Challenging and Dismantling Stereotypes in Jones’s The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada and Edwards’s Monsters

Abstract

There is the widespread conviction that cinema tends to reinforce all sorts of schemes and stereotypes that we use to interpret and respond to surrounding realities. However, over the last decades a number of filmmakers have been trying to challenge and subvert some of those generic expectations and assumptions by dismantling many of the stereotypes present in certain film and cultural traditions. This paper will closely analyze two films with the aim of showing that cinema has the capacity of changing our perception of particular spaces and the human groups in them. Both The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (dir. Jones 2005) and Monsters (dir. Edwards 2010) take place in borderland territories where the audience expects to witness the kind of plots habitual in those volatile spaces. Although belonging to two very distinct film genres—post- Western and science-fiction—both movies rely on the tropes and conventions that are typical of the two genres. However, far from confirming and justifying the dichotomies that have governed most narratives in these traditions and contexts, the two films challenge many of the assumptions and stereotypes that usually guide our interpretation of these filmic texts.