JARHEAD 179
airfield. Iraqi re sis tance never materializes, and the First Gulf War ends after just
four days. Swofford goes home on leave and finds that his girlfriend, Kristina
(Brianne Davis), has moved on to a new boyfriend. We see snippets of other sol-
diers trying to reintegrate into civilian life, and also see Sykes serving as a first
sergeant in the Iraq War. Later, O’Donnell visits Swofford and informs him of Troy’s
death in a car accident. Swofford attends Troy’s funeral and sees some of the other
men from their unit. The film ends with the group reminiscing about the war.
Reception
Jarhead opened on the weekend of 4–6 November 2005 and closed on 19 Janu-
ary 2006 (widest release: 2,448 theaters)— four years post-9/11, seven months after
the U.S. invasion of Iraq that toppled Saddam Hussein’s regime, and in the midst
of deadly and relentless al Qaeda insurgency, that is, the evolving military- political
catastrophe known as the Second Gulf War, against which Jarhead was still topical
in a general sense but, at the same time, yesterday’s news. During its 14- week run,
the movie grossed $62.6 million in domestic box office receipts. Foreign box office
receipts came in at $34.2 million, for a worldwide total of $96.8 million. After the-
aters took their percentage of the gross, Universal made about $53.2 million, a
sum that left the studio at a considerable loss (overhead, i.e., production and world-
wide P&A bud gets combined, prob ably exceeded $100 million). Though it tanked
at the box office, Jarhead did well on the home video market, posting over $52 mil-
lion in retail sales, considerably mitigating Universal’s losses. Reviews were mixed.
For film critic Mick LaSalle, the movie’s ambivalent perspective “feels right. The
ambivalence runs deep. Jarhead, at least to a degree, blows the myth of the noble
warrior. Yet it also suggests that a nation depends on that myth and its appeal to
certain kinds of impressionable people. So that at the end of his experience, Swof-
ford doesn’t know if he’s been enhanced or played for a sucker. Neither do we”
(LaSalle, 2005). Writing from a radical Left perspective, Joanne Laurier criticized
both book and film for lacking any meaningful perspective beyond the nihilistic
machismo of young Marines: “Swofford’s work, however, remains extremely lim-
ited, and open to truly deplorable interpretation, because he has failed to make
any serious assessment, after more than a de cade, of the Gulf War, its objective
origins and consequences... Both film and book fail to perceive that the deep
demoralization of the U.S. forces flows ultimately from their soul- destroying assign-
ment to conquer the world on behalf of a bankrupt imperialism” (Laurier, 2005).
Reel History Versus Real History
When Jarhead was released, the U.S. Marine Corps Public Affairs office released a
memo warning that “the movie’s script is an inaccurate portrayal of Marines in
general and does not provide a reasonable interpretation of military life” (quoted
in Fick, 2005). Though he thought the Marines’ official condemnation “a bit much,”
ex- Marine Fick took issue with some of the incidents depicted in Jarhead: “Could
a Marine really be shot and killed in training without any fallout whatsoever? Would
dozens of Marines celebrate the end of the war by dancing around a bonfire, glee-
fully firing their rifles into the night sky? Could Swofford’s sniper team actually