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

Abstract

Refoliating Vietnam in the Post-9/11 American Homeland: Debra Granik’s Leave No Trace Kodai Abe (bio) 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 two mushroom 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 rubble of 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 the reinforcing of American exceptionalism—the mythic idea that the United States is young, innocent, benign, and unique—through [End Page 199] strategic manipulation of the cultural contexts in which those images 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 the war 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 event is 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 memory that 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 and move 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 the country’s establishment as a flagrant means of validating its use of force. As William Spanos argues in American Exceptionalism in the Age of Globalization, “the specter of Vietnam” is still haunting the post-9/11 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 have been regulated via American exceptionalist visual legacies, how to look at the post-9/11 American homeland security state through an antiexceptionalist lens emerges as a challenge worth engaging. But what does it mean to “remember” the Vietnam War as a visual countermemory 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 [End Page 200] war on terror? More broadly, how can we talk about critical ways of visualizing countermemories? With these questions in mind, I examine Debra...