Made in 1957, "Desk Set" has the distinction of being the last comedy that
Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy costarred in. It is also one of the
first movies (and probably the last) that tackled the subject of computers
and unemployment.

Tracy plays Richard Sumner, an MIT graduate and computer expert who is
consulting with a huge media corporation in order to introduce Emilac into
their research department. That department is run by Bunny Watson, played
by Hepburn. She and her staff--all women--would seem to be resistant to any
kind of drastic technological innovations. First of all, the questions that
are put to them over the phone each day would seem resistant to automation:
"What is the tonnage of the planet Earth?"; "Who are Santa's reindeers?",
etc. Second of all, their office evoked a time in the American corporate
world where expressions of individuality were tolerated, if not encouraged.
For instance, there is a vine in Hepburn's office that snakes wildly across
the walls and ceilings, an obvious statement that its owner will not allow
herself to be subjected to the right-angled efficiency of Sumner's
automation schemes.

Once the computer is finally introduced, Hepburn and her staff receive pink
slips on the very first payday, courtesy of another Emilac that has been
installed in the payroll department. In the climactic scene, when Sumner
visits the research department to see how the new computer is working out,
all hell is breaking loose. The research department is being deluged with
phone calls that the new female and anal retentive operator of Emilac can
not process accurately. When she feeds the machine a question as to whether
the King of the Watusis drives a car, the machine can only spit out a movie
review of "King Solomon's Mines", which included the keyword "Watusi."

Sumner implores Hepburn to pitch in and help process the complex queries.
Why should she, she asks, since she has just been fired. Fired? That's not
possible, he replies, for the research staff was not only meant to be kept
on, there were going to be new hires to handle the expected increase in
volume, in light of the company's plans to merge with another corporate
giant. Just as she shows him her pink slip, the CEO of the company storms
into the research office and shows Sumner his own pink slip. It turns out
that the payroll computer has screwed up and everybody in the company has
been fired. This revelation is accompanied by the sight of Emilac spitting
out punch cards across the room like confetti and the sound of agonized
electronic burbling as the burden of the complex queries finally proves too
much for its logic circuits.

The movie ends happily with everybody retaining their job and Tracy and
Hepburn (rather elderly at this point in their career) smooching. For those
who have not had the pleasure of seeing a Tracy-Hepburn comedy, this may
not be the most rewarding of their films. Generally they are cast to type,
with Tracy as a gruff, homespun, working class guy, while Hepburn is more
refined, gifted with an ironically dry sense of humor. Their films also
tend to be observations on society, such as the remarkable 1941 "Woman of
the Year". Written by Ring Lardner Jr., it is Hollywood's ideological
contribution to the Stalin-Hitler Nonaggression Pact. In this film, Tracy's
character believes that the United States should focus on its own problems,
while Hepburn is a blueblood activist who is always running around to
various meetings concerned with war in peace in some far-off hotspot.

Based on a Broadway play by William Marchant, "Desk Set" prefigures
concerns that last with us until this day. Will computers throw people out
of work? What kind of progress will that be? As I have mentioned
previously, the first attempt to come to grips with these sorts of
questions in a Marxist framework was found in the pages of The American
Socialist, a magazine that lasted from 1954 to 1959 and whose impact and
legacy are much greater than would be suggested by its brief life span.

In the December 1955 issue, we find a symposium on "What's Ahead for Labor"
that tries to assess the impact of automation and mechanization on jobs.
Kermit Eby, a professor at the University of Chicago who had begun
contributing to the magazine that year, notes that 1.6 million fewer people
are engaged in industrial production than at the high point. "These
displaced persons, of course, push into the services and displace others.
All the time, each is working for lower wages."

Anticipating the neo-Luddite protests against automation that surfaced in
the 1990s from people like Jeremy Rifkin and Kirkpatrick Sale, Eby defends
a socialist perspective. If we can forgive the male chauvinism contained in
his observations, there is still much that makes sense:

"It is not my thesis that the machine does not liberate, nor do I argue for
return to the primitive, as Gandhi did. However, I do insist that man ends
are not defined in the volume of goods and services his industrial machines
produce. Instead, man’s ends lie in the quality of life that increased
leisure makes possible. And today, at least in America, more and more of us
are freed to live life in dimensions which transcend survival, as measured
in bread-and-butter terms. Consequently, not only must we today examine our
work-ethic, but also our attitude toward play and leisure-time activity.

"For example, it has been emphasized that ours is a spectator culture. It
is, of course, but there are other signs already mentioned: do-it-yourself,
travel, and so on. All these things point to something more than the
spectator view. To begin with, I would examine what life would be like when
we no longer need to eat our bread by the sweat of our brow. And how would
our lives be changed if we realized that work is not a punishment for past
sins and that play is not evil, but rather a creative expression of man’s
creative and artistic self?

"As our industrial revolution advances, we come face to face with a world
moving towards the 30-hour week, paid vacations, field, early retirement.
How many workers dream of their chicken farm? For the. skilled operator and
the maintenance man, going to the factory will perhaps not be so bad. On
many operations there will be little to do except watch the machine. There
will be time for talk-fest with the boys. Under such circumstances the
factory kind of club where the worker goes to meet the boys will be one of
the few man-dominated worlds left."

[Thanks to Van Gosse, moderator of the Radical History mailing list, for
suggesting that "Desk Set" was worth taking a second look at.]


Louis Proyect
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