Harvey and the soundtrack for TDK

So I've been listening to the soundtrack for THE DARK KNIGHT on a loop as I've been revising the third draft of the Harvey Dent novel. That may sound like a painfully obvious music choice, but stay with me on this.

When the dumbfoundingly-awesome inviere (would that I could have been at Dragon*Con, to have seen her in person as Six) clued me into the third track, "Harvey Two-Face," she said that I--personally me, John Hefner--needed to hear it. She said that of all the soundtrack, this piece alone deserved some kind of award.

"They got him," she said. "They finally got Harvey."

And she's right. It's a wonderful track. Haunting, full of promise, hope, tragedy, and dread. But I couldn't quite put my finger on what was missing until very recently, when I realized that--just like THE DARK KNIGHT itself--it only covers Harvey, at least one side of Harvey. There's really no Two-Face there.

And I must say again, I've only become more dissatisfied with how they dropped the ball with Harvey in TDK. Really, the most damning evidence is how his whole story--even though he likely had the most screen time of any character--he's swept under the shadow of Heath Ledger's Joker with everyone else. Forgive me for having high standards, but Two-Face is a character that should have hit people every bit as hard as Ledger's Joker, just in different places. They are Gotham's masks of Comedy and Tragedy.

Many critics (the ones more aligned to film than comics) have likened Ledger's Joker to being this year's Anton Chigurh: an iconic mythical figure of terror and chaos that will live on for decades. While I was awed and terrified by Chigurh along with everyone else, I thought to myself, "Just wait till DARK KNIGHT. They think this character has made coin-flipping terrifying? They don't even know, man." But the problem is, they still don't.

Because for Two-Face in THE DARK KNIGHT, the coin-flipping is little more than a gimmick, with only the most tenuous ties to any real meaning or power. The closest things we have are the lines of it being his "father's lucky coin," (an implication known only by us hardcore nerds) and his line at the end about "there's only chance," which comes out of nowhere. This new luck-based life-direction philosophy comes out of nowhere, shoe-horned in at the last minute, and rings ultimately hollow in every way, save for fans going, "Oh, it makes sense, because this is how Two-Face acts anyway, so I can accept it."

No, sorry, fail. It better fits the simplistic Two-Face of the Golden Age, where going ugly (not even the pain of the acid, just being turned ugly) was enough motivation to have someone go crazy and evil. Really, it's not much more complex than that in TDK. In real life, people do not go that crazy that quickly. No, Joker, I beg to differ: sanity, unlike gravity, does NOT require a little push, just as it does not take "one bad day" (as Alan Moore pointed out) to drive a person mad. That simplistic shit only happens in old comic books.

That's just the problem, really. Harvey Dent was a character, while Two-Face was a comic book character.

But honestly, it doesn't piss me off and frustrate me as much as it could, not as much as some other geek things can do. The flip side to this is that, well, I don't have to worry about it overshadowing my novel. I started this book so I could finally tell the story that I've always wanted to see, all the areas that moved me but went underdeveloped or unexplored. Three drafts in, and I'm getting there. I'm damn close, and I'm damn proud.

So why, I wondered, have I been listening continuously to THE DARK KNIGHT soundtrack, when its Harvey themes only convey one part of the story I'm trying to tell? There's no Two-Face in those Harvey themes; there are references to his downfall, his tragedy, but no references to his burning anger, his madness, his resentment, his loathing and his self-loathing bubbling and festering to the breaking point. THAT wasn't there.

But that's when I realized that... it actually was. It's the Joker's theme. That screeching, howling, screaming discord of pain, stress, rage, chaos, and madness... that's what I hear in my head whenever I think of Two-Face.

In fact, in the hospital scene where we see Harvey's breakdown (the last truly great Harvey Dent scene in that film, IMO), where he grabs the coin, tears off the bandages, and screams... correct me if I'm wrong, but they played the Joker's theme there, didn't they?

That's when I realized that the soundtrack as a whole actually fits what I'm trying to accomplish with this book. After all, THE DARK KNIGHT was an ensemble piece, essentially about Gotham as a whole and how it affected each of the individuals who lived there, from the outside in.

But Harvey's the only character who has ties to all those walks of life--Crime Alley, City Hall, Bruce Wayne, Batman, the police, the mob, and the freaks--and as such, Harvey's story alone is a story of Gotham as a whole. In my novel, taken from the first person perspective and told in the present tense, Harvey's story is the story of Gotham--and vice versa--from the inside out.

It's the little epiphanies that make projects like this so thrilling.