Much as I love Brad Brevet and the work he does at Rope of Silicon, the point of the Harvey Dent stuff has never been about what’s in the screenplay.
We’ve talked about this before, but the script shows what an audience sees, not what is. What the audience was meant to see was that the character was toast, but it was a vague send-off. Which is what has allowed for all the speculation, for Eckhart to say that he’d love to come back for a third film, for Emma Thomas to outright claim that the filmmakers left it open for interpretation, for Eckhart to even have to ASK CHRIS NOLAN THE CHARACTER’S STATUS (which of course led to yesterday’s item).
So enough of the “How could you not know??” stuff. It’s always been up-in-the-air, if you ask me.
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4 responses to “Missing the point on the Harvey thing”
But Kris, would they have held a memorial for him at the end of the film if he was still alive?
I guess I just never questioned it for a second based on that alone and assumed the fact the script says he is dead was sort of the final nail in Dent’s coffin.
I also saw you think the way he died (“off screen”) was “pathetic”. Just curious, did you feel the same about Brolin’s death in No Country? Obviously not exact comparisons, just curious.
A memorial. Yes. Because the point is that the public needed to think him dead. It’s not like we saw a body. Just a giant photo.
The Brolin death in No Country was a stylistic choice (that didn’t really work for me either), one that has been critically defended. Like you say, not exactly comparable.
I tell yah, if there were two faked memorials in The Dark Knight I would take my A+ grade back in a second. I loved the film despite its flaws but that would be too much. On top of that, I thought Two-Face was sorta weak compared to Dent and wouldn’t want to see anymore of him.
Also, the body probably wasn’t shown to keep up the perfect public appearance of Dent and not the scarred nasty version. Just a thought…
Well first of all we didn’t see a memorial for Gordon…and adding another one wouldn’t have come across as much of a stretch, considering it would be following a precedent! And I don’t think Two-Face was weak at all, it may have only seemed a lesser villain performance in the long shadow cast by Heath Ledger’s Joker. And I think the body could be shown to us the audience while being denied to the people. Also, I don’t buy the Brolin death in NCFOM comparison to what’s going on here: the death there was of the hero, and tried to show that sometimes the bad guys win out. Two-Face surving would have just showed us that the pain and torture of life will endure…another message in the same depressing vein as No Country.