The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (Tommy Lee Jones, 2005) situates itself amongst this mire of ideological ambivalence. The scene I have selected for this study captures the conflicted sensibilities we have about the Western nowadays, revered on the one hand as a cherished lost object and scorned on the other as a retrograde holdover. The film espouses these competing perspectives and ends up re-mythologizing as much as it demythologizes; it redeems an ethical masculine subject formation even as it unveils the latently violent and asocial tendencies intrinsic to American Exceptionalism. Some, who strictly define the genre as set in post-bellum America (see Kitses 57; Wright 5-6; Durgnat & Simmon 69), may wonder if it’s a Western at all, but I won’t belabour this point here. Suffice it to say, Three Burials is part of a cycle of films that I term ‘Post-Mortem’ Westerns, whose standard Western icons and tropes deployed in a modern day setting reinforce the genre’s outmodedness while enhancing the genre’s capability to deconstruct its mythological roots.