Great “The Dark Knight” analysis

Joshua James at Daily Dojo steered me toward a screenwriting blog I somehow had not managed to find, a blog hosted by screenwriter Todd Alcott (blog link provided here). So I go to Todd’s blog and I’m immediately sucked into a four-part series he has written in which he provides some of the best analysis of The Dark Knight I have read. Here are the links: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.

I started reading Part 4 and my “you had me at hello” moment was this observation:

For the people who feel shortchanged by the Two-Face storyline, think about this: the entire movie is about him, the struggle for his soul, which represents the soul of Gotham City. Bruce Wayne has sacrificed everything he has (except, of course, all his power and wealth, obviously) for the “good” part of Gotham, the Joker keeps aborbing more and more of the city’s power and wealth and then squandering it, and the two of them literally tear Harvey Dent in half. When folks complain that Two-Face isn’t in the movie enough, I think what they mean is that the cool special-effects makeup isn’t in the movie enough, and that Two-Face doesn’t have any kind of outlandish, colorful scheme to implement. Well, that’s too bad, but the Joker doesn’t have a scheme either. There isn’t any “end” to this for the Joker, he wants to take the whole world and send it down the toilet — an endless project of disorder to match Bruce’s endless project of order. Whereas Two-Face has the opposite of a grand scheme — he wants to kill the people who made him suffer, and then kill himself. The folks who pine for a “bigger” Two-Face story, one to match the one in, say, Batman Forever I guess, where he teams up with the Riddler to build a giant mind-control ray, miss the great tragedy at the heart of The Dark Knight — they want a supervillain, whereas the Nolans have imagined him as a human being.

Amen and allow me to add my two cents. Of all the characters in TDK, Harvey is the one who goes through the most dramatic personal transformation. In Act One, he is a Class A certifiable hero, an elected official standing tall on the right side of the law, someone who even Bruce Wayne determines is worthy of public support:

WAYNE
“I believe in Harvey Dent.” Nice
slogan, Harvey. Certainly caught
Rachel’s attention. But then I 
started paying attention to Harvey,
and all he’s been doing as our new
D.A., and you know what? I believe 
in Harvey Dent. On his watch, Gotham 
can feel a little bit safer. A little 
more optimistic. So get out your 
checkbooks and let’s make sure that
he stays right where all of Gotham
wants him…
(raises his glass)
All except Gotham’s criminals, of
course. To the face of Gotham’s
bright future — Harvey Dent.

Harvey staves off a would be assassin in the courtroom. Harvey sends 500 criminals behind bars in the largest mass arrest in Gotham’s history. Harvey works in concert with Batman to get the bad guys. He’s a hero. But even in his set-up, we see the seeds of his character’s Deconstruction:

* Harvey is cock-sure and hell-bent on achieving his goals. As long as he’s on the right side of the law, that’s fine. But if he ever goes to the ‘dark’ side, we can anticipate him carrying with him that same single-minded purposefulness — with negative ramifications.

* It’s Harvey himself who voices this notable line: “I guess you die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become a villain.” Harvey was prepared to die a hero if Rachel could live. Unfortunately, she died and he lived, albeit with a grossly disfigured face (a turn of events which is hinted at [ironically] with Bruce Wayne’s toast — “To the face of Gotham’s bright future — Harvey Dent.”)

After Harvey loses Rachel, he is a seething mass of anger. Remember how he refuses to take any pain medication or allow any reconstructive surgery. What’s that about? Playing an armchair psychologist for a moment, I suspect Harvey’s initial motivation here is that he wants to feel the physical pain because it’s an echo of his emotional pain caused by the loss of his lover Rachel. Re his face: My guess is that since the disfigurement occurred at the same time as Rachel’s death, he needs to see his face as a constant reminder of her death, to fuel his righteous rage.

That’s speculation, of course, but this isn’t: While Harvey lies in a hospital bed, left to stew in his fury, the Joker sees an opportunity — to steer Harvey toward the ‘dark’ side. And as I alluded to in a previous post, the scene between the Joker and Harvey is one of the most gripping sequences in the movie:

While Harvey has all this anger roiling around, it is the Joker who provides the ‘wisdom’ to point Harvey down his path of revenge, disunity, and eventual death. That’s quite a transformation arc and, as I say, the most significant character evolution in the movie.

So when Todd says, “For the people who feel shortchanged by the Two-Face storyline, think about this: the entire movie is about him, the struggle for his soul, which represents the soul of Gotham City,” that is an insightful observation — and one with which I agree.

Read all of Todd’s analysis of TDK. Great stuff.

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