What does it mean to retreat, to withdraw, to leave the village for the forest? Is it a rejection of society, a refusal to orientate oneself along pre-established lines? Or is it an inability to follow these lines, when societal circumstances render a direction or position no longer available? Whether a rejection or a response to marginalisation, the act of retreat, for French feminist philosopher Catherine Clément, is a form of ‘syncope’: a momentary break or suspension from social life that, at the same time, constitutes and revives it.¹ Retreat, in other words, is written into the very structure of social life, functioning as a kind of re-routing. Debra Granik’s most recent film, Leave No Trace (2018), opens on such a moment of suspension: a father and daughter, living in the wilds of an Oregon forest. The air is thick – high-pitched bird calls and the buzzing of flies mingle with the rustle of wind and the rhythmic drum of a woodpecker. These densely-textured ambient sounds accompany close-ups of ferns and other vegetal life, until a disorienting tracking shot focuses our attention towards the movement of a young girl through the wet, verdant brush. The unresolved chords of Dickon Hinchliffe’s score provoke a sense of unease.² The camera shifts to track a bearded man, before locating the two figures together, side-by-side, as they faintly hum “You Are My Sunshine”. At first, the scene is largely indistinguishable from the quotidian routines of a family camping trip – albeit one of recreational survivalism. We watch the two feather wood and build a campfire, hard-boil eggs and compost their shells. Yet, as we begin to inhabit this forested landscape alongside the characters, the difference soon becomes stark. When unable to light rain-soaked kindling, the father’s frustration seems to build too quickly, to simmer over. The ensuing disagreement over the use of propane alerts us to a scarcity of resources, and registers the gradual disentanglement between father and daughter. “Don’t waste it. We’re low,” he warns. “I’m hungry,” she counters.
In its attention towards life on the margins of American society, Leave No Trace returns to themes explored in Granik’s previous films: from rural poverty in the Academy Award-nominated Winter’s Bone (2010), to the treatment of U.S. veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in the documentary film Stray Dog (2014). Based on the 2009 novel My Abandonment by Peter Rock, and the news story on which it draws, Leave No Trace centres on the relationship between a father and his 13-year old daughter who were found living off-grid in Forest Park: an 8 km-wide municipal park and conservation area in Portland, Oregon. A nocturnal scene in a shared camping tent immediately grounds us in the particularities of their living situation: the father experiences recurring nightmares, sonically rendered through the deafening thrum of a helicopter and the score’s siren-like wail; and as his daughter attempts to comfort him, a passing reference to her late mother underscores their interreliance. After an accidental sighting by a jogger punctures this hermetic world, the film traces the divergent trajectories of Will (Ben Foster) and his daughter Tom (Thomasin McKenzie) towards reintegration into social life: first, after social workers rehouse them on a nearby Christmas tree farm; and later, as they escape to the unfamiliar landscape of Washington State.
The return from forest to ‘village’ is filtered through the psychological interiority and perceptual world of the male protagonist, Will. When father and daughter venture out from the woods on their routine grocery shop (supported by Will selling his PTSD prescription medication to a camp of other veterans), Portland is captured in angular shot and blue-grey tones, all vertical lines and reflective surfaces. The mechanised noises of traffic and construction work are magnified beyond naturalistic effect; and the film isolates the computerised voice over the aerial tram’s speaker-system which directs passengers to disembark – a quotidian form of the societal instruction Will and Tom typically manage to evade. While this shift in audio-visual style heightens the contrast between the quiet of the forest and the perceived menace of the city, in reality the borderline between the two is less clear-cut: rangers and joggers traverse Forest Park, and as Granik describes in an interview with Filmmaker, “when you’re in its inner sanctum you can’t hear anything from outside it. But every metre closer to the city you start to hear the thunder of distant trucks and then cranes”. Will and Tom’s retreat, in other words, is a matter of degree. Later, in the semi-rural setting of the Christmas tree farm, the film’s amplification of sound effects similarly express Will’s psychological interiority: abrupt cuts to the drill of a tree-netting conveyor belt, and later to a thrumming helicopter as it transports trees echo the nightmares (or auditory flashbacks) that interrupt his sleep.
As this context of PTSD and veteran experience suggests, Leave No Trace is not a film that romanticises Will and Tom’s retreat. In the last decade or so, concomitant with technological development and its acceleration of everyday life, what it means to live ‘off-grid’ has invited considerable interest, documented by photographers such as Alec Soth and his Broken Manual (2006-10) series;³ and re-imagined through ‘cabin porn’, and the #Vanlife and tiny house movements (the film itself references the latter). With its emphasis on self-sufficiency, subsistence living, and communion with the natural world, this contemporary interest in the off-grid shares something of the romanticism of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, a work Kathryn Schulz brilliantly critiques in her 2015 essay for The New Yorker. Walden, Schulz suggests, is “less a cornerstone work of environmental literature than the original cabin porn: a fantasy about rustic life divorced from the reality of living in the woods, and, especially, a fantasy about escaping the entanglements and responsibilities of living among other people.” From this ‘original cabin porn’ to its contemporary version, the question of who gets to retreat from social life remains pressing. Who can afford to ‘escape the 9-5’ or ‘escape corporate America’, as it is so often framed? For whom is this subsistence living a choice, and for whom is it a necessity?
The ethical and political dimensions of this act of retreat, of course, have taken on new contours since Thoreau left for the woods in 1845. In the face of climate change and ecological crisis caused by human impact on the environment, finding a more sustainable way of living is of vital concern. With the ‘nature’ Thoreau so revered increasingly under threat, is it still possible to consider retreat – let alone romanticise it – without acknowledging our complicity in its destruction? Leave No Trace reflects Clément’s notion of retreat as a re-routing of social life, but given our current environmental context, the film’s depiction of the forest – and later use of animals – as backdrop for human concerns of community is troubling. Today, addressing the ethics of retreat goes beyond the question of responsibility (or lack thereof) for other humans, encompassing, and often prioritising, responsibility towards non-human animals and environment.
In its Forest Park setting, Leave No Trace points to this backdrop of ecological crisis: the forest Will and Tom initially inhabit is not some remote natural environment, but instead a ‘protected natural area’ encroached by city life. Through details like these the film gestures towards a mode of contemporary societal critique distinct from the romanticist (and often anti-humanist) attitudes of the ‘cabin porn’ vision of retreat. Tacky landscape prints clutter the walls of the social services centre, and an almost too on-the-nose juxtaposition between natural forest and Christmas tree farm underscores the human domination and domestication of the natural environment. On the level of social institutions, standardised tests and psychological interviews are presented as ill-equipped for understanding Will and Tom’s situation, and an abrupt cut mid-dance gently undermines the church performance of For His Glory Dance Troupe. These moments of societal critique, however, are marshalled more when conveying Will’s experience and difficult trajectory of reintegration. A tonal – and stylistic – shift marks the later focus of the narrative on Tom, whose own relationship to social life is less straightforward.
Given our current environmental context, the film’s depiction of the forest – and later use of animals – as backdrop for human concerns of community is troubling.
With Tom at its centre, Leave No Trace fleshes out its broadly humanist ethics. Despite the pauses and silences between father and daughter, who often prefer to communicate via gesture, glance, and reciprocal clicks of a kind of echolocation, the film privileges their psychological legibility. If little room is left for ambiguity as to why a character acts as he or she does, this is to ensure our empathic engagement. Profound, yet fleeting contact with domesticated animals recur across the film; yet, like the surrounding natural environment which initially acts as refuge for Tom and Will, the animals of Leave No Trace are more in the service of facilitating (and restoring) human-to-human connection. Just as the setting of Forest Park raises the spectre of ecological crisis without elaborating on it further, these encounters with animals at times suggest a de-centering of the human, only to ultimately fall back on conventional cinematic representations of human/animal relations which figure “non-human creatures as inferior (non-)beings, as mere props on the stage of human becoming.”⁴ The film frequently aligns Will and Tom with the domestication of animals, drawing a parallel with their own reintegration into social life, the move from the forest into human care. A moment of contact between Will and a horse enclosed in a stable immediately precedes (and perhaps triggers) their escape from the Christmas tree farm – an early morning scene marked by Tom in her bedroom, gently removing two plastic toy horses from the windowsill. More often, however, the characters’ identification with domesticated animals opens onto scenes of connection with other humans. At the farm, Tom’s discovery of a pet rabbit, Chainsaw, prompts conversation with a neighbourhood teen – a moment that feels charged with the potential of belonging. Later, when Tom participates in a Future Farmers of America workshop, an agricultural education programme which teaches high school students how to raise rabbits for meat or show, she is positioned as an onlooker, as if to reflect her shifting identifications between the animals and her so-called peers.
Some may argue that the film’s focus on domesticated animals is, in itself, an ecological critique of our mistreatment of non-human animals and the environment. However, when we examine the way the narrative mobilises these animals, the use to which they are put, this argument becomes unsteady. When a fellow ex-military at the Washington State RV park offers Will the assistance of his PTSD dog, Boris, the emphasis is not on human/animal relations, but instead on shared veteran experience. Even the beehive, itself a figure of (nonhuman) community, opens out onto close-ups of honey-soaked hands: a moment of tenderness between father and daughter. In doing so, the film reduces honey bees – a species recently under threat from exposure to insecticides – to a mere symbolic vehicle for human-to-human connection. For a contemporary film about a retreat to the forest, this anthropocentric approach to the representation of living with non-human animals and the natural environment feels not only reductive, but untimely. Connection is figured through the hospitality of strangers and the community of neighbours, evoked most powerfully in a scene at the RV park, where the neighbours gather over a barbecue and through music. As Michael Hurley and Marisa Anderson perform “O My Stars”, the film cuts between the neighbours listening, alone and together.
In privileging connection in its human-to-human form, these later scenes undermine the film’s initial gestures towards an ecologically-minded societal critique, from the Forest Park setting to the Christmas tree farm. Rather than cross-cutting between their different perspectives on reintegration into social life, Leave No Trace sequences narrative focus from Will to Tom. When the narrative shifts to Tom, we are shown only positive encounters with others and the limits of surviving on one’s own in the forest, and the film finishes with her perspective, contrasting human hospitality with the inhospitable landscape of Washington State. Furthermore, the film’s critique seems specifically calibrated to appeal to a polarised America: its targets of veteran care and social institutions over community are palatable across the political spectrum (even though they draw different, often opposing conclusions). By ultimately sidelining ecological questions, Leave No Trace may have secured broad appeal; but in doing so, the film misses the mark – ethically and politically – in presenting a contemporary narrative of retreat.
The film’s redeeming critical force, however, comes from the way it centres marginality and presents the question of care. Leave No Trace focuses on figures at the margins: Tom and Will, but also other veterans and individuals experiencing homelessness, the RV community, and even the long-haul truck driver who gives them a ride across the Washington border. Through this focus, the film asks us to reflect on the difficulties of, and failures in, caring for others – both societally and personally. The film presents an indictment of both US veteran care and the failure to respond to the nationwide opioid crisis, as it simultaneously foregrounds the benevolence, albeit misguided, of social services in characters such as Tom’s social worker, Jean (Dana Millican). While the film’s societal critique is directed towards the institutions and systems of care, on a more intimate level, its tender portrait of the relationship between father and daughter defamiliarises our fixed, often one-way understandings of care. Can we take care of others before ourselves? What does it mean to recognise the limits of one’s care? The film concludes with a gesture of care. Instead of fading out with Will’s final retreat into the forest, his gradual becoming-invisible within the landscape, Leave No Trace ends with Tom suspending groceries from a tree – vocalising a now-unreciprocated ‘click’. Whether or not Will returns from the forest, through this emphasis on caring for, the film works toward a re-imagining of community and connection – albeit one that is limited to the human.
1 Catherine Clément, Syncope: The Philosophy of Rapture, trans. Sally O’Driscoll and Deirdre M. Mahoney (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1994). 2 Composer Dickon Hinchliffe is a founding member of the British band Tindersticks, and collaborated on scores for several of Claire Denis’s films, including Trouble Every Day (2001) and Vendredi soir (2002). 3 Photographs from Alec Soth’s Broken Manual (2006-10) were included in the recent Barbican exhibition in London, Another Kind of Life: Photography on the Margins. https://www.barbican.org.uk/our-story/press-room/another-kind-of-life-photography-on-the-margins. 4 Dominik Ohrem, “Animating Creaturely Life,” in Beyond the Human-Animal Divide: Creaturely Lives in Literature and Culture, ed. by Dominik Ohrem and Roman Bartosch (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 10.
