Welcome to “Scene of the Crime,” a recurring column in which we examine single memorable scenes from crime movies.
The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, directed by Tommy Lee Jones in 2006, makes its boarder patrol villain Mike Norton (Barry Pepper) suffer for the myriad crimes he has perpetrated against Mexican immigrants. Specifically, Texas rancher Pete Perkins (Tommy Lee Jones) is avenging the murder of his dear friend Melquiades “Mel” Estrada (Julio César Cedillo) by transporting both Mel’s dead body and a tied-up Norton to the Texas-Mexico boarder, to bury him properly in his homeland and to make Norton do it.
There’s a point in the film where the men need to cross a river. Perkins, on horseback, has been dragging Norton behind him. They reach a river, and Perkins will ride across it, while Norton will walk. Norton, who has tried to run away twice (the second time resulting in a snakebite for which he needs medical treatment from a healer in Mexico), refuses to cross the river, digging his heels (literally), and loudly protesting. So, Perkins lassos him, dragging him, thrashing and howling, through the water to the other side.
The significance of this scene in the film cannot be overstated; the process of taking Norton to the Texas-Mexico border is one which slowly dehumanizes, even animalizes, him as retribution for the constant dehumanization and animalization he perpetrates against the Mexican immigrants who endanger their own lives to cross the border.
Norton is skinny—gaunt, with sunken eyes, reptilian posture, and protruding bones. He’s wearing a tan shirt with a snakeskin-style pattern on it. As they approach the border, and as the protagonist gets closer to their goals, however, the wildness of the villain’s physical appearance, and his feral, uncivilized tendencies, become more pronounced, until he is forced to physically represent how he behaves socially—becoming the animals they initially resembled. It’s no coincidence that Norton is bit by a snake; by the time he crosses the river, he has reptile in him, literal cold blood inside his metaphorical cold blood. He becomes, in every possible way without a full mystical transformation, the snake he has always been.
In fact, earlier, while lying down, unconscious after the rattlesnake bite, a band of Latino travelers who have just made it across the border stumble upon Norton’s body and the snake. “Watch out, there’s a rattlesnake,” they call, but the snake, dead on the ground, is not visible—only Norton’s body, hanging out of a hole in the rock, is, and it seems as if the call is referring to him and not the animal.
The venomous Norton habitually fights dirty—early on in the film, while catching a Mexican couple who had crossed the boarder, he tackles them couple (screaming “bitch,” to the woman, punching her in the nose) until they are defenseless. Later on, he encounters the woman again—in Mexico. She is the healer treating his snakebite, and, in a moment of reflexivity, she tells the guide that she recognizes him as her assailant because “he has a face like a white rat”—before she punches him in the nose as payback. In flattening his nose, she further removes his more mammalian appearance in exchange for something suitably reptilian.
Later, in the river-crossing scene, bites the guide to protest riding through the river, not unlike the snake that had bitten him. Here, he is lassoed like stubborn cow, and dragged as if on a leash through the water by the mounted Perkins. Following them is the guide, also on horseback, who is dragging a donkey from a similar rope—and this visual proportion turns Mike into, well, an ass. But his thrashing movements (achieved through Pepper’s remarkable physical acting) are elastic and wriggling, snakelike in every way.
In the film’s final sequence, after the healer he had injured truly saves his life by drawing out the venom and traces of animal he had inside him, they arrive at Mel’s true burial ground. Perkins demands that Norton ask for forgiveness—and Norton, crying and begging, complies. Here, in Mexico, he is able to turn back into a human, leaving behind the beast he was in Texas.
