ABSTRACT
This chapter examines two westerns made within five years of either side of 2000—Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man (1995) and Tommy Lee Jones’s Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005)—and the sonic worlds created by their music. While they could hardly be more dissimilar, Dead Man and Three Burials, both products of independent art cinema, share a consciousness of the mythic legacy of the western, and each updates the genre in its own way to comment on America at the millennium. Both subject American masculinity and the use of violence to a critical re-vision, and also radically reorder the western’s traditional conceptualization of the functions of the frontier and of the cultural Other.
