some stories perform the social good of encouraging
development and change; some stories, even, may be transfiguring, like that of
a God born and dying as human, and that human death being conquered as a tomb
is found empty.
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