Refoliating Vietnam in the
Post-9/11 American Homeland:
Debra Granik’s Leave No Trace

Kodai Abe

The spectacular images of terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, evoked a variety of cultural and historical memories in regulating the shock. For most spectators all over
the world, the conventional aesthetics of the Hollywood film, an
American product par excellence, ironically served as the handiest
framework to register the sublime event. Most Americans remembered the recent domestic terrorist bombing in Oklahoma City in
1995. The 9/11 attack, some observed, was the worst intelligence
failure and a cunning surprise attack ever since Pearl Harbor. Others immediately feared that it might be caused by nuclear weapons,
and the collapses of the twin towers reminded them of the twomushroom clouds above Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The designation of “ground zero” soon followed. Thomas Franklin’s photograph of three firefighters raising an American flag on the rubbleof the World Trade Center was shortlisted for a Pulitzer Prize, echoing Joe Rosenthal’s Pulitzer Prize–winning composition capturing
US marines atop Iwo Jima during World War II. Such visual associations of 9/11 with other historical events often facilitated thereinforcing of American exceptionalism—the mythic idea that theUnited States is young, innocent, benign, and unique—throughDiscourse, 45.1–2, Winter/Spring 2023, pp. 199–222.
Copyright © 2023 Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309. ISSN 1522-5321.

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Kodai Abestrategic manipulation of the cultural contexts in which thoseimages are represented to elicit specific affective reactions. Conjuring an array of traumatic American victimhood as well as its “good”
and “just” use of military force, the United States secured national
support for the reinvigoration of militarism under the aegis of thewar on terror, thereby rationalizing, sanctifying, and perpetuating its violence. As Joseph Darda argues in examining 9/11 visual
productions, the Bush administration manufactured “exceptionalist optics”; it succeeded in orchestrating our “unconscious optics”(per Walter Benjamin) when looking at 9/11 images such as Franklin’s so as to acknowledge and subscribe to American exceptionalism.1 National hegemonic discourses not only control how an eventis mediatized but also condition and determine the ways in which
we look at and react to events on the unconscious level.
Against the post-9/11 resurgence of patriotism, many critics
have made concerted efforts to exhume a buried national memorythat most jeopardizes American exceptionalist discourse: the Vietnam War. Since the military defeat in Southeast Asia, the memory of Vietnam has remained a highly contested issue in talking
about American politics and warfare. For conservatives, Vietnam
is a trauma that Americans are suffering from, and it is imperative
to forget or revise it in order for Americans to recover from it andmove forward (to a new war); for liberals, the war must be remembered as nothing other than American violence inflicted upon
people in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, as a war that eloquently
revealed that American exceptionalism has always served since thecountry’s establishment as a flagrant means of validating its use offorce. As William Spanos argues in American Exceptionalism in the Ageof Globalization, “the specter of Vietnam” is still haunting the post9/11 American homeland security state,2 despite President George
W. Bush’s endeavor to exorcise it through legislation of the Patriot
Act in 2001 and the Homeland Security Act in 2002, among others.
If the discourse and the affect surrounding the war on terror havebeen regulated via American exceptionalist visual legacies, how tolook at the post-9/11 American homeland security state throughan antiexceptionalist lens emerges as a challenge worth engaging.
But what does it mean to “remember” the Vietnam War as a visualcountermemory during and after the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan,or elsewhere? How would it be possible for what Marianne Hirsch
termed the “postmemory generation” to keep remembering the
war that formally ended in 1975, to continue witnessing “the specter of Vietnam” still haunting the post-9/11 American homeland?
What are the cultural and historical conditions of antiexceptionalist optics when it comes to representing Vietnam in the age of theRefoliating Vietnam201

war on terror? More broadly, how can we talk about critical ways ofvisualizing countermemories?
With these questions in mind, I examine Debra Granik’s
2018 film Leave No Trace,3 an adaptation of Peter Rock’s novel My
Abandonment (2009), which itself is a novelization of an actual
event widely reported in 2004. The film tells the story of a family
consisting of an Iraq War veteran named Will (Ben Foster)—themodel individual was a Vietnam War vet—and his daughter Tom(Thomasin McKenzie),4 who are living illegally in a state park ina northeastern American rain forest. By capturing a vet sufferingfrom post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) back home following
his military service in the Iraqi desert who is now obsessively drawn
to the rain forest that permeates the screen, Leave No Trace, I argue,
visually evokes the Vietnam War as a landscape and situates thewar on terror within that historical context. By capturing an Iraq
War vet against the background of the green landscape of Vietnam, a country that most Americans associate with “a war foughtin the jungle,” the film refoliates Vietnam on the post-9/11 American homeland security state, conjuring up the specter of Vietnam
to historically recontextualize Bush’s normalization of the state of
exception. Granik’s film also subsumes and subverts the complicity between American exceptionalism and American victimhoodby addressing the conflict between Will and Tom, a postmemory
daughter. Although the film changed the title of the story, its cinematography foregrounds Tom’s agency in the act of abandonment further than does the novel. Toward the end, Tom decides
to “abandon” her father, who disappears into the woods, but thedaughter continues to attend to the Iraq War vet via the landscapewherein he is believed to be surviving. It is through this indirection, as opposed to direct daily contact with the intensely traumatized subject, that the postmemory daughter manages to maintaina sustainable relationship with the past that she never experienced.
The transgenerational trauma, in this case the amalgamation of
the father’s individual experience in Iraq and the state’s violent
history in Vietnam, is remembered and inherited through and as
the landscape.
Vietnam as Transgenerational Trauma
As Bush and his policymakers consistently called for a “state of
emergency” and are remembered for doing so, it would be necessary to map out the relationship among state of emergency, state of
exception, and exceptionalism. First, Bush’s state of emergency can

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Kodai Abebe understood as a form of state of exception. Carl Schmitt, whose
political theory has empowered worldwide totalitarian regimes
since Nazi Germany in his own time, famously defined sovereignty
as “he who decides on the exception” and defined exception as“principally unlimited authority, which means the suspensionof the entire existing order.”5 The post-9/11 deployment of thestate of emergency, which expanded state power to mobilize themilitary, target terrorist facilities around the world, and selectively
surveil, detain, and judge suspected terrorists, falls within the category of the state of exception.6 It is a time of emergency, the Bushadministration’s logic goes, so the state must suspend the law andput exceptional policies into action. Giorgio Agamben, in opening
his State of Exception by juxtaposing Schmitt’s Political Theology andBush’s Patriot Act, also criticized Bush’s homeland security state asa typical instance of the state of exception. Agamben’s argument
is that the state of exception is no longer an exception and insteadhas become a “paradigm of government” and “has perhaps only
today reached its full development.”7 Bush’s constant reference tohimself as the “Commander in Chief of the Army” after 9/11, Agamben continues, should be understood as the “presidential claim tosovereign powers in emergency situations,” and “Bush is attempting to produce a situation in which the emergency becomes therule, and the very distinction between peace and war . . . becomes
impossible.”8 While the Cold War presidents tended to characterize their wars as small, limited, and experimental—that is, as lessthan a war—Bush took 9/11 as a chance to reinvigorate American
militarism by pushing the limit of “national” state of exception allover the world, thereby waging the war on terror, a full-scale, permanent, and global warfare.
Second, the state of exception and exceptionalism, as Donald
Pease argues, are originally incompatible with each other. While
American exceptionalism, a belief in American superiority in theworld, is assumed to be a “norm” of the United States, its policymakers, in regulating such obviously unjustifiable events as Japanese internment camps, Operation Wetback, and the Vietnam War,among others, have been forced to label those instances as exceptional deviations from that norm, from the linear narrative of thenation’s official exceptionalist history. “But if American exceptionalism produced beliefs to which the state has regularly taken exception,” Pease writes, “the state has nevertheless needed the fantasy[of exceptionalism] to solicit its citizenry’s assent to its monopoly
over actual and symbolic violence.”9 Thus, Pease diagnoses the resiliency of the belief in American exceptionalism despite the constant production of exceptions to it as maintained by the “structures

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of denial.”10 Yet, the coexistence of American exceptionalism as anorm and the incessant declarations of exception to it no longer
seem to constitute any serious contradiction to the Bush administration’s ideologues such as Karl Rove, John Ashcroft, and Paul
Wolfowitz. Most prominent would be Vice President Dick Cheney,
who advised Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, George H. W. Bush, andGeorge W. Bush and in 2015 published Exceptional: Why the World
Needs a Powerful America. For this architect of the Patriot Act, it is totally consistent to advocate American exceptionalism and to declarethat “the Chief Executive will on occasion feel duty bound to assertmonarchical notions of prerogative that will permit him to exceed
the law.”11 The state of exception has become the “paradigm ofgovernment” for this homeland security state indeed, and now thecontradiction itself has become a norm; American exceptionalism
has absorbed the state of exception as a core component of its own
arsenal. Wars in Iraq or Afghanistan no longer have to be forgottenor revised; post-9/11 American exceptionalism can declare the war
on terror with pride. The re­evocation of Vietnam after 9/11 thus
gains critical importance in reperceiving—or revisualizing—theegregious contradictions of American exceptionalism.
In the past two decades, the so-called New Americanists havemade the most prominent contributions to remembering Vietnam as countermemory. For American political thinking, how toremember—or forget—Vietnam has constituted a crucial corefor both the Right and the Left. For conservatives such as Ronald
Reagan, for example, Vietnam meant the American (rather than
Vietnamese) wound to be healed, and he diagnosed Americans’unwillingness thereafter to get involved in any military action as
the “Vietnam syndrome.” In the early 1990s, George H. W. Bush,celebrating the “success” of his Operation Desert Storm in “liberating” Kuwait in the Persian Gulf, declared to have “kicked” the syndrome,12 retrospectively consolidating Reagan’s revisionist accountof Vietnam as a “noble cause.” For them, Vietnam is an American
trauma from which the state must recover through waging andwinning more wars. It is as if every time it wages war, the UnitedStates has to summon up and exorcise its own traumatic memory,
as if, following faithfully Freud’s classic definition, in an attempt
to “work through” its trauma by compulsively repeating the past.13
In the twenty-first century, George W. Bush was destined to repeat
the process in Afghanistan and Iraq. “As the public watched thewar on television,” Pease writes, “the transgenerational trauma
inherited from Vietnam seemed to have been conjured up to be‘worked through’ in the hyper-reality of the Iraqi desert so that it
might be completely obliterated from the national psyche.”14 In204

Kodai Abeexamining transgenerational trauma from the perpetrator’s perspective, Gabriele Schwab argues that “the buried ghosts of the pastcome to haunt language from within, always threatening to destroy
its communicative and expressive function.”15 The same thing canhappen to our optics, especially when trauma is eagerly regulated
through visual images. If the transgenerational trauma of Vietnam
seemed to be worked through in “the hyper-reality of the Iraqi desert” as shown on TV, we might be able to intervene in the process
precisely by compulsively repeating the visual memory of this war
fought in the “jungle.”
As Amy Kaplan has repeatedly demonstrated, “the notions of
the domestic and the foreign mutually constitute one another in animperial context.”16 The “oxymoronic” nature of American imperialism is what the title of her 2002 acclaimed book designates: The
Anarchy of Empire. In a later article published as a reaction to thepromulgation of the 2002 Homeland Security Act, she applied thisobservation to George W. Bush “homeland” as a focalizing trope ofthe resurgence of the post-9/11 American exceptionalism as wellas, for her, a fulcrum to subvert it. “Thus,” Kaplan writes, “the ideaof homeland works by generating a profound sense of insecurity
not only because of the threat of terrorism, but because the homeland, too, proves a fundamentally uncanny place, haunted by priorand future losses, invasions, abandonment. The uncanny, after all,in Freud is a translation of unheimlich, the “unhomely.” The homeland is haunted by all the unfamiliar yet strangely familiar foreign
specters that threaten to turn it into its opposite.”17 Taken together,
the New Americanists’ critical strategy can be summarized as apractice to render the post-9/11 homeland an uncanny, unhomelike place by evoking “all the unfamiliar yet strangely familiar foreign specters,” that is, above all to make “the specter of Vietnam”
visible within the homeland security state rather than as an exceptional war fought “over there.” As much as the official narrative andmediatization can regulate our unconscious optics, cultural productions can also critically intervene in the process by conjuring
up the countermemory that the state authorities believed had been
worked through. When looking at the American homeland security state through antiexceptionalist optics, one will find it haunted
by the specters of Vietnam.
While evoking Vietnam would serve as a critique of American
exceptionalism, the memory of the Vietnam War is exposed tothe danger of oblivion for a more practical reason, one similar towhat World War II memory encountered in the 1990s. At that time,
the survivors of the war that ended in 1945 were getting old andpassing away, and those perceiving the crisis of memory began toRefoliating Vietnam

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archive the testimonies from the firsthand witnesses. Along withthis “memory boom,” a discipline called memory studies emerged,
and scholars, especially those engaged with trauma theory and
Holocaust studies, began to discuss what the second or later generations of a traumatic historical event can and should do in faceof this unfolding crisis. At this point Hirsch’s “postmemory,” theorized through her examination of Holocaust survivors’ photographand its influence on family members born after the event, emerged
as the most seminal tool in considering such problematics. “Postmemory is distinguished from memory by generational distanceand from history by deep personal connection,” she writes.18 It isa “powerful and very particular form of memory” in that “its connection to its object or source is mediated not through recollection
but through an imaginative investment and creation.”19 Postmemory is not just a relatively inauthentic “memory” in relation to thefirst generation; it is “very particular form of memory” that is different from memories of direct experiences precisely because ofits distance, alienation, or indirectness. In the post-9/11 American
context, its postmemory generation, such as children of Iraq War
vets, needs to confront the transgenerational memory of Iraq and
Vietnam at the same time. Amid the national endeavor to willfully
forget and revise those memories quickly, what kind of critical position can those who come after occupy in their engagement withmemory “through an imaginative investment and creation”? In
this way, the postmemory generation emerges as a unique actor ofremembering the memory of Vietnam in the American homeland,and, as I demonstrate, the landscape serves as a vehicle for thiscritical inheritance.
Refoliating Vietnam in the American Homeland
Leave No Trace is a film pervaded with greenery. It begins with thediegetic sound of a forest—water, insects, birds, and the rustle ofleaves—and then we are presented with a close-up of the mossy,
ferny branches followed by high-angle long shots capturing the twomain characters in turn: first the father Will and then his daughter
Tom, whose visibility is constantly blocked by the prominent vegetation. Throughout the story, we often lose sight of actors among
trees in extreme long shots. They are living in the woods, which
will turn out to be a public rain forest park in Portland, Oregon,
by means of survival skills that sustain their idyllic, self-sufficient,and ecological way of life. Indeed, for the film’s title Granik opted
for the phrase “leave no trace,” which indicates ecological outdoor

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Kodai Abeethics and practices aimed at preserving and coexisting with nature.
When watching Will waking up in the middle of the night from anightmare reverberating with the loud sound of a helicopter or
passing over a New York Times clipping about suicidal vets returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, the viewer is gradually informedthat Will is suffering from PTSD stemming from his service in Iraq.
After the duo is forcibly removed from the park due to a carelessmistake on Tom’s part and ordered to be relocated in a facility
under government supervision, Will soon decides to go back into
the woods against Tom’s wishes, this time in Washington State.
While it is common for a traumatized subject to struggle (and findit impossible) to reenter “normal” civilian life, Will’s unflinching
resolution to keep hidden in the woods invites interpretation. Withher aesthetic choice to dominate the screen with vivid green in a
way that novels might not capture, Granik augments the mystery ofWill’s psychological mechanism. Through its cinematography, thefilm underscores that this is a story about the relationship between
the verdant landscape and an Iraq War vet’s trauma.
In the 2004 news report, the actual father was a Vietnam War
vet. He abducted his daughter from her foster parents in Idaho
under false pretense and raised her secretly in the forest on his
own. In novelizing this incident, Rock strangely chose to set it in1999 so that the father, though not specified, could remain a Vietnam War vet, but the story was displaced from the historical background of the war on terror. Granik put it back into the post-9/11
context but, oddly, decided to characterize him as an Iraq War vet.
To understand this move, we need to turn to an interview organizedby Tiff Talks in 2018 in which Granik referred to her intention tobridge Vietnam and Iraq when shooting Leave No Trace. She began
by referring to her recent film Stray Dog (2014), a documentaryfeaturing a Vietnam War vet, Ron, that was “very influential in thebackstory of Will.” Through her contact with Vietnam War vets inthe age of the war on terror, she came to realize that “this war was
no different.”20 She avoided using the term “post-traumatic stressdisorder” because, she believed, this now popularized term coinedin the aftermath of the Vietnam War has rendered the war “invisible” by explaining away the “gnarly” nature of the war. Granik,
dubbing the wars fought in the Middle East as the “Sand War,”21
continued, stating that “of course the Sand War veterans and theliterature that’s been more recent aided and abetted that understanding,” that is, American wars as American PTSD. Her choice ofrecharacterizing a Vietnam War vet as an Iraq War vet signals her
cognizance of the transgenerational continuum between Vietnam
and Iraq, wars fought in the jungle and in the desert, respectively.

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Yet, this is not to say that the wars in Vietnam and Iraq are actually“no different”; in placing an Iraq War vet against the Vietnamese
background, this Iraq War film situates the war on terror within the
broader historical context of American wars throughout the long
Cold War, that is, not as an exception but instead as a structural contradiction embedded in the ideology of American exceptionalism.
When Granik describes her filmmaking engagement withthe wars in Vietnam and Iraq as an attempt to make Vietnam visible again in the post-9/11 American homeland, she echoes New
Americanist’s critical vocabulary. “The invisible/silent (non)beingof the Vietnamese insurgents vis-à-vis the American army in the
Vietnam ‘wilderness’ in the 1960s,” as Spanos writes, “haunts theAmerican cultural memory now, after the Al Qaeda attacks.”22 To
be able to see the invisible specter of Vietnam as Spanos argues,
drawing on Louis Althusser, we need to develop a “new gaze,”23 andthis is what I call antiexceptionalist optics. With frequent recourse
to long and extreme long shots, Granik’s film has the green landscape dominate the small figures of the actors; here, the rain forest
possesses a competence as what narratologists refer to as actant.24
The landscape, albeit anthropomorphic, has an agency in its own
right in this pictorial narrative. In criticizing American cultural,especially cinematic, representations of the Vietnam War, Darda
notes that “Americans waged war in Vietnam, it seems, with a brutal environment and themselves, not with Vietnamese,”25 thereby
erasing the existence of Asian victims. Indeed, American culturaland political imaginations have conceptualized Vietnam as a “jungle” with nobody in it (a variation of the exceptionalist myth of“Virgin Land”), and the idea of the enemy as the landscape, anactant, was at the core of President John F. Kennedy’s mind when
he fantasized about being able to defeat the country by defoliating it with the notorious herbicide Agent Orange in contraventionof the 1925 Geneva Protocol. It was this cultural imagination andmemory of Vietnam as a war fought in the jungle that the UnitedStates tried to “work through” in the “hyper-reality” of the Iraqi
desert in vain, and it is this failure that the film highlights as the historical reference point of the war on terror, as something that will
never be “surmounted.” In capturing an Iraq War vet compulsively
returning to the rain forest, Leave No Trace refoliates Vietnam in the
post-9/11 American homeland security state.
It is no wonder, then, that the state authorities evict Will fromthe park. Soon after Tom is spotted by a jogger, police officers andsocial workers come to search the woods, and the father-­daughter
unit, despite their leave-no-trace practices and hide-and-seek drillings, is easily detected by a tracker dog, loudly barking away, that

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Kodai Abe

violently disarranges their chessboard, a familial communication
tool. As the frightened and angered Tom protests against the unnecessary deployment of an aggressive German shepherd, thesearch party is depicted as an intimidating power associated with
American military force. The K-9 officer replicates search-anddestroy strategy, a method employed against the guerrilla forces
hiding in the jungle during the Vietnam War that is now directedagainst a traumatized vet and his teenage daughter living in an
American rain forest. When taken to an institution, Tom is told bya social worker that “your dad needs to provide you a shelter anda place to live.” In Tom’s opinion “he did,” and they “just don’t
understand that it was my home.” The staff adds, “It’s not a crime
to be unhoused. Many people are. But it’s illegal to live on publicland.” The protocol of the homeland security state monopolizes
the authority over the definition of “home” and polices, criminalizes, and pathologizes every alleged unhomelike element. Whenthe social worker hands over some paperwork to be filled out for
Tom’s enrollment in a school, not so much asking as ordering—“It’s important for you to follow through so you guys can remain
independent. Do you understand?”—she is talking through the vocabulary of American neocolonialism, a still rampant legacy ofCold War politics, that intervenes into other people’s life and culture to recast them as conforming to an American way of life, theonly form of independence that one is allowed to enjoy. Thus, thefilm captures the transnational and transgenerational continuity ofAmerican violence against Vietnamese abroad and Iraq War vetsand their families at home.
The state surveillance authority that regulates the family’s
housing, food, and clothing is a salient example of what is now
called biopower. In his lecture at the Collège de France, Michel
Foucault defined this as the power “to rationalize the problems
posed to governmental practice by phenomena characteristic ofa set of living beings forming a population: health, hygiene, birthrate, life expectance, race.”26 At the government facility, Will andTom are prohibited from seeing each other—officials wrongly suspect that Will might have been sexually abusing Tom—and madeto undergo a variety of tests, written and oral, that are presented
alternatively through cutbacks (figures 1 and 2). When Tom asks
how they read her answers and why they don’t just ask her directly,
the social worker explains that the exam is important because Tom,
perhaps traumatized by her father, “might not be able to say it.”
Will, in front of a computer, is directed to answer 435 true and false
questions, such as “I enjoy reading articles on crime,” “I have nightmares or troubling dreams,” and “I think about things that are tooRefoliating Vietnam

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Figure 1. Tom getting tested at the government facility. Leave No Trace(Debra Granik, 2018).

Figure 2. Will getting tested at the government facility. Leave No Trace(Debra Granik, 2018).

bad to think about,” which soon begin to torment him. Thoughwell intentioned on the surface and perhaps from the heart, thosein charge of taking care of the family are effective and subservient instruments of the homeland security state. As Michael Hardt
and Antonio Negri opined, Foucault’s work described a “historical,
epochal passage in social forms from disciplinary society to the societyof control.”27 In the latter form of biopolitical society wherein we still
abide, “mechanisms of command become ever more ‘democratic,’
ever more immanent to the social field, distributed throughout thebrains and bodies of the citizens.”28 Biopower operates through210

Kodai Abesuch instruments as welfare systems and monitored activities,
thereby creating “a state of autonomous alienation from the senseof life.” With its computing and controlling devices that looks
unharmful and “democratic,” biopower attempts to domesticate
all unhomelike “brains and bodies.”
Equally important, biopower dovetails with the logic of capitalism by interpreting and integrating deviant elements such as
pathology into the profit-and-loss calculation system. As Foucault
states,However pathological the subject may be . . . , he is nevertheless “responsive” to some extent to possible gains and losses, which means that penal
action must act on the interplay of gains and losses or, in other words, on
the environment; we must act on the market milieu in which the individual makes his supply of crime and encounters a positive or negative
demand. This raises the problem . . . of the new techniques of environmental technology or environmental psychology which I think are linked
to neo-liberalism in the United States.29

In the neoliberal world, everything is included and brought undercontrol rather than excluded and executed so that it contributes
to the gains of market. Especially after Francis Fukuyama declared
the “end of history” in 1989, proposing that American liberal
democracy is the final form of world governance, neoliberalists
have argued that the logic of capitalism and free markets is the
only possible human “environment.”30 US-led global capitalism
has become a new “nature,” so to speak, and it is only under theneoliberalist regulations that one is allowed to live. After Will andTom are displaced from the park and relocated to an “independent” house under constant surveillance, Will is asked to work as
a farmer. This is a farm that deals in fir Christmas trees for which
Oregon is known, where the cacophony of trees being cut withchainsaws, bound by a huge machine, and dropped from a helicopter (which seems to assail the camera) is rendered disturbingly
and discordantly loud in juxtaposition with the overall quietnessof the film. Whereas the rain forest offers a sense of security for
Will, the function of artificial greenness at the farm has a diametrically opposite effect: it torments him (figure 3). When Will asks
the farm owner Walters if there would be any work in the stable (aquiet place where he has to see nobody), Walters replies, “Thoseare expensive animals and take some training. Right now I needhelp with the trees. That’s where I make my money.” Here, greenness is completely commodified, reified, and deprived of its criticalRefoliating Vietnam

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Figure 3. The loud noise of cutting trees torments Will at the farm inOregon. Leave No Trace (2018).

potentiality to unnaturalize the neoliberal “nature”; it represents
the environment called global capitalism.
life in the rain forest looks natural and self-sufficient, they infact cannot help depending on consumer society out of the woodsfor daily necessities. After all, the “natural” rain forest is a publicpark owned and operated by the neoliberal state. Before buying
food at a grocery store, Will takes Tom to a Veterans Administration (VA) hospital, where the camera does not fail to capture adisabled old vet in a wheelchair across whose back we can read theterm “VIETNAM.” Will sells the prescribed medicines he receives
to other vets who seem to be living on the fringe of the same parkon their own. Reading aloud the warnings deridingly (“If you area veteran who takes benzos for PTSD, here is what you need toknow”), the vet asks Will “when was the last time that stopped anightmare?” They both know that these painkillers and tranquilizes are in fact “pretty much useless.” “I haven’t taken them in two
years, seven months and twenty-eight days,” the vet adds, handing
Will some money. Here PTSD, ironically quoted from an official
document, is no more than a simplified narrative that will neverseriously attend to how veterans are suffering, as Granik criticizedin the interview. Moreover, the VA network is also integrated into
the network of state apparatus: “At first,” the vet observes, “they’rehanding ’em out like candy, then they pull the leash on us.” Indeed,
Foucault characterized medical science, the discursive power consisting of “making live and letting die,” as the central instrumentin establishing biopower “with institutions to coordinate medical

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Kodai Abecare, centralize information, and normalize knowledge.”31 ThoughWill’s illegal activity seems to assume a critical aspect against the
medico-political hegemonic power, he cannot avoid participating
in and contributing to the logic of global capitalism sustained by
biopower/biopolitics. In this neoliberal environment where there
is no way out, Will has no option other than capitalizing on his
pathological mind and body; here, one can always find a way tomake it marketable.
Yet, an uncritical emphasis on Will’s status as a victim would
run the risk of rendering him as a vehicle to validate American
exceptionalism. In the wake of 9/11, American cultural studies
scholars such as Ann Kaplan, Marita Sturken, Jeffrey Alexander,and many others have critiqued the complicity of the resurgence ofAmerican militarism and the cultural politics of trauma discoursethat foregrounds the victimhood and innocence of Americans in
an ahistorical manner. A fragrant example of American victim culture and the tradition of deploying veterans in its making would
be the revisionist account of the Vietnam War during the 1980s
under the Reagan administration, with the building of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the “heal the wound” narrative. “Thememorial culture of the United States,” Sturken writes, “has been
largely experienced as a therapeutic culture, in which particular
citizens, primarily veterans and their families, have been seen as
coming to terms with the past and making peace with difficult
memories.”32 After 9/11, the symbolized site designated groundzero also “has produced particular narratives of redemption thatparticipate in the production on innocence,” being “deployed as
the justification for a series of wars and destructive policies on the
U.S. government.”33 Though Will is at odds with the authorities of
the homeland security state, he is an American ex-combatant who
served in Iraq; after all, he is an agent of American violence. Yet,
Granik’s film is mindful of this risk in portraying a veteran’s victimhood in the post-9/11 context, which is expressed through the conflict between Will and Tom, the father’s unwitting victimization of
his daughter, and the daughter’s decision to “abandon” her father.
The film narratively and cinematographically encourages theviewer to relativize Will’s drama from Tom’s perspective. Throughcritically relativizing Will’s victimhood from a post­memory generation’s viewpoint, Leave No Trace visually preserves rather than curestransgenerational trauma as a nonconforming element of theAmerican homeland.

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Antiexceptionalist Optics
In their familial relationship without a mother, thirteen-year-old
Tom is obliged to take on the mother-wife role. In the scene inwhich Will wakes up from a nightmare punctuated by the soundof a helicopter, Tom, dealing with this recurrent nighttime situation, tries to soothe him by asking what his favorite color is. Will
replies by echoing the same question, to which Tom answers “yellow” and extends the conversation by further asking what color her
mother liked best. It too was yellow, according to Will, to which
Tom mutters, “Maybe she told me that. I wish I could remember
her” (later, it is hinted that Will had to get divorced because he“got hooked on pain medication”). This exchange early in the film
encapsulates the multiplicity of Tom’s roles and predicaments. As
the only companion of a troubled vet, she needs to work as a caretaker who looks after him around the clock; when attending to afrightened Will, Tom looks like a mother pacifying a distraught
child. Tom and her mother sharing a favorite color implies thatthe daughter serves for Will as a kind of stand-in for his wife. Whileher high scores on intelligence tests testifies to the effectiveness ofWill’s homeschooling education, it also signals that as a motherless daughter living with a traumatized father, Tom had to develop
maturity and independence quickly for her age. Although she does
her best to support him, the stress she suffers from is graduallyforegrounded as the narrative evolves, eventually culminating in
her “abandonment” of Will. Not only does the film relativize Will’s
victimhood through this process, but it also sublimates the themeof abandonment as a further critique of American exceptionalism.
Tom’s final decision to “abandon” her father visually suggests a
way of inheriting the transgenerational trauma through and as thelandscape into which Will disappears.
The roles that Tom performs are not restricted to familial
ones. Due to Will’s traumatic reenactments stemming from his war
experience, she is indirectly involved in the Iraq War as a fellow“soldier.” When Will catches the sound of chainsaws in the rain
forest from afar, he suddenly becomes aroused and hyperalert,
while Tom, knowing what will happen next, tries to assure him of
their safety. “Drill,” Will commands, interrupting dinner and initiating their routine hide-and-seek exercise in which Tom is supposed to hide in the woods within ten seconds but is detected too
easily: “You’re burned. Your tracks are all over the place.” “Dad, I
can do this,” Tom says. “Well, then, do it well,” Will replies. “Hey.
Do it well. One more time.” In explicating the mechanism of re­enactment that is common to traumatized subjects, trauma theorist

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Judith Herman notes that they “relive the moment of trauma not
only in their thoughts and dreams but also in their actions,” and“some reenactments are consciously chosen.”34 Herman also notesthat “sometimes people reenact the traumatic moment with a fantasy of changing the outcome of the dangerous encounter. In theirattempts to undo the traumatic moment, survivors may even put
themselves at risk of further harm.” In this pseudo-military drill,
Will is obsessed with saving his comrade’s life by training him/her
to hide well. Given the fact that Granik decided to use the actress’s
real nickname, Tom, which is usually a boy’s name, instead of Caroline in the original novel, we can assume the director’s implication to be that Will is reenacting a past experience in which he
was unable to save “Tom” in Iraq. Will is obsessed with “a fantasyof changing the outcome,” and its “risk of further harm” is in thiscase inflicted on his daughter. Tom represents what Schwab calls“replacement children” who “will commonly be unable to develop
a sense of coming into his or her own place” under the burden of“parental fantasy” to replace the dead one with the living one.35
Trapped in the traumatized father’s fantasy, Tom is prevented frombeing fully herself.
In short, the traumatic nature of Will’s battlefield experience
impels him to prioritize himself at the sacrifice of Tom. He is incapacitated as a father to care adequately for his child, and as thefilm repeatedly emphasizes, he is unable to avoid victimizing her
as long as they live together. During the drill Tom repeatedly tells
Will that she is hungry, but he pays no attention to her and orders
one more round. While waiting for Will to be prescribed drugs at
the VA hospital, Tom, after greeting a Vietnam War vet in a wheelchair, talks with another old vet (who is old enough to have servedin Vietnam too). He is a staff member working at the hospital’scounter to distribute VA-issued devices, such as a “stress coin” tocall for help when one has “a friend or family member in trouble
that’s a vet” and a gun lock that “keeps them from accidentallyshooting someone and . . . it gives them time to think before they
commit something wrong, even worse.” Thus, Tom is cognizant of
the danger of Will’s violence toward either himself or her. Later
when Will decides to run away from the farm against Tom’s wishes,
her palm is cut when they are catching an illegal ride on a train—
she is constantly involved in committing crimes—and Will, ignoring her complaints, simply remarks, “Not too deep, clean it out.”
Subsequently, in the mountains of Washington State she becomes
too tired and cold to walk on, but Will, a trained soldier, insists that“we’ve gotta move quickly.” At an abandoned cabin that they findand break into, Tom, while Will is away, happens to take a look into

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her father’s Ziplock bag containing documents in which she finds
the clipping from the New York Times titled “A Unit Stalked by Suicide, Trying to Save Itself,”36 a headline that stuns Tom and exacerbates her anxiety about her father’s potential impulsive suicide,
thereby leaving her alone (that night he fails to come back due
to an accident that nearly kills him). Tom sincerely wants to takecare of Will and even seems to be willing if necessary to take on histransgenerational trauma, but this is simply beyond her capacity.
How, then, can she “abandon” her father in a way that does not
involve the forgetting of violent history? What, in other words, is an
ethical abandonment for the postmemory generation? This is thequestion that Leave No Trace ultimately has to address through Tom.
The conflict between Will and Tom that results in their separation best manifests as Tom’s desire to belong to a community versus
Will’s compulsion to return to the forest and hide away. After being
taken away from the farm around which she has just begun building some new social connections, Tom complains to Will, “I liked
it there. Did you even try?” The same thing happens while they areallowed to use a vacant RV in a forested RV park until Will’s broken
ankle fully heals. Before long, Tom finds Will packing his belongings to leave, and they have the following exchange:
Tom: What are you doing? Dad, your—your leg isn’t even healed all theway. And it won’t. It won’t heal alright. I don’t want to leave. Last time
you almost died. And you would have if I hadn’t found you.
Will: That will never happen again.
Tom: These people, they’re not that different from us.
Will: Yes, they’ve been very good to us, but we have to . . .
Tom: You! You need. Not me. The same thing that’s wrong with you isn’t
wrong with me.

Though she then gives way to Will’s determination to leave, thedisintegration of “we” here already signals the decision she has
made for herself; in the woods she stops following him, resoluteto stay behind, and thereby “abandons” him. In the context of the
post-9/11 resurgence of American exceptionalism and its culturalrepresentations, Tom’s choice of staying with a nonfamilial community and “abandoning” her traumatized father is of particularsignificance. Many American post-9/11 films and novels have garnered popularity by capitalizing on the sentimental trajectory fromtrauma to recovery achieved by means of family reunion.37 In criticizing this vogue in storytelling, Richard Gray argues that “most of
the fiction . . . betrays a response to crisis that is eerily analogous
to the reaction of many politicians and the mainstream American

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Kodai Abemedia after 9/11: a desperate retreat into the old sureties.”38 Even
works that are ostensibly self-critical regarding their potential complicity with patriotism, he continues, are “not entirely resistant tothe seductive pieties of home, hearth and family and, related tothem, the equally seductive myth of American exceptionalism.”39
In post-9/11 American fictions, American exceptionalism, trauma
culture, and the theme of family converge. If “nonverbal and precognitive acts of transfer occur most clearly within a familial space,”
as Hirsch notes,40 and if “the danger of emphasizing memory andmourning lies in using trauma as the foundation of identity,” as
Schwab warns,41 then the transgenerational transmission and healing of traumatic memory within the family can be deployed as a
typically conservative plot. These ideological maneuvers are subsumed and subverted in Leave No Trace in its closing sequences.
Tom decides to stay with the RV community, Granik’s original idea, conceived in the wake of her acquaintance with Vietnam
vets while shooting Stray Dog. At one point, Tom watches and helps
Dale (Dale Dickey)—a local woman who initially accommodates
them and, perceiving their situation, sends for a veteran medic forthe injured Will—unload and transfer food supplies from a truck
into a seemingly waterproof pouch. Dale explains, “I leave thisout for someone who lives up in the woods. Haven’t seen themin years, but I know he gets the foods ’cause when I come back,the bag is always empty.” In the woods, Dale hangs the bag ontoa branch, patting the tree’s trunk as if communicating with it or,
rather, with the whole environment within which those unknown
men—perhaps also vets, judging from the community’s display of
unqualified sympathy toward Will—are believed to be still surviving. This indirect way of caring for somebody invisible profoundly
impresses Tom and shows her a way to separate from Will while notentirely abandoning him. In the final sequence that follows the“abandonment,” Will, now alone, deviates from a gravel road andappears to “melt” into the woods, at which point the camera tilts
up and he becomes completely indiscernible (figure 4), which isfollowed by Tom replicating Dale’s practice (figure 5). In analyzing the contemporary mediatization and mediation of catastrophic
images after 9/11, Ann Kaplan argues that those indirect formsof witnessing can result in either secondary trauma or what she
terms “empty empathy,” a fleeting, ahistorical kind of emotional
response.42 The ending of Granik’s film shows a way to eschew thisdilemma: for the postmemory generation, it is suggested, the mediation of trauma via landscape works as a means to sustain one’s
connection to a transgenerational trauma. Neither a direct daily
contact with (which victimizes Tom) nor a complete abandonmentRefoliating Vietnam

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Figure 4. Will “melts” into the woods. Leave No Trace (2018).

Figure 5. Tom “feeds” the landscape wherein her father is believed to be
surviving. Leave No Trace (2018).

of (which forgets Will) a traumatized subject, Tom demonstrates
an indirect, sustainable kind of relationship with her father’s memory via the environment.
Though their ecological After Will has merged into the woods,
he becomes a constituent of the green landscape that has defined
the dominant atmosphere of the entire film. Will as an individual
character is now decomposed, and the trace of his existence—along with those of other “invisible” vets—is spread over thescreen. He becomes a landscape; with Gilles Deleuze and Félix
Guttari, this conversion might be termed a becoming-landscape.43
The characteristic and memorable greenness of this film here

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becomes historically overdetermined: for Tom, the forest represents an interface connected to the trauma of her Iraq vet father,while for the viewer, Tom’s practice is presented against the background of the Vietnam War as landscape. Through separation anddisappearance, we see Will leaving traces of the Iraq War on andas an affectively and historically charged—haunted—landscape,environment, or medium. Neither the rain forest (Vietnam) nor
the vet (Iraq) is “worked through” but survive as an entity to beattended to; the final sequence urges us to recognize that the older
war, characterized as “exceptional” to American history, and therecent one, waged under the declaration of “state of exception,”prove far from exceptional when taken together. This film brings
Iraq and Vietnam to intersect and renders visible the contradictions of American exceptionalism. The seemingly sentimental narrative of a wounded family and its separation in fact represents a
visual way of registering the Iraq War along the genealogy of theVietnam War. Following separation, the camera captures Will disappearing into and then Tom “feeding” the landscape, scenes thatare bridged by a slow tilt-up shot of a spiderweb—a repetition ofa sequence at the outset of the film, though we see three wholewebs in the first (figure 6) and just one in the last in a close-up with
its edges out of the frame (figure 7). Whereas at the beginning it
might signify the “ideal” nuclear family with a mother in it andTom’s status as being caught in the web, the final image crystalizes
the temporary abode for Will, Tom’s independence, and the networked community that connects her and the now invisible father
out of the screen. Despite its title, Leave No Trace is a film that is allabout leaving historical traces.
In interviews, Granik refers to the thirteen-year-old girl as “anoutsider”44 to the combatant experience and intended to convey
that the father “wants to pass his legacies to his daughter.”45 If thefilm presents the way to pass on the legacy of the Iraq War as inseparable from the Vietnam War to “outsiders” through landscape, itwould also implicate its spectators, most of whom are more alienated than Tom from the direct memory of the wars, whether Vietnam or Iraq. How can the postmemory generation, as outsiders orjust as casual spectators of a film, respond to the insider’s appeal
in an ethical manner? What is it about outsider’s responsibility or
the ethical condition of outsider’s ability to respond that might betermed as “response-ability”? Granik, another outsider, expresses
her filmmaker ethics through her cinematography. While theoriginal novel employs the girl’s first-person narration, Granik
carefully refrains from using point-of-view shots, even close-ups offaces, eschewing emotional overidentification with “insiders” inRefoliating Vietnam

219

Figures 6. There are three whole spiderwebs at the beginning of the film.
Leave No Trace (2018).

Figures 7. At the end of the film, there is just one spiderweb. Leave No Trace(2018).

relation to herself and signaling her aesthetic and ethical choice tomaintain distance between disparate subject positions. In theorizing indirect witnesses’ ethicality, Thomas Trezise, in his aptly titled
Witnessing Witnessing, argues that “however it may be motivated,the overidentification with survivors or the appropriation of theirexperience as our own can prove just as silencing.”46 Granik’s film
not only assigns this outsider’s response-ability upon herself but
also demands it from its spectators. For viewers, this distance prevents us from overempathizing with victims and “war heroes,” acritical distance that betrays our expectation to view those images

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Kodai Abethrough exceptionalist optics. In situating the “exceptional” war on
terror within the context of another “exceptional” war fought inSoutheast Asia, Debra Granik’s Leave No Trace calls on us to develop
an antiexceptionalist optics through which to look at not only thefilm itself but also actual, ongoing, and “exceptional” American
violence committed off the screen.
Notes
1. Joseph Darda, “The Exceptionalist Optics of 9/11 Photography,” Journal of
American Studies 50, no. 1 (2017): 185–204.
2. William V. Spanos, American Exceptionalism in the Age of Globalization: The Specter of Vietnam (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008), 51.
3. Leave No Trace, dir. Debra Granik (Harrison Productions, Reisman Productions, and Still Rolling Productions, 2018).
4. See Peter Rock, My Abandonment (Boston: Mariner Books, 2010).
5. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans.
George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 5, 12.
6. For a more detailed theoretical distinction between exception and emergency, see George Schwab, The Challenge of the Exception: An Introduction to the Political
Ideas of Carl Schmitt between 1921 and 1936, 2nd ed. (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1989).
7. Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: Universityof Chicago Press, 2005), 13, 22.
8. Agamben, State of Exception, 22.
9. Donald E. Pease, “Exceptionalism,” in Keywords for American Cultural Studies (New York: New York University Press, 2007/2020), keywords.nyupress.org/
american​-cultural-studies/essay/exceptionalism/.
10. Pease, “Exceptionalism.”
11. Quoted in Peter Dale Scott, “Is the State of Emergency Superseding the
US Constitution? Continuity of Government Planning, War and American Society,”
Japan Focus: The Asia-Pacific Journal 8, issue 48, no. 1 (2010), apjjf.org/-Peter-Dale​-Scott/​3448/article.html.
12. George Bush, “Remarks to the American Legislative Exchange Council,”
American Presidency Project, March 1, 1991, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/​?pid​=19351.
13. See Sigmund Freud, “Remembering, Repeating and Working Through,” in
The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 12, trans.
James Strachey, 145–57 (London: Hogarth, 1958).
14. Donald E. Pease, The New American Exceptionalism (Minneapolis: Universityof Minnesota Press, 2009), 55.
15. Gabriele Schwab, Haunting Legacies: Violent Histories and Transgenerational
Trauma (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 49.

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16. Amy Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2002), 4.
17. Amy Kaplan, “Homeland Insecurities: Some Reflections on Language andSpace,” Radical History Review 85 (Winter 2003): 89.
18. Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography Narrative and Postmemory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 22.
19. Hirsch, Family Frames, 22.
20. “Debra Granik on Leave No Trace | TIFF 2018,” YouTube, July 1, 2021, www.
youtube.com/watch?v=qXICB9Vmfrk.
21. The “Sand War” is a misleading byname, since this designation is also used
for the conflict between Algeria and Morocco in 1963.
22. Spanos, American Exceptionalism, 56.
23. Spanos, 52.
24. See Algirdas Julien Greimas, “Actants, Actors, and Figures,” in On Meaning:
Selected Writing in Semiotic Theory, trans. Paul J. Perron and Frank H. Collins, 106–20(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).
25. Joseph Darda, Empire of Defense: Race and the Cultural Politics of Permanent War(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 81.
26. Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France,
1978–79, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 317.
27. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 22–23.
28. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 23.
29. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 259.
30. For critiques of the “end of history” discourse, see Ernesto Laclau andChantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics(London: Verso, 2014); Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism; or, the Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991); and Slavoj Žižek, “Class Struggle or Postmodernism? Yes Please!,” in Judith Butler, Ernest Laclau and Slavoj Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, 90–135 (London: Verso, 2000).
31. Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France
1975–1976, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), 244–47.
32. Marita Sturken, Tourists of History: Memory, Kitsch, and Consumerism from
Oklahoma City to Ground Zero (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 14.
33. Sturken, Tourists of History, 169.
34. Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (New York: Basic Books, 2015), 39.
35. Schwab, Haunting Legacies, 122.
36. Dave Philipps, “In Unit Stalked by Suicide, Veterans Try to Save One Another,”
New York Times, September 19, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/20/us/
marine-battalion-veterans-scarred-by-suicides-turn-to-one-another-for-help.

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37. Whether conservative, liberal, or radical, many American filmmakers andnovelists are not only depicting 9/11 and Iraq but also eagerly revisiting American
wars fought throughout Asia during the Cold War era, invariably thematizing familial reunion (or the impossibility or difficulty thereof). To pick just a few acclaimed
examples, see Johnathan Safran Foer’s 9/11 novel Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close(2005, cinematized in 2011 by the director Stephen Daldry); Toni Morrison’s Korean
War novel Home (2012); Clint Eastwood’s Iraq War film American Sniper (2014); Phil
Klay’s Iraq War short story collection Redeployment (2014); Paul Schrader’s film First
Reformed (2017); and Spike Lee’s Vietnam War film Da 5 Bloods (2020).
38. Richard Gray, After the Fall: American Literature since 9/11 (Chichester, West
Sussex, UK:: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 16.
39. Gray, After the Fall, 17.
40. Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture
after the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 34.
41. Schwab, Haunting Legacies, 19.
42. E. Ann Kaplan, “Global Trauma and Public Feelings: Viewing Images ofCatastrophe,” Consumption, Markets and Culture 11, no. 1 (2008): 3–24.
43. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism andSchizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1987), 232–309.
44. “Debra Granik Interview on Leave No Trace at Sundance London 2018,”
YouTube, July 1, 2021, https://www.youtube.comwatch?v=eFCZpYnMPWw.
45. “Debra Granik Talks about Her Film Leave No Trace,” YouTube, July 1, 2021,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0AnZMqcDuU.
46. Thomas Trezise, Witnessing Witnessing: On the Reception of Holocaust Survivor
Testimony (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 224.