Hollywood Border Cinema: Westerns with a Vengeance

Recently, the Western has undergone a mini-revival. Brokeback Mountain (2005), The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005), and No Country for Old Men (2007) offer new meditations on “American” identity through its most hallowed genre. 1 As the most contemporary examples of the Western genre, these fi lms attest to the ways that it is continually being reimagined and redeployed to explore the most salient issues of contemporary culture. These fi lms put both U.S. culture and its major media industry on the line; they force an examination of the myths of the West and the Southwest as they come to bear on national self-defi nition. Although many Westerns take place in the Southwest along the border, some actually depict the borderlands with characters traversing the national border separating the United States and Mexico to tell a story about U.S. dominance in the hemisphere and the world.