The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com Arts Wednesday, January 18, 2017 — 5A “Hidden Figures” uplifts NASA’s unsung heroes Film highlights necessity of professional diversity and the ability storytelling has to retroactively write history Exiting the movie theater last week, I heard snippets of a conversation about “Hidden Figures.” “I grew up in the same town as her,” a woman said, referring to one of the main characters. “And I didn’t even know that she did that much until later.” If this tells us anything, it’s that storytelling is powerful. Following Katherine Johnson (Taraji P. Henson, “Empire”), a physicist and mathematician who made seminal contributions to celestial navigation, Mary Jackson (Janelle Monáe, “The Electric Lady”), NASA’s first black female engineer, and Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer, “The Help”), NASA’s first black female supervisor, “Hidden Figures” understands that what goes unsaid is often what says it all. Despite their college degrees and unparalleled technical capabilities, the women face innumerable barriers, big and small, to succeed as black women in STEM. “If you were a white man, would you want to be an engineer?” a colleague asks Mary. “I wouldn’t want to be an engineer, because I’d already be one,” she replies. The film outlines just some of the reasons why: A NASA policy requires that all engineers take a specific course only offered by segregated schools. When Katherine joins an all- white team, she is provided a “colored” coffee machine exclusively for her use. She runs half a mile in heels through the parking lot because not a single colored restroom exists in the entire building complex. Every shot is staged to make the discomfort known. Katherine walks into a sterile sea of white button-downs and black ties. The only color present comes from the cardigans worn by the two women in the room, and her dark skin. “Hidden Figures” aims to undo superstar culture, splitting hierarchy down to its core and revealing the multitudes of people that really make genius happen. Dorothy says, “progress for one of us is progress for us all,” and it’s evident in the making of the film. While it sheds light on three incredible black women, “Hidden Figures” also pays tribute to the partners, children, churches and role models that empower them. Dorothy doesn’t just aspire to be a supervisor for herself. She stubbornly stands by her girls in the colored computing team to ensure the security of their futures at NASA, refusing to advance if other they can’t advance, too. The space race contextualizes the civil rights movement within a foreign policy context. While this has a positive effect of categorizing people not by race, but as Americans on equal footing, its unrealistic execution makes it a distraction. With simplistic and unnecessary dialogue, John Glenn’s boyish, Labrador Retriever charm verges on dopey. The highly unrealistic space CGI also takes away from the heartwarming storyline of the women. Still, it’s a feel-good movie, stuffed with sweeping monologues and snappy comebacks against microaggressions. Though it’s unlikely that every conversation occurred in reality, the film does not sugarcoat how hard black women fough; how hard they still fight today. Instead, the optimism in “Hidden Figures” acts as a voice clapping back against racism, speaking for all people color who cannot speak out for themselves. Even for viewers, “Hidden Figures” has the power to bring together communities, eliciting the most sniffling I’ve heard in a theater as of late. “C’mon, seriously!” someone muttered from behind me when the door of the command room closed in Octavia’s face. The theater erupted in applause when the supervisor who once actively emphasized her inferiority and lack of belonging passed by her desk and made her a cup of coffee. 20TH CENTURY FOX Math! VANESSA WONG Daily Arts Wrtier SOHN’s ‘Rennen’ a weak, gloomy sophomore release London-raised, Vienna-made and now Los Angeles-based Christopher Taylor — or SOHN — just dropped his second album after almost three years of silence. The record’s title, Rennen, translates from German to “run.” With this follow up to his successful debut, SOHN found himself itching to pivot away from the snowy Austrian capital where he made his first album, Tremors, in 2014. The artist elaborates, “I went from holing up in a dark studio in Vienna, leaving at 6am and trudging through the snow to get home, to being on a ranch in the California hills, worried that a fire’s going to sweep across and blow everything away.” Ironically, it seems the moody, wintry atmosphere charged Tremors with the signature spark that set SOHN apart in the electro-indie arena. Despite his sunny shift in scenery, SOHN seems proccupied by the shadow of looming loss that the hills of LA cast over his headspace — a shadow that dimmed the emotional impact of Rennen. The majority of the record’s poignant songs are placed at its opening. “Hard Liquor” is a pulsing, soulful track that peaks at the ringing harmonies of the chorus. Its sexy title and electronic layers are dulled by the surface-level, redundant lyrics. For example, he sings repetitively, “she needs her hard liquor/give her that hard liquor/and she’ll be ok.” “Conrad,” the second of Rennen’s three singles, matures lyrically and maintains the bassy funk of the first track. Initially, it sounds like an 80’s jam as SOHN croons, “I can feel it comin’ we can never go back” in a Michael Jackson- esque tenor range. The production progresses into a synthy, frenetic collage that leads listeners into the meditative “Signal.” The anticlimactic third track is laced with an eastern-influenced riff — the only component that keeps listeners attention until it’s almost-cringey conclusion. “Dead Wrong” and “Primary” are at times both disjointed and screechy — the former shows wood- clinking hints of a Glass Animals knock off, while “Primary” is grounded in unintriguing vocals and a generally messy electronic mix. SOHN simmers down into an echoing piano ballad for the record’s eponymous track. Its ethereal call- and-response vocals occasionally overlap into chill inducing, weepy harmonies. The layered voices act as a reminder of the depth and captivating energy that pervaded Tremors — a depth that Rennen, for the most part, lacks. “Proof” attempts a last shot at this sensual appeal before the album winds down in its concluding tracks. Loaded with distorted oohs and ahs, creaky bass vibrations and intermittent audible exhales, “Proof” is enticing. Beyond its sexual surface — lines like “skin to skin … I know that you need me now” — SOHN suggests something deeper, sighing, “yeah, we believe in a system, a system but everybody knows it’s wrong.” There is more brooding beneath the somber surface of Rennen’s concluding track, “Harbour,” as well. If listeners somehow make it to the last minute of this song (the last minute of the album, actually) they’ll be surprised by a sudden, suspense-inducing assault of pixelated noise. The conclusion of “Harbour” could effectively act as the the ending song of a “Mission Impossible” soundtrack – one that strikes when the screen goes black and reads, “to be continued.” It’s the type of frenzied song that beats in the background as the audience sits in a theatre, entranced by an uncalled-for finale. The album’s finish will seldom be reached, though, for the majority of Rennen’s alluring ambiance occurs at the front end of the album. Beyond a handful of ear-perking melodies and invigorating beats, SOHN seems to have lost some of the electro-lushness that set the bar high for his follow up record. AVERY FRIEDMAN Daily Arts Writer Worldstar and the insidious appeal of online schadenfreude If you peruse the Internet endlessly like me, you are bound to have seen a viral video of a fight break out. It was probably recorded on a low-quality camera phone and has received thousands, possibly millions, of views. They can appear as either single clips or compilations, with the latter showing extended clips of other ridiculous stuff, like pranks gone wrong or outrageous public sexual acts. While videos of school and street fights are intended to be funny, they instead normalize violence by portraying a fight as entertainment. One of the biggest outlets of these kinds of videos is WorldStar Hip Hop, a video blog that has been producing online content since 2005. As of 2013, WorldStar has garnered a large following, currently coming in at 1.76M followers on Twitter, nearly 7 million likes on Facebook, 3.8 million YouTube subscribers and 7.2m followers on Instagram. With its multifaceted platform, WorldStar has pervaded nearly every facet of social media, playing a particularly influential role on the now-defunct Vine. WorldStar Hip Hop isn’t completely devoted to producing explicitly violent content; the site has been instrumental in promoting Black voices through music videos, intimate behind-the-scenes features, breathtaking rap battles and other original content. In fact, it reposts and shares many non- violent videos that are genuinely funny and captivating. At the same time, though, it’s astonishing that WorldStar is mostly known for being unapologetic in distributing violent content. Perhaps a counter argument would suggest that WorldStar is simply capturing the uncensored, unfiltered reality of certain public schools and neighborhoods in America. But the kind of violence in these videos are depicted as “shock value” humor, priming its viewers with a funny, eye-catching caption like “Racist Guys Attack An Interracial Couple In Washington State!” or “Dude Calls Classmate The “N” Word Then Runs For His Life Yelling “Help Me”!” By pulling viewers in with these insane headlines, people can laugh more easily at the misfortunes of whoever is getting punched, kicked or beaten in the video. There’s something so sinister about shock value that it makes you wonder why people find violence entertaining in the first place. In addition to the brutal violence, what bothers me most about WorldStar videos, as well as its other amateur, copycat sites like Quality Fights (28.8k Twitter followers) and Vine Fights (165k Twitter followers), is that they perpetuate and generalize stereotypes about the people they depict in the video. Take Sharkeisha, for example. In November 2013, WorldStar posted a one-and-a-half minute clip from Instagram of a woman named Sharkeisha sucker-punching a friend, who seemed totally non- confrontational in the video. As the video circulated and gained millions of views, the Internet reacted in various ways. Some expressed shock, disgust and disbelief, including the family of ShaMichael Manuel, the woman who Sharkeisha sucker- punched. According to a report from the New York Daily News, ShaMichael’s mother shunned people for “glorifying Sharkeisha” and simultaneously “taunting my daughter.” Others, however, were undeterred by the video’s violence, as Sharkeisha became a hit meme among Twitter and Vine users and even got her own definition on Urban Dictionary. On November 27th, the day after the video was published, “Sharkeisha” had become the number one trending topic on Twitter and the third most searched keyword of the day on Google Trends. Nothing, not even Sharkeisha’s punching, seemed to stop the Internet from spreading her name everywhere. At the time, the Sharkeisha phenomenon may have seemed like a humorous addition to the Internet’s world of strange viral videos. But as Hip Hop Wired pointed out in an article a day after the video’s release, people who find this funny will “think this is the sort of classless behavior typical of any and all Black women.” Sharkeisha may have an odd name and a physical strength unknown to mankind, but her sudden act of brutal violence against an innocent person, as promoted by WorldStar and other online outlets, is far from funny. It’s shameful not just for the way it depicts the violence and distorts the identity of the person who caused it, but also for neglecting the victim of the fight almost entirely. This is just one of many examples of popular videos that normalize and perpetuate unmediated violence without considering the consequences. Why do we laugh at other people’s misfortunes? Do we genuinely find school fights and public embarrassment funny or are they so startling that they naturally elicit an uncomfortable chuckle? Are we so masochistic that our sense of morality has been completely drained by the devious inner workings of social media? The Internet is obsessed with violence, but this notion isn’t a new development. Across most mediums, people consume violent content, whether through staged fighting on WWE or the Transformers franchise. There’s even a movie coming out this year called “Fist Fight” about two grown-ass male teachers (played by Charlie Day and Ice Cube) who engage in a classic, old-school fight in front of their school. It’ll probably score big at the box office. But what is most troubling about these videos, specifically the ones found on WorldStar’s website, is that they spread faster and become far more pervasive through social media. Watching people beat each other up is certainly a fascinating way to observe human behavior, but it’s not productive or entertaining in any way. To put it simply, it’s dangerous and needs to be stopped. SAM ROSENBERG Social Media Columnist SOCIAL MEDIA COLUMN FILM REVIEW A- “Hidden Figures” 20th Century Fox Rave Cinemas, Quality 16 INTERESTED IN WRITING FOR ARTS? MASS MEETINGS — 7 P.M. ON 1/19, 1/23, 1/26, 1/30 @ 420 MAYNARD Any questions regarding the application process? Don’t hesitate to email us at anay@umich.edu or npzak@umich.edu MUSIC REVIEW Artist’s return to musical fold falls short of expectations “Hidden Figures” understands that what goes unsaid is often what says it all Even for viewers, “Hidden Figures” has the power to bring together communities Rennen SOHN 4AD