Soon after arriving in Mexico City to commence field research, I paid a trip to the rather magnificent Cineteca Nacional, a grand cultural complex that brews coffee, sells books, and screens recent films. I went to see Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, and was pretty surprised to find just how closely it connected with the research that I am doing (when I’m not at the movies).

At the beginning of the film, Mildred Hayes commissions three billboards along a quiet strip of country road. Seven months have passed since Hayes’s daughter was raped and murdered, and with no progress being made to bring the perpetrator to justice, Hayes uses the billboards to call out the local police chief (note: I haven’t spoiled anything yet, but it’s all spoilers from here).

My dissertation project looks at the appearance of public messages (narcomensajes or narcomantas) in Mexico over roughly the last ten years. Whether or not these messages appear at the scene of a crime, they almost always refer to crimes past, present or future. Often they call out specific state officials for not doing their job, or for doing it too well. With these rough similarities clear from the opening scene of the film, Three Billboards also got me thinking about some other shared themes with my project.

Going public will have a profound effect. Hayes doesn’t know exactly what, or how, but she recognises that the billboards will force attention, will force a response, and that at least something will happen. She is introducing a little uncertainty, a little chaos, to an otherwise quite rigid social setting. The billboards do indeed bring chaos, and the whole arc of the film is about just how much chaos ensues. Whether the billboards achieve much else is another question. The thousands of narcomensajes displayed in Mexico have had similarly chaotic, uncertain effects.

Hayes opts to shake things up, because of the perceived impunity at work in her community. The murderer of Hayes’s daughter is at large, somewhere. The police department – or at the very least, certain members of it – has a record of racist abuse and violence. In the former situation, it appears that the police cannot solve the case; in the latter, they have little interest in any resolution. Faced with these limits to the law, people find other ways to provoke action, and to pursue their version of justice. This includes the police. Vigilantism is one way that people take matters in their own hands. Displaying public messages is another.

Ebbing may be a small town – and the film draws laughs by lampooning close-minded small town life – but it is also a complex social world. In studies of violence and conflict, we often take the town as a unified, homogenous whole, with perfect access to local information. Ebbing is anything but this: it is a riot of open secrets and half truths. No one can make sense of the crime at the center of the story, but everyone knows all about the police brutality, and a bunch of other truths never officially divulged. Once the billboards go up, any pretense of local unity or perfect knowledge is lost. People act on hunches, are often (usually) proved wrong. There is no final resolution, to restoration of truth or justice.

P.S. Why Cuernavaca? It just happened that I was looking at early 2010 when I wrote this – a time when control of Cuernavaca was being hotly contested by rival groups, and messages were appearing throughout the city.