Analog Desires: On <i>Stranger Things</i> and the Logics of Nostalgia
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 paper examines the relation between Stranger Things (Netflix, 2016–) and the omnipresence of nostalgic tropes within current mediascapes. Nostalgia for the 1980s is already a well-examined subject within film and media studies, yet there remains much to say about the ties between nostalgia and desire. As with any desire considered from a psychoanalytic standpoint, nostalgia is focused on an impossible object that is conceived in retrospect. After comparing the object of nostalgia with the functioning of the object-cause of desire as it is conceptualized in psychoanalytic thought, this paper argues that the nostalgic desire expressed within the series is situated around the very shift from the analog to the digital. It is argued that nostalgia within Stranger Things emerges from the remediation of analog media and technologies, and that its relation to desire emanates from the very lack that is retrospectively situated at the heart of digital media.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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