ABSTRACT
“Should Bunny Watson marry Richard Sumner?” When Spencer Traey's character asks a computer this question in the 1957 romantic comedy Desk Set, he expects an affirmative answer. In this way, he simultaneously hopes to convince Bunny (Katherine Hepburn) to marry him, and assuage her opposition to the machine. The function of computers in narrative films is often twofold like this, coding cultural conflicts over technological progress through gender, and negotiating gender and sexuality through the machines. The fact that the computer comes up with a generically unsatisfactory “No!” then attests to the ambivalences toward both computers and heterosexuality that narrative films featuring computers often play out. The story of the advance of the computer as an ever more pervasive technological presence therefore joins the ongoing story of persistent attempts to reconcile gender differences in an uneasy heterosexual relation, which various narrative genres have been telling over the course of film history.
