The Geek Beat: Believing in Harvey Dent

by Elisabeth Rappe Aug 26th 2008 // 5:03PM

Filed under: The Geek Beat



I had planned to do a column ranking the boys of summertime the way I had with the women – but as I've been plotting it out, I realized it wasn't going to work. The roles men are given are infinitely more heroic, interesting, and complex, and any ranking would quickly become a list of favorites rather than best. And it's predictable – Tony Stark, Wall E, Harvey Dent, end of story, and totally boring. The more I tried to make it less so, the more slippery the concept became, and I realized it was all a thinly veiled excuse to write about one of the characters in particular: Harvey Dent. And with Devin Faraci's call to analytical arms, it's like a sign from the movie gods to get into meatier territory.

The most highly anticipated element of The Dark Knight for me was also what ended up being the most disappointing – Harvey "Two-Face" Dent. In the afterglow of opening weekend, people looked askance at me when I voiced this aloud before half-heartedly defending Christopher Nolan's vision. But in all the is-he-isn't-he-dead debate of late, it's became apparent that more people agreed with me than not.


Yet, despite the story flaws, Dent ranked high for me on the "best of summer" list. I'd be lying if I claimed it wasn't largely because of Aaron Eckhart, who not only is a consistently good performer, but who's golden looks mark him as the second coming of Viggo Mortensen. Eckhart is what makes Dent work at all. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized you could wrench a proper defense out of the character – starting with those looks, really. He's the epitome of purity and goodness, the White Knight of Gotham, a refugee of Camelot. The chirpy slogan, which slapped against anyone else's face, would be laughable. Eckhart's Dent is someone you believe in – and however rushed and incomplete his transformation, his fall remains bitterly tragic. It's that staple of Greek tragedy, hamartia, the character who intends to hit the mark but goes sadly astray. (Of course, that term opens its own can of debatable worms, let's just go with the quick and common definition of "fatal flaw and tragic consequences.")

Nolan really dug more into classic literature with Dent than comic books – I'm not sure if the credit goes to him or David S. Goyer, but the allusions are top notch. There's a lot of emphasis on knighthood and honor in The Dark Knight, and it's not nearly as glib and corny as it seems on first glance. Nor is it precisely a modern de-construction of what those labels mean, or what a hero is. If you go back into your medieval texts (stop snoring, this is important!), and read Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the Morte d' Arthur, even Beowulf, you see a constant theme of imperfect and flawed knighthood. Arthur's knights were all like Harvey Dent – good men all, but with a fine crack just under the surface that gave when pushed enough, making them susceptible to all the baser sins. The chivalric quests a medieval knight faced were usually designed with the end of making him violate his oath somehow – and they were often concocted by otherworldly and dangerous individuals. If Dent borrows his white knighthood from somewhere literary, it's Sir Gawain, a knight who's greatest sin is his dedication to perfection, a false modesty that needs a lesson in humility. Unfortunately, for Dent, it comes at the hands of someone far nastier and more destructive than anything of Arthurian legend.

When you look at Dent's story from a smaller scale, as Greek tragedy or medieval romance, it becomes a little more acceptable. Dent is a tragedy you can see coming from a mile away, not because we know the story from the comic books, but because good men are inevitably destroyed. His quest for perfection, both personal and political, is destined to fail because we mortals never allow for those internal flaws. Even without the Joker, something would have pushed Dent over the edge because of that crack running under his surface. Call it righteous anger, call it a buried psychosis, it doesn't matter. He ignored it at his peril.

It's fittingly medieval, too, that Dent's collapse really comes about due to losing his lady fair – while I still give Rachel Dawes more credit than most viewers, she's placed in a generally thankless role of medieval damsel in distress. The White and Dark Knights both seek to earn her favor with greater deeds of civic prowess and in true chivalric fashion, she holds herself aloof. Dent takes her loss harder than Bruce Wayne does, and becomes monstrous in his grief. And frankly, he has our sympathy in it. Supposedly, that's what defines a true hamartia in drama – when a character's change can elicit the greatest fear and sympathy from its audience.

It's the level of villainy that, ultimately, disappointed us all. When Dent finally embraces the Two-Face persona, we expected a true split between Dent's humanity and his depravity, a psychotic indecision that went deeper than the need for a coin toss. The arc feels cut short. But if you pretend the comic character doesn't exist, it works better. Dent's desire to clean up the city via legal means becomes, in his inhuman state, a cold-blooded and unreasonable justice. He was always a man of moral absolutes who, when shoved, really has no room for a middle ground of schizophrenic indecision. He can either be the White Knight of Gotham, or true Dark one, but nothing in halves.

And what makes the story bitterly frustrating is that Dent doesn't get a moment of regret or redemption, like Boromir (arguably, a character closer to Nolan's Dent than anything of the comic pages) in Lord of the Rings. He dies despised, though pitied even by those he threatened. But in this, he's no different than those flawed knights before him – Gawain, Lancelot, Tristan, or all those Greek tyrants, and Shakespearean kings. You always want more, and you always want the ending to be different – and in this, Nolan remains stubbornly real world, where necks are broken, police inquiries must be satisfied, and a fragile Gotham needs a media scapegoat.

Whew. That was heavy, heavy stuff. It would have been so much easier to call him the dreamiest dude of 2008, but it was so much more than that. He broke my heart with all his anguish and ruined ideals, and that sort of punch is what allows Dent to take the summer prize. Given the bar I've now set for myself, I better get to work writing next year's piece – it's going to Wolverine, obviously, so I'll start comparing him to a Byronic hero pronto.

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