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Filming the “Electronic Brain” In tracing the cultural history of computing, so far our focus has been on the discourses and legacies of technical elites: first the works of Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace, then the debates of engineers over the relative merits of analog versus digital computing. This is because before the mid-1940s, computers were specialized technical objects unfamiliar to the general public. Computers weren’t a part of popular culture. With the emergence of mainframe digital computers in the years after World War II, computing machines entered public consciousness for the first time. Early digital computers such as ENIAC and UNIVAC were featured in Life, Time, and other newsmagazines. By the 1950s, the computerization of America had begun. Americans started to encounter the work of computers in their interactions with complex bureaucracies, including government agencies, banks, and other institutions. Representations of the huge, powerful, intimidating machines began appearing in science fiction and other forms of popular entertainment. As computers moved out of the lab and into the workplace, they emerged in the American public sphere as figures of both hope and anxiety , offering the promise of technological salvation and the threat of mass unemployment. At first, even the name of the machines was up for grabs—up through the end of the 1950s, they were often called “electronic brains” or “giant brains.” To understand popular ideas about computers in the mainframe era, this chapter will turn to turn an examination of representations of computers in popular film. We’ll focus on two of the most commercially successful films of the 1950s and 1960s to feature computers: 1957’s Desk Set and 1968’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Desk Set is a romantic comedy, the eighth of the nine films starring Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. Hepburn plays Bunny Watson, the head research librarian for a television network. Tracy is Richard Sumner, a consultant brought in to computerize the workplace. The 3 47 comic tension in the film springs from Watson’s fear that the new computer will replace her and her colleagues. Although her fears are revealed to be groundless in the film’s conclusion, they resonate more deeply than does the movie’s pat happy ending. The film is a fascinating snapshot of popular anxieties about computerization in the 1950s. Desk Set is particularly interesting because it’s one of the few movies about computers that isn’t in any way part of the genre of science fiction. SF films typically address audiences’ hopes and anxieties about technology through extrapolation, imagining the utopian and/or dystopian future consequences of new machines such as computers. (As we’ll see in a moment, this is exactly the strategy of 2001.) Desk Set, instead, is a romantic comedy set in the present. In the genre of romantic comedy, social conflicts are mapped onto the characters of a warring couple who alternately fight and love. This is the template for all of the Hepburn and Tracy comedies. In this case, Desk Set mines the audience’s hopes and anxieties about computers as the source of comic (and romantic) tension and con- flict between Hepburn and Tracy. As we shall see, this generic framework allows the film to directly address questions of gender and technology that almost always remain repressed in the science fiction genre. 2001 is Stanley Kubrick’s filmed version of Arthur C. Clarke’s science fiction novel, in which a group of astronauts travels to investigate a mysterious extraterrestrial object. Over the course of their journey, their arti- ficially intelligent shipboard computer, HAL, begins to malfunction, murdering most of the crew before he can be deactivated. 2001 is a much darker story than Desk Set, with no happy ending for HAL (although the remaining astronaut goes on to his hallucinatory final journey in the film’s famously psychedelic climax). But its legacy has been more complex than one might think. Despite HAL’s villainy, he lives on as film’s most fully realized artificially intelligent computer, and he remains an inspiration for generations of AI researchers who choose to focus on the inspiring technical accomplishment of HAL’s creation, rather than his subsequent meltdown . The film, then, is another snapshot of the mixture of hope and anxiety in Americans’ attitudes towards computers. Filmed in Kubrick’s portentous style, it takes a very different approach from the frothy Desk Set. But still, in the differences between the two films, we can take some measure of Americans’ deepening...

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