Jarhead Movie
A man sits with hands clasped in prayer while a crowded protest plays on an old television

Section 03

The Field

8 pieces

The Gulf War on screen — from Three Kings to The Hurt Locker, and the shadow of Apocalypse Now.

Movie poster for Three Kings showing three soldiers carrying duffel bags across a desert 01

Three Kings Was the Argument Jarhead Answered

David O.

Read this piece Man in a black tuxedo with white shirt and tie smiling on a red carpet 02

Bigelow's Answer: What The Hurt Locker Did Three Years Later

Kathryn Bigelow's 2008 film in relation to Jarhead — same conflict geography, opposite temperament, a director who chose action where Mendes chose waiting.

Read this piece A firefighter in a yellow helmet sprays water at a smoldering, burned-out building 03

Courage Under Fire and the Gulf War Before Anyone Had Processed It

Edward Zwick's 1996 film as the first major Gulf War feature — made before the conflict had settled into a genre, with Denzel Washington and Meg Ryan in the first fiction to grapple directly with the 1991 ground campaign.

Read this piece Snipers in camouflage take firing positions behind a sandbag barrier at an outdoor range 04

American Sniper and the Box Office the Genre Never Expected

Clint Eastwood's 2014 film with Bradley Cooper as Chris Kyle — its production history, its box-office performance (the highest-grossing domestic release of 2014 per Box Office Mojo figures published that year), and where it sits in the Gulf-and-Iraq genre beside Jarhead..

Read this piece Five men in black t-shirts and shorts stand on a rooftop between brick buildings 05

Generation Kill: When the Genre Moved to Seven Episodes

David Simon and Ed Burns's 2008 HBO miniseries as a structural departure — the same embed journalism tradition as Jarhead's memoir roots, but given the space of seven hours.

Read this piece Movie poster for Gunner Palace showing a soldier's face beside a bombed palace with a pool 06

Gunner Palace: Uday Hussein's Pool House and What Came After

Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein's 2004 documentary, filmed with the 2/3 Field Artillery battalion in Baghdad — the film that placed the genre's documentary wing alongside its fiction arm at the same historical moment as Jarhead's production..

Read this piece Movie poster for the war documentary Restrepo, showing a soldier in mountainous terrain 07

Restrepo and the Year a Documentary Won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance

Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington's 2010 Afghanistan documentary — its Sundance Grand Jury Prize, its year in the Korengal Valley with the 173rd Airborne, and how it extended the war-documentary tradition that Gunner Palace had reopened.

Read this piece A man sits with hands clasped in prayer while a crowded protest plays on an old television 08

The War That Played Live, and What That Did to Every Film That Followed

How the 1991 Gulf War's televised coverage — CNN, the pool-feed imagery, the green night-vision footage — created a visual vocabulary that Jarhead, Three Kings and Courage Under Fire all had to answer.

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