And now, let's talk about Harvey...
... and in doing so, let's discuss the major glaring flaws of THE DARK KNIGHT.
But first, let me say something right off the bat. They got Harvey. The Nolans, Goyer, Zimmer, Howard, and of course Eckhart... they fucking got him. Oh, there was more that could have been done, but that's irrelevant to this point. For what they had here, for what they could have done in a film already so huge and bloated (where Harvey was the major--but not sole--focus), I have no complaints.
Devin from CHUD.com put it damn well when he wrote: The film's title isn't really about Batman's nickname, it's about Batman's relationship with Dent - over and over again Dent is called Gotham's White Knight. He's the city's Obama, newly elected as DA and cleaning things up from the inside in a way that Bruce Wayne could only dream about. Eckhart, all jaw and blonde good looks, plays Dent as the kind of good guy we haven't seen in movies in decades. Honest and ethical yet funny and sexual, he's a hero with almost no darkness, no repression, no hesitation. He's straight but not square; Dent accepts that the city needs Batman. He understands that some rules have to be bent for the greater good. This is a superhero movie, but the superhero seems to be the DA.
First, okay, I do take issue with one big point: if anyone knows anything about repression, it's Harvey Dent (or at least it should be). And while they didn't touch at all upon Harvey's own madness before the scarring, those of us in the know could fill in the blanks (his father's lucky coin!), while others could hopefully figure it out for themselves.
That's one thing I will say, and get to in more depth soon enough... we didn't see enough of Harvey's dark side. Of the demons lurking just under the surface, bubbling up more and more as time went on, exacerbated by the stress and frustration of the system, his own bad decisions and things painfully out of his control. Oh sure, we saw some of his anger, but Harvey's problems run much deeper than anger management issues (which is one major factor many writers, including Jeph Loeb in THE LONG HALLOWEEN, have gotten wrong about the character). He needs to be more than a guy with anger management issues for the transformation to make sense.
We mainly saw the good side, the heroic man who will ultimately be either lost forever or trapped in a stalemate struggle with a horrible monster with half his face. I don't know which is more tragic, but either way, it's the heart of his tragedy, and I can at least say with deep pleasure that, yes, they got that side. They got Harvey Dent.
But god help me, they fucked up Two-Face.
And *that's* the part that will forever keep me from fully embracing this movie as a masterpiece. That's the part that ultimately undoes the film for me.
Now, wait, hear me out.
Perhaps you're thinking, "Well, Heffie's obsessed with the character, he takes him so personally, of course he would think that," and yes, I cannot deny that no matter how much I'm gonna try to be objective, it's going to be impossible to separate my own passion for the character, as well as what I know/think/believe to be what's right and wrong about any given take on Harvey Dent and Two-Face.
But let's go back to Devin for a second, who immediately followed the above with saying: It's not Eckhart's fault, but I found Dent's turn to evil in the third act to be unconvincing. Forgiving the impossibility of Dent getting those wounds and running around being a bad guy, his change into that bad guy feels rushed. And what's worse, the very nature of Two Face is once again misused; in Schumacher's take on the character he was just a lunatic all the time, and here he's just using his scarred coin to decide whether or not to kill people. There's no feeling that he's torn about it, and at one point when the coin doesn't allow him to kill someone, he flips again to get a chance to kill another character in an attempt to kill that first person after all. I wanted to see this Two Face be torn, to be a slave to that coin. Instead he feels like a villain with a gimmick.
While I sometimes strongly disagree with Devin, I was gratified to say that I concur with every last word. Now let the Harvey Dent fanboy expand upon these thoughts, while adding a few of his own; step by step, starting with the minor quibbles and working my way up, just as the film did.
This is long (and getting longer) but if you're up for it, I'd love your thoughts.
Once again, you did catch that I said
***SPOILERS***
... right?
And here.
We.
Go.
Okay, first, the scarring (and this is just fan nitpicking, so feel free to plow ahead).
While I would have preferred the classic Moroni-throws-acid-in-his-face-during-court origin, this one was more of a powerhouse scene for the many story purposes it served, so whatever. As for the look of Two-Face, the leaked promo art didn't do it justice. I loved it. I mean, I would have liked it to be a wee bit gooey/meatier, ala my original gold standard for Two-Face scarring--Liam Neeson's DARKMAN--but I was totally pleased and enthralled to watch him every second. Especially his eyes; I loved just watching the normal eye and the exposed bloodshot rolling ball moving in perfect unison. And thank god we got the exposed teeth.
Exposed bone, on the other hand... yeah, you're seriously pushing credulity. If they'd just added a bit more Darkman-style meat, it'd have actually been more realistic, even plausible. After all, I've spent a whole consulting my mother, the rehab nurse, as to what a real-life Two-Face could look like. Give me 75% Eckhart with 25% Darkman and I'm good to go.
Some have complained about the CGI, that he looked a bit too PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN, and while I could see that, I thoroughly liked it nonetheless. Which, I'm sure, most will think about some of my following criticisms.
That said, ever since the image of the Two-Face action figure leaked, I was rather excited to see some uneven scarring, and slightly disappointed to see a traditional down-the-middle Two-Face. Furthermore, while he was face-down in the gasoline, he was spitting and spurting drops on his soon-to-remain-unscarred face. Once he'd caught fire, those should have ignited as well.
But this is an mildly annoying continuity thing, hardly the stuff of real film nor character criticism.
So the Joker manipulates him. This, I can buy, because the Joker is a master manipulator, and god bless Harvey, ever the alcoholic's child, he is so easily manipulated. And okay, the coin came up clean, so yeah, he wouldn't kill the Joker. But to let him go off scot-free? The guy who is most directly responsible for his current state? And why, because "the Joker is a mad dog, but I want the one who took him off his chain"?
Well, okay, so he goes after the gangsters and corrupt cops instead. While the Joker thing is odd, at least this is perfect. This is exactly what crazed Harvey would and should do! I remember Nolan and company promised that Harvey would be the dark mirror to Batman, and this is exactly the kind of thing I had in mind: the dark vigilante, crossing the lines that Batman doesn't dare cross! And yet, something's bugging me, something about his motivation seems off... but whatever, I'm seeing Two-Face come to life, I don't want to think about that!
And then he... goes after Gordon's family?
Wait, what?
Okay, here's the thing: Two-Face is a monster, and yes, he is capable of doing something as horrible as that. But does anybody truly buy that the Harvey Dent of this film could go that evil that quickly, that having his face burned off and losing his love would be enough to turn the White Knight, the genuinely good and heroic character, into the sort of monster that would try to kill an innocent family and put a gun to a child's head?
Again, Two-Face *would* do that, but not without a whole other movie's worth of build-up to get to that point.
Now, I recently talked with someone on scans_daily who said, "I figured the combination of grief, excruciating pain and stress is what drove Dent to go all insane vigilante. In his mind, Gordon failed to save Rachel, so he wanted to show him just what he lost by threatening his son. Of course it isn't a rational thing to do, Harvey Dent wasn't in a rational state."
To which I replied, "But from a storytelling perspective, that's kinda bullcrap. It's a sort of "anything goes" excuse. From that logic, he could just as well have started wearing bananas on his feet and calling himself the Queeeeeeen of Fraaaance, because hey, he's irrational!"
So no, I don't buy it. It's a total bullshit excuse from a creative standpoint, and for an audience member, it's downright insulting. Especially when the nature of his lifelong mental illnesses went completely unacknowledged.
Really, if people didn't *expect* Harvey to snap, because that's of course what he was destined to do, would they so readily just accept this happening with the character as established before? I'd like to think not, anyway.
And really, what was his motivation? What was it that pushed this Harvey Dent over the edge?
Rachel's death. The scarring too, but you could see he didn't care about that. It was solely Rachel's death that drove Harvey.
And that's bullshit.
Here's the thing. THE DARK KNIGHT is a decidedly un-Hollywood superhero film in many ways, most especially how it's largely a film about ideas. Yes, these ideas might be, as tompurdue put it, essentially the sort of questions put before freshman philosophy students, relatively simplistic compared to the sort of moral conundrums that happen in real life on a daily basis, but that's more challenging and thought-provoking that what we usually get. The ideas in question here are about ideals, society, law, order, justice, revenge, all themes which even the movie knows that Harvey Dent personifies. His personification is the point. We all agreed?
And yet, what do they do? They abandon this essential theme that they've logically built up, and for what? All for the most uber-Hollywood cliched motivation of, "RRARGH, MY GIRLFRIEND IS DEAD, I AM NOW VENGEFUL! MENDOZAAAAAAAAA!!!" But, y'know, with some random bugfuck crazy thrown in for no good reason other than it serves the already-crammed and plot.
What. The fuck.
Now this too won't bother most people, because they'd accept that sort of worn-out story trope anyway even in a decent film. But for me, it's an utter waste both for the character and the movie in general! That's where the film jumped the shark. Never mind that Rachel seemed to be less of a character and more just there as a foil for Bruce and Harvey. In classic "Women in Refrigerators" tradition, she exists purely for Bruce and Harvey to react when she's killed off.
But let's play Devil's Advocate. In the comics (and therefore my novel), Harvey's love and only major human connection is his wife Gilda. If she had been killed by the mob, wouldn't the situation essentially be the same? Wouldn't that be enough to push him over the edge?
Maybe, almost certainly, but not to the extent that he'd become what he does, no more than simply getting a face full of acid (or fire) would truly turn him into Two-Face. There is no one action that turns Harvey into a monster, that's the thing. It's all little factors, things from childhood-onward. One of the things that fascinates me so much about Harvey is the question of "When was he too far gone? When could he have been saved? Could he ever have been saved, or was he lost from the start, his fate sealed from birth?" I honestly have no answer, and that's what so heartbreaking about the character.
Gilda's death would have sped things up, sure... but it would have only fueled the demons already hard at work under the skin.
So therefore, not only is Rachel's whole character exiting pretty well purely to be a Woman in Refrigerator, but at the same time, it completely reduces Harvey's whole character--the character that's supposed to be the representative of the ideals that the Joker is tearing down--into nothing more than avenging Rachel.
And I considered that Nolan and company did this as their way of trying to depict Harvey as Bruce Wayne's dark mirror. Rather than explore the dark vigilante aspect, they opted instead to try and show how Harvey would react to loss as opposed to Batman.
But Bloo put it best: "If the intention was to make a comparison between a terrible tragedy that happens to Bruce, and a terrible tragedy that happens to Harvey, and to compare their separate reactions and consequences, it was a poor match-up. If it was just the harbinger of Two-Face, it failed miserably."
And this is the motivation that Harvey has to try and kill an innocent family to punish Jim Gordon, rather than actually try and at least THWART the actual person most responsible?! The coin came up clean, so he wouldn't kill the Joker, but to completely let him off? Two-Face does not work that way! The coin does not work that way! Fuck, the scene in Moroni's car with his driver is proof enough of that! He didn't let Moroni off, do why the hell would he just let the Joker go in favor of Gordon?
Oh wait, he's irrational. Pull the other one.
And since we're talking about the coin, Devin's absolutely right: we don't at all get the sense that he's torn when he flips the coin. Where's the tortured stalemate between the personalities that leads him to use the coin as the tie-breaker? Where's the struggle? Where's... fuck, where's the duality?
You know, back in March, CHUD ran this exciting article specifically on how Harvey's duality was going to be specially filmed and depicted in the film, almost as a Smeagol/Gollum thing, which struck me as goddamn perfect. So what happened? Where was the duality? Where was the conflict?
In the scene with Gordon's family, Harvey tells Batman essentially that he doesn't want to do this, but the way it was depicted, that line rang false. There should have been tears in his good eye as he said it, and we should have seen the character actually tortured even as he's seriously planning on doing these horrible things. I'm sure many would say was was plenty tortured for their tastes, but I want you to consider what could have been, what should have been, if they'd given him his own movie to truly transform and develop into the monster, the kind of monster who would kill a child*.
Which brings up another factor: Harvey's death.
Assuming he even is dead.
This has been the subject of some debate. The general immediate assumption is that he died, as I initially thought, but it's rather ambiguous. He didn't look like he suffered any visible means of death, and Batman looked pretty good even after suffering the same fall *and* hitting a couple beams on his way down (even armor aside). Besides, as the scene with Moroni already established, a fall from that kind of height wouldn't kill somebody.
Furthermore, his good eye was closed like he was passed out, not open in a death stare like we'd usually see.** Also, he was visibly breathing, and his eye twitched when Batman moved his head, but let's cut the bullshit, even I know that was more "Aaron Eckhart trying to play dead" than anything else.
Now, I know what you might say: "Yeah, except that Harvey's survival would completely invalidate the ending and Batman's new status as a hunted vigilante."
First of all, it wouldn't have to. Gordon clearly already has experience with faked deaths, and there wasn't a body at the Harvey Dent memorial, nor--if you'll notice--did Gordon nor Batman actually say that Harvey died. I could easily imagine Gordon and Batman participating in a cover-up, shipping Harvey off to a padded cell in Arkham to keep him hidden like a Kennedy sibling, but while trying to help cure him. It's not much of a stretch, nor the stuff of fanboy fantasy.
That said, I did check out the novelization of THE DARK KNIGHT by classic bat-scribe Denny O'Neill and he wrote, quite literally, "His good eye was open lifelessly. He was obviously dead." But who cares about novelizations anyway, and besides, as depicted in the film, it was far from obvious.
Furthermore, Harvey's death invalidates something far more important than the ending. Because if Harvey's dead, that means Batman killed him. After the whole movie making such a huge point about Batman refusing to break his one rule, refusing to kill the Joker even after everything, to have him kill his own friend would betray the film in a stupid fucking way.
Even still, you could argue that it doesn't invalidate the rule because it was an accident. If you think that, you still miss the point entirely.
Batman doesn't kill. Not purposefully, not accidentally.
Any bending of that is an utter violation of both the rule and the character. And yes, for the record, I hate the "I don't have to save you" moment from BATMAN BEGINS. I only justify it as thinking that Batman knew Ra's well enough that the bastard would be fully able to save his own ass.
But Batman does not kill. Period.
So if Harvey's dead, I call bullshit. Even to the point that it just might totally unravel the film (presuming the rushed madness of Harvey didn't already do that).
Honestly, back in the day, they said that he would be the focus of the third movie, and that's seriously what needs to happen. Not just because I love him, and not just because he needs a whole film to really develop, especially outside of the Joker's shadow, Entertainment Weekly said that the Two-Face transformation feels "all at once too much and not enough"), but because bringing Two-Face in full-force is the only way I can imagine them truly carrying over the power of this film, of having even a candle in the wind's chance of following THE DARK KNIGHT.
Because, let me stress yet again, I loved the vast majority of THE DARK KNIGHT. But the above factors will never allow me to fully embrace it, and from an objective standpoint, put a serious cramp on the film as a film, not just what I'd want it to be.
All that said, if I had to choose between them getting Harvey Dent right or getting Two-Face right, I'd say Harvey without a moment's hesitation. And for that, I am deeply pleased.
*Someone remarked that they "Anakin Skywalkered Harvey." God help us all.
**That said, I still tell myself that Doctor Octopus' arms reactivated, pulled him out of the water, and gave him Robo-CPR, lalalala, not listening.
But first, let me say something right off the bat. They got Harvey. The Nolans, Goyer, Zimmer, Howard, and of course Eckhart... they fucking got him. Oh, there was more that could have been done, but that's irrelevant to this point. For what they had here, for what they could have done in a film already so huge and bloated (where Harvey was the major--but not sole--focus), I have no complaints.
Devin from CHUD.com put it damn well when he wrote: The film's title isn't really about Batman's nickname, it's about Batman's relationship with Dent - over and over again Dent is called Gotham's White Knight. He's the city's Obama, newly elected as DA and cleaning things up from the inside in a way that Bruce Wayne could only dream about. Eckhart, all jaw and blonde good looks, plays Dent as the kind of good guy we haven't seen in movies in decades. Honest and ethical yet funny and sexual, he's a hero with almost no darkness, no repression, no hesitation. He's straight but not square; Dent accepts that the city needs Batman. He understands that some rules have to be bent for the greater good. This is a superhero movie, but the superhero seems to be the DA.
First, okay, I do take issue with one big point: if anyone knows anything about repression, it's Harvey Dent (or at least it should be). And while they didn't touch at all upon Harvey's own madness before the scarring, those of us in the know could fill in the blanks (his father's lucky coin!), while others could hopefully figure it out for themselves.
That's one thing I will say, and get to in more depth soon enough... we didn't see enough of Harvey's dark side. Of the demons lurking just under the surface, bubbling up more and more as time went on, exacerbated by the stress and frustration of the system, his own bad decisions and things painfully out of his control. Oh sure, we saw some of his anger, but Harvey's problems run much deeper than anger management issues (which is one major factor many writers, including Jeph Loeb in THE LONG HALLOWEEN, have gotten wrong about the character). He needs to be more than a guy with anger management issues for the transformation to make sense.
We mainly saw the good side, the heroic man who will ultimately be either lost forever or trapped in a stalemate struggle with a horrible monster with half his face. I don't know which is more tragic, but either way, it's the heart of his tragedy, and I can at least say with deep pleasure that, yes, they got that side. They got Harvey Dent.
But god help me, they fucked up Two-Face.
And *that's* the part that will forever keep me from fully embracing this movie as a masterpiece. That's the part that ultimately undoes the film for me.
Now, wait, hear me out.
Perhaps you're thinking, "Well, Heffie's obsessed with the character, he takes him so personally, of course he would think that," and yes, I cannot deny that no matter how much I'm gonna try to be objective, it's going to be impossible to separate my own passion for the character, as well as what I know/think/believe to be what's right and wrong about any given take on Harvey Dent and Two-Face.
But let's go back to Devin for a second, who immediately followed the above with saying: It's not Eckhart's fault, but I found Dent's turn to evil in the third act to be unconvincing. Forgiving the impossibility of Dent getting those wounds and running around being a bad guy, his change into that bad guy feels rushed. And what's worse, the very nature of Two Face is once again misused; in Schumacher's take on the character he was just a lunatic all the time, and here he's just using his scarred coin to decide whether or not to kill people. There's no feeling that he's torn about it, and at one point when the coin doesn't allow him to kill someone, he flips again to get a chance to kill another character in an attempt to kill that first person after all. I wanted to see this Two Face be torn, to be a slave to that coin. Instead he feels like a villain with a gimmick.
While I sometimes strongly disagree with Devin, I was gratified to say that I concur with every last word. Now let the Harvey Dent fanboy expand upon these thoughts, while adding a few of his own; step by step, starting with the minor quibbles and working my way up, just as the film did.
This is long (and getting longer) but if you're up for it, I'd love your thoughts.
Once again, you did catch that I said
***SPOILERS***
... right?
And here.
We.
Go.
Okay, first, the scarring (and this is just fan nitpicking, so feel free to plow ahead).
While I would have preferred the classic Moroni-throws-acid-in-his-face-during-court origin, this one was more of a powerhouse scene for the many story purposes it served, so whatever. As for the look of Two-Face, the leaked promo art didn't do it justice. I loved it. I mean, I would have liked it to be a wee bit gooey/meatier, ala my original gold standard for Two-Face scarring--Liam Neeson's DARKMAN--but I was totally pleased and enthralled to watch him every second. Especially his eyes; I loved just watching the normal eye and the exposed bloodshot rolling ball moving in perfect unison. And thank god we got the exposed teeth.
Exposed bone, on the other hand... yeah, you're seriously pushing credulity. If they'd just added a bit more Darkman-style meat, it'd have actually been more realistic, even plausible. After all, I've spent a whole consulting my mother, the rehab nurse, as to what a real-life Two-Face could look like. Give me 75% Eckhart with 25% Darkman and I'm good to go.
Some have complained about the CGI, that he looked a bit too PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN, and while I could see that, I thoroughly liked it nonetheless. Which, I'm sure, most will think about some of my following criticisms.
That said, ever since the image of the Two-Face action figure leaked, I was rather excited to see some uneven scarring, and slightly disappointed to see a traditional down-the-middle Two-Face. Furthermore, while he was face-down in the gasoline, he was spitting and spurting drops on his soon-to-remain-unscarred face. Once he'd caught fire, those should have ignited as well.
But this is an mildly annoying continuity thing, hardly the stuff of real film nor character criticism.
So the Joker manipulates him. This, I can buy, because the Joker is a master manipulator, and god bless Harvey, ever the alcoholic's child, he is so easily manipulated. And okay, the coin came up clean, so yeah, he wouldn't kill the Joker. But to let him go off scot-free? The guy who is most directly responsible for his current state? And why, because "the Joker is a mad dog, but I want the one who took him off his chain"?
Well, okay, so he goes after the gangsters and corrupt cops instead. While the Joker thing is odd, at least this is perfect. This is exactly what crazed Harvey would and should do! I remember Nolan and company promised that Harvey would be the dark mirror to Batman, and this is exactly the kind of thing I had in mind: the dark vigilante, crossing the lines that Batman doesn't dare cross! And yet, something's bugging me, something about his motivation seems off... but whatever, I'm seeing Two-Face come to life, I don't want to think about that!
And then he... goes after Gordon's family?
Wait, what?
Okay, here's the thing: Two-Face is a monster, and yes, he is capable of doing something as horrible as that. But does anybody truly buy that the Harvey Dent of this film could go that evil that quickly, that having his face burned off and losing his love would be enough to turn the White Knight, the genuinely good and heroic character, into the sort of monster that would try to kill an innocent family and put a gun to a child's head?
Again, Two-Face *would* do that, but not without a whole other movie's worth of build-up to get to that point.
Now, I recently talked with someone on scans_daily who said, "I figured the combination of grief, excruciating pain and stress is what drove Dent to go all insane vigilante. In his mind, Gordon failed to save Rachel, so he wanted to show him just what he lost by threatening his son. Of course it isn't a rational thing to do, Harvey Dent wasn't in a rational state."
To which I replied, "But from a storytelling perspective, that's kinda bullcrap. It's a sort of "anything goes" excuse. From that logic, he could just as well have started wearing bananas on his feet and calling himself the Queeeeeeen of Fraaaance, because hey, he's irrational!"
So no, I don't buy it. It's a total bullshit excuse from a creative standpoint, and for an audience member, it's downright insulting. Especially when the nature of his lifelong mental illnesses went completely unacknowledged.
Really, if people didn't *expect* Harvey to snap, because that's of course what he was destined to do, would they so readily just accept this happening with the character as established before? I'd like to think not, anyway.
And really, what was his motivation? What was it that pushed this Harvey Dent over the edge?
Rachel's death. The scarring too, but you could see he didn't care about that. It was solely Rachel's death that drove Harvey.
And that's bullshit.
Here's the thing. THE DARK KNIGHT is a decidedly un-Hollywood superhero film in many ways, most especially how it's largely a film about ideas. Yes, these ideas might be, as tompurdue put it, essentially the sort of questions put before freshman philosophy students, relatively simplistic compared to the sort of moral conundrums that happen in real life on a daily basis, but that's more challenging and thought-provoking that what we usually get. The ideas in question here are about ideals, society, law, order, justice, revenge, all themes which even the movie knows that Harvey Dent personifies. His personification is the point. We all agreed?
And yet, what do they do? They abandon this essential theme that they've logically built up, and for what? All for the most uber-Hollywood cliched motivation of, "RRARGH, MY GIRLFRIEND IS DEAD, I AM NOW VENGEFUL! MENDOZAAAAAAAAA!!!" But, y'know, with some random bugfuck crazy thrown in for no good reason other than it serves the already-crammed and plot.
What. The fuck.
Now this too won't bother most people, because they'd accept that sort of worn-out story trope anyway even in a decent film. But for me, it's an utter waste both for the character and the movie in general! That's where the film jumped the shark. Never mind that Rachel seemed to be less of a character and more just there as a foil for Bruce and Harvey. In classic "Women in Refrigerators" tradition, she exists purely for Bruce and Harvey to react when she's killed off.
But let's play Devil's Advocate. In the comics (and therefore my novel), Harvey's love and only major human connection is his wife Gilda. If she had been killed by the mob, wouldn't the situation essentially be the same? Wouldn't that be enough to push him over the edge?
Maybe, almost certainly, but not to the extent that he'd become what he does, no more than simply getting a face full of acid (or fire) would truly turn him into Two-Face. There is no one action that turns Harvey into a monster, that's the thing. It's all little factors, things from childhood-onward. One of the things that fascinates me so much about Harvey is the question of "When was he too far gone? When could he have been saved? Could he ever have been saved, or was he lost from the start, his fate sealed from birth?" I honestly have no answer, and that's what so heartbreaking about the character.
Gilda's death would have sped things up, sure... but it would have only fueled the demons already hard at work under the skin.
So therefore, not only is Rachel's whole character exiting pretty well purely to be a Woman in Refrigerator, but at the same time, it completely reduces Harvey's whole character--the character that's supposed to be the representative of the ideals that the Joker is tearing down--into nothing more than avenging Rachel.
And I considered that Nolan and company did this as their way of trying to depict Harvey as Bruce Wayne's dark mirror. Rather than explore the dark vigilante aspect, they opted instead to try and show how Harvey would react to loss as opposed to Batman.
But Bloo put it best: "If the intention was to make a comparison between a terrible tragedy that happens to Bruce, and a terrible tragedy that happens to Harvey, and to compare their separate reactions and consequences, it was a poor match-up. If it was just the harbinger of Two-Face, it failed miserably."
And this is the motivation that Harvey has to try and kill an innocent family to punish Jim Gordon, rather than actually try and at least THWART the actual person most responsible?! The coin came up clean, so he wouldn't kill the Joker, but to completely let him off? Two-Face does not work that way! The coin does not work that way! Fuck, the scene in Moroni's car with his driver is proof enough of that! He didn't let Moroni off, do why the hell would he just let the Joker go in favor of Gordon?
Oh wait, he's irrational. Pull the other one.
And since we're talking about the coin, Devin's absolutely right: we don't at all get the sense that he's torn when he flips the coin. Where's the tortured stalemate between the personalities that leads him to use the coin as the tie-breaker? Where's the struggle? Where's... fuck, where's the duality?
You know, back in March, CHUD ran this exciting article specifically on how Harvey's duality was going to be specially filmed and depicted in the film, almost as a Smeagol/Gollum thing, which struck me as goddamn perfect. So what happened? Where was the duality? Where was the conflict?
In the scene with Gordon's family, Harvey tells Batman essentially that he doesn't want to do this, but the way it was depicted, that line rang false. There should have been tears in his good eye as he said it, and we should have seen the character actually tortured even as he's seriously planning on doing these horrible things. I'm sure many would say was was plenty tortured for their tastes, but I want you to consider what could have been, what should have been, if they'd given him his own movie to truly transform and develop into the monster, the kind of monster who would kill a child*.
Which brings up another factor: Harvey's death.
Assuming he even is dead.
This has been the subject of some debate. The general immediate assumption is that he died, as I initially thought, but it's rather ambiguous. He didn't look like he suffered any visible means of death, and Batman looked pretty good even after suffering the same fall *and* hitting a couple beams on his way down (even armor aside). Besides, as the scene with Moroni already established, a fall from that kind of height wouldn't kill somebody.
Furthermore, his good eye was closed like he was passed out, not open in a death stare like we'd usually see.** Also, he was visibly breathing, and his eye twitched when Batman moved his head, but let's cut the bullshit, even I know that was more "Aaron Eckhart trying to play dead" than anything else.
Now, I know what you might say: "Yeah, except that Harvey's survival would completely invalidate the ending and Batman's new status as a hunted vigilante."
First of all, it wouldn't have to. Gordon clearly already has experience with faked deaths, and there wasn't a body at the Harvey Dent memorial, nor--if you'll notice--did Gordon nor Batman actually say that Harvey died. I could easily imagine Gordon and Batman participating in a cover-up, shipping Harvey off to a padded cell in Arkham to keep him hidden like a Kennedy sibling, but while trying to help cure him. It's not much of a stretch, nor the stuff of fanboy fantasy.
That said, I did check out the novelization of THE DARK KNIGHT by classic bat-scribe Denny O'Neill and he wrote, quite literally, "His good eye was open lifelessly. He was obviously dead." But who cares about novelizations anyway, and besides, as depicted in the film, it was far from obvious.
Furthermore, Harvey's death invalidates something far more important than the ending. Because if Harvey's dead, that means Batman killed him. After the whole movie making such a huge point about Batman refusing to break his one rule, refusing to kill the Joker even after everything, to have him kill his own friend would betray the film in a stupid fucking way.
Even still, you could argue that it doesn't invalidate the rule because it was an accident. If you think that, you still miss the point entirely.
Batman doesn't kill. Not purposefully, not accidentally.
Any bending of that is an utter violation of both the rule and the character. And yes, for the record, I hate the "I don't have to save you" moment from BATMAN BEGINS. I only justify it as thinking that Batman knew Ra's well enough that the bastard would be fully able to save his own ass.
But Batman does not kill. Period.
So if Harvey's dead, I call bullshit. Even to the point that it just might totally unravel the film (presuming the rushed madness of Harvey didn't already do that).
Honestly, back in the day, they said that he would be the focus of the third movie, and that's seriously what needs to happen. Not just because I love him, and not just because he needs a whole film to really develop, especially outside of the Joker's shadow, Entertainment Weekly said that the Two-Face transformation feels "all at once too much and not enough"), but because bringing Two-Face in full-force is the only way I can imagine them truly carrying over the power of this film, of having even a candle in the wind's chance of following THE DARK KNIGHT.
Because, let me stress yet again, I loved the vast majority of THE DARK KNIGHT. But the above factors will never allow me to fully embrace it, and from an objective standpoint, put a serious cramp on the film as a film, not just what I'd want it to be.
All that said, if I had to choose between them getting Harvey Dent right or getting Two-Face right, I'd say Harvey without a moment's hesitation. And for that, I am deeply pleased.
*Someone remarked that they "Anakin Skywalkered Harvey." God help us all.
**That said, I still tell myself that Doctor Octopus' arms reactivated, pulled him out of the water, and gave him Robo-CPR, lalalala, not listening.