The empty self in Revolutionary Road or: How I learned to stop worrying and love the blonde
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article focuses on the themes of self and selfhood raised in the 2008 film Revolutionary Road and the 1961 novel of the same name. These texts, I suggest, demonstrate how American culture has been performing a double movement since World War II, simultaneously appealing to an essential, stable notion of the self while ingraining a sense of emptiness and incompleteness in individuals. Using Judith Butler's concept of performativity as its main theoretical framework, the article approaches Revolutionary Road from three angles. First, it explores the transformation of the American aesthetic by focusing on the setting in which the plot takes place the suburbs of New York in the 1950s. Second, the article investigates the sweeping changes that occurred in the workplace during this period, focusing mainly on the autonomous Marxists' concept of virtuosic and immaterial labour. Finally, the article considers Lacan's theory of desire as it relates to the domestic sphere. The article concludes by arguing that these texts represent a subtle revolution in American thought that encourages readers and audiences to embrace the performative nature of the self rather than attempting to satisfy what Cushman calls the empty self, which can never be satisfied.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it