ABSTRACT
In Tavi Gevinson’s dreamy, kitsch nostalgia for an imagined America that she has come to know primarily via filmic representation, and in her efforts to salvage the real America on her doorstep via a practice of collecting guided by the principle of ‘strange magic’. Tavi’s metamodern affect reflects the struggle of these lost possibilities to find a new language in a postmodern culture that has all but erased them. The author explores, in particular, the ghost of Erfahrung that the teenage ideal signifies, as opposed to the mere Erlebnis that typifies adulthood, and how, in this, too, there lies a powerful resistance to instrumental reason. The narrators in the film have still not forgotten Bloch’s ‘inconstructable question’, and the film asks its viewers not to either. In considering the popular genre of Detroit ‘abandoned spaces’ photography, the author questioned readings that understand the images primarily as expressing a restorative nostalgia for Fordian prosperity.
