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P L A Y E R I N F O R M A T I O N
Your Name: Jansen.
OOC Journal: touchstoned
Under 18? If yes, what is your age?: 23.
Email + IM: ga11imaufry; jamiemckrimmon[@]gmail
Characters Played at Ataraxion: n/a

C H A R A C T E R I N F O R M A T I O N
Name: Harry Lockhart
Canon: Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
Original or Alternate Universe: OU
Canon Point: The end of the film. Approximately the credits scene.
Number: 008 (or some variant thereof.)


Setting:
The setting of KKBB is remarkably similar to any other generic setting from 2005 LA or NYC. People are capable of making mistakes, cops enjoy going to parties, and nothing particularly different ever happens, unless you count one guy having extraordinarily good luck while simultaneously having remarkably bad luck counts as anything to talk about.

History:

Embrey, Indiana. "When in doubt, cut up a pig", faithfully serving as the town motto since 1802. The biggest thing that happened in that town was that one Hollywood flick that went through about twenty years ago, and it wasn't even big. Starring some actor who went on to change his name and become fifteen times as successful after he did it, the most notable thing the town ever produced happened to be people who were leaving it. They all left for different reasons, but the point is, people are from Embrey, they don't actually live there. It's the kind of town where it just works out better that way. Big fish, small pond. Hell, average sized fish, tiny pond.

Harry Lockhart is a pretty normal-to-small sized fish himself, which is probably why it took him longer to leave. He went to high school with this girl, you see, who left first, sometime in junior year. Harmony Faith Lane was a pretty big fish, to continue the metaphor, and she left the little town to go hit the big one, get famous and rich in Hollywood as an actress, and then come back home and save her little sister. The film alludes pretty irrevocably to their father being a pedophile, in what is otherwise a fairly light-hearted storyline, which ultimately winds up being both motivation and plot point later on.

Anyway, this is all flashback. The story starts in earnest with... Well, it starts with a party. (Well technically before that it starts with a different flashback – there's this whole magician thing. I'll come back to it.) Harry's smoking, offending Angelenos by smoking, rescuing moths from pools – whatever. Flashback to New York, where Harry spends most of his days now, boosting car radios and trying to steal toys for his niece for Christmas with his buddy. His admittedly semi-sophisticated alarm hack wiggles free when a train goes by, they run out into the alley, and lo! New York City is full of tough chicks with guns who are apparently totally okay with shooting people who are trying to tell them that their guns aren't loaded. Harry tries to get his friend to drop the gun, his friend insists on waving it around and shouting back at the lady, and she winds up shooting him in the chest – but not before the bullet passes through Harry's arm as he tries to get the guy to back away.

Wham, bam, Harry takes off running again, thank you ma'am, and in evading the cops runs right into –

… an open audition? Okay, sure. Someone else hands him a script and now it's cold reading time. Hilariously, "reality and fiction blur" and this scene happens to be about a guy who got his partner shot during a robbery gone wrong.

Well. Owing to – ahem – recent experiences, Harry nails the fuck out of that audition, going off-script and emoting more methodly than Russell Crowe on his best day ever. He wows everyone in the room, and earns himself a one-way ticket to LA for the rest of the shoot.

Kay, so, he was at a party, remember? The moth in the pool? Awesome. Flashback over, back to the party. He's here to meet up with Gay Perry, the guy who is a rl private eye and is going to apparently teach Harry how to pretend to be one for the movie. Now, while he's waiting on that to happen, he comes across this douchnozzle feeling up this one girl who fell asleep on a pool table?? at a party in LA?? while reading some books that reminded her of her childhood in this stranger's house??? (spoiler: this is harmony reading Jonny Gossamer books, the books that the movie in Embrey were based on that made her decide to become an actress, sort of, so, you know.) Harry stands up for this girl who is being felt up in her sleep and calls the guy out for being an asshole and that hey, maybe they should take this outside where he's going to clearly open a can of whoop-ass up all over this gu-

quick cut to harry getting his ass handed to him in the grass outside. This dude slams his face into the ground, and then just kicks him a couple of times in the side for good measure before sauntering off. Nice try, Harry.

Anyway, he meets Gay Perry now, who helps clean him up, and he meets Corbin Bernsen Harlan Dexter, whose party and house this actually is. The party is for his daughter, woohoo, big reunion between the two of them suddenly for no apparent reason. Totally not plot relevant. On the way out, Harry mentions that he thinks that girl was The One That Got Away, from back home. Perry tells him where he can find her, because everyone in LA knows everyone else, apparently, and he happens to know who she is.

FLASHBACK again btw Harry used to be a magician (see I said I'd come back to it). Harmony helped him with his tricks, namely, where he cut her in half. She scared the living bejeezus out of everyone one day when she started screaming while the chainsaw was eating through the box, and then when the lid was opened and the chainsaw was gone, she was just doing it for attention. "I'm going to be an actress some day." They've been friends since like around age 7 to at least 16, when she left, and in Harry's eyes, she's been the one, the dream girl, ever since he started recognizing girls for the beautifully wonderful things they can be.

/flashback.

So he meets up with Harmony at this other bar, and shows off how clever he can actually be when he feels like it. ("Man, I feel sore. I mean, physically, not like a guy who's angry in a movie in the 1950s.") He doesn't even recognise her for who she is at first – which makes sense, since they haven't seen each other for like fifteen years. She's a quick one though, and she pegs him immediately, and they have a nice little evening and then they go back to his hotel room and –

he gets plastered drunk and apparently sleeps with her friend. Oops.

Narrative happens – they bicker, she apparently cuts the ties, slams the door in his face, he looks really sad, yadda yadda. He goes on to have a stake-out with Perry, the first of his PI lessons with the man.

Okay now cue the ridiculous shit.

Perry was hired by this lady to spy on some dude in a cabin. So they're out there, someone gets in a car and leaves, they follow them, and then the car flies over them and lands in a lake. Okay, sure. They dive in to get the people out of the car, and find a body in the trunk. Oops again. Haul her off – Perry accidentally shot her in the head getting the trunk actually open, even more oops, so no cops – and they leave her by the side of the road. On the way back, they get a phone call from the... cops. Harmony apparently shot herself in the head, and they're supposed to treat all suicides as homicides. It's all very sad, but Perry has to leave, and Harry goes up to his hotel room.

When... Harmony knocks on the door. It wasn't her, it was her sister, and someone told her that Harry is a PI and she wants his help with the case, because her sister took her birth control pill for the day and so obviously was murdered and didn't commit suicide. Of course, because she's The One, he doesn't tell her he was lying, yes he totally is a real PI, and he'll totally help her. There's a spider and some touchy feely that doesn't actually get to the touchy part really and then she leaves because they fight a little because Harry is incapable of not breaking everything he loves, and he decides to take a leak. This winds up entailing a certain amount of... peeing on the body he's just noticed in his shower – surprise! It's the body from the lake. Again. Like the world's worst yo-yo, except that it actually did come back. Cue him and Perry trying – again – to dispose of the same body.

Some more narrative happens, backstory I already gave you, it's well-delivered and pretty and everything's good. Harry and Harmony go off and chat – she tells him that due to the incest she told her little sister that their dad was actually not their dad, that some actor on this one movie was her real father so she she would feel better, and hey, it worked – and Perry has to get back to his actual case – the one with the girl who wanted him to spy on some dude in the cabin? Still important. Harry and Harmony catch the news at this point too, and they discover that the corpse that's been following Harry around LA is actually Corbin Bernsen Harlan Dexter's daughter, the one that party was for. Weird, right? Oh well.

Perry tells Harry to get out of LA, because shit is getting real, and oh by the way you were never actually going to be hired for the movie, they were just using you to shave a few thousand dollars off of Colin Farrell's price tag. Sorry Charlie Harry. Don't be too sad, and yes, actually do leave please, because you're oddly endearing and something bad will happen to you if you stay.

Well, Harry stays.

Bad things happen.

Actually, he was going to leave, he was all the way in the airport like a good boy, when it clicks. He realizes that Perry's case, and his case, "are the same fucking case", and he runs off to tell Harmony about it.

She shuts the door on his enthusiasm, and his left ring finger, which is promptly cut off in the door, because things like that actually happen in real life. He's off to the hospital to get it sewn back on, and then he meets her at a party later only a little bit high on Demerol. Anyway, they learn that surprise surprise, that no-name actor who was in the Jonny Gossamer flick back from Embrey, Indiana went on to change his name (I told you) and became, drum roll please, Harlan Dexter. Shock and amazement! Her sister had hired Perry to spy on the guy in the cabin, had reasoned out that Harlan was apparently her real father, and then was apparently murdered for some reason.

Well both Perry and Harmony also still have real jobs, so the Scooby gang splits up again for a while, and Harry gets cornered by these two tough guys who rip his finger back off and tell him to go back home to NYC. Harmony starts to take him to the hospital again, but gets side-tracked when she realizes Perry's stake-out is a set up, and wow apparently everyone in LA has guns because a macho nacho vendor shoots the shit out of one of the thugs while Harry falls asleep in the car, and a pink haired chick in on the set-up drives him to her house by mistake?? (i'm not even kidding this movie is ridiculous)

Pink haired chick gets shot while Harry is hiding under the bed, and it's super duper sad, and then he shoots the shit out of the guy and is even more sad because Harry is actually very nice and empathetic and doesn't take killing people lightly.

Harry and Harmony have a nice second touchy feely moment that actually gets more with the touchy than before until she tells him she slept with his best friend and they argue again and split up.

And then he runs into Perry who tells him Harmony figured everything out and accidentally kills someone again by complete mistake and feels even more bad about his growing kill count.

And then they get captured by Dexter and he gets his balls electrocuted by way of torture for information but everything's mostly fine aside from where he has a hard time walking.

Things start to happen really fast around here, in case you hadn't noticed.

Harmony steals a car with a coffin and the corpse of Harlan Dexter's daughter and the bad guys chase her. Harry and Perry attempt to catch up, and do, and things are fine in this somewhat small scale shoot out until someone shoots at them both and the bullet goes straight through Perry and hits Harry in the chest too and knocks them both out. Harmony, who fell off the side of an overpass, calls Harry, rejuvenates his heroic aura or whatever, and he gets up and kills basically everyone left, including shooting Harlan after catching a handgun that had landed on the coffin that had landed on the sign on the overpass with the arm of the corpse that he's hanging off of dangling out the side. (Just, take a moment to picture that properly. It's magnificent.)

Harry saves the day, they learn all of it had to do with Harlan having the pink haired girl pose as his daughter while the real one was safely locked up in a mental institution, all so he could "reconcile" with her for – what, you guessed it – money. The universal motivator. Harmony's sister was tailing Harlan, and saw him having some extra-curricular fun with the pink haired girl he'd hired to play his daughter. To her, this looked like incest all over again – real life intrudes in on the semi-fairy-tale narrative once again as we learn that Harmony's little sister did indeed commit suicide. "First her real father, then the shiny new one."

Anyway, everyone else lives, everything's happily ever after, except that Harry's still missing a finger. He stays in LA, and works with Perry now, a real life private eye that in no way at all likely actually hinders Perry's work instead of helping. At all.

Personality:

The problem with Harry Lockhart isn't that he's too smart for his own good, or that his luck is just karma on a rampage, or even that he's a ladykiller who turns too many heads. He isn't supremely skilled, he doesn't have a way with words, and he's not a particularly efficient hero, even if he is a genuinely good person most of the time. He's not a world class criminal, he doesn't even have a particularly cool collection of anything.

Harry Lockhart doesn't even always get to be average.

No, instead, he manages to run in slightly-below-average most of the time, neither at the front of the pack nor actually pulling up the rear. Harry's that guy who was in almost every single one of your classes all four years of high school whose name you think is either Henry, Hunter, or maybe Aiden, although he doesn't look much like an Aiden. Maybe Larry?

Anyway. At a glance, Harry does look like a pretty ordinary person. In general, at least. I mean, he steals things for a living – car radios, audio-visual components, watches, gum, whatever knick-knacks will fit in his pockets at the time – which might be a distinguishing feature, but I guess that depends on your demographic area. He's more or less just your average Joe schlepping it through a lower-middle class lifestyle. He looks fairly non-threatening – more and more non-threatening the longer you let him talk, actually, in most cases – doesn't really ask for a whole lot of your attention most of the time, and maybe seems like he took a few extra years to move out of his parents' basement.

No, see, the problem with Harry Lockhart is that despite all of these appearances, he's not ordinary at all.

See: Harry goes out of his way to help people he cares about.

Throughout the film, we mostly just get to see Harry come to care about Perry, his only friend in LA, and that's a one-sided use of the term, and Harmony, the girl of his teenage dreams from back home. Kind of a skewed sample, but. When Harmony's sister is apparently murdered and she comes to ask him for help, he continues on pretending that he's actually a private detective and agrees to help her out. He continues helping her even after she gets pretty damn angry with him and ceases communication, even when this results in him being shot at, beat up, losing a finger (her fault, actually!!!) legitimately tortured, and the only other person involved says that things are too hot and the investigation will wind up getting one of them killed.

I'll admit, for a lot of this Harry is more or less just along for the ride, but he's along with everything he's got, ready to help and be wherever someone tells him he needs to be. He helps Perry on the numerous occasions they're in some form of danger, and listens to the man even while he's occasionally complaining about something having recently gone wrong.

It's one half of his heroic tendencies, what set him apart from the other protagonist characters in the film who are involved due to family and money. These are the traits that he might actually recognise as being somewhat heroic later on, although his sense of self is ridiculously skewed towards the negative. In his eyes, he can't really do much of anything useful, although he has a few tricks he's proud of and doesn't mind flaunting, and figuring out what he's going to count which way is like shooting kool-aid into a wind-tunnel – no usable diagnostic results, lots of mess, and you don't even get to enjoy the kool-aid.

See: Harry also cares for people he knows almost nothing about.

What is basically our introduction to Harry as an adult character is him trying to defend the honor of this girl who has fallen asleep at a party. He doesn't recognize her yet, doesn't know who this other guy even is, but he whips out the tough guy card and sounds pretty god damn convincing about it – up until he's getting his ass handed to him outside. Later, he tells a corpse who is more or less haunting him that "she deserved better, sweetheart" while begrudgingly leaving her body by the side of the road. Perry had previously described this as "dumping the luggage", a bit of crude casualness that cased Harry to give him a somewhat disgusted look, because she's still a person, and deserves respect.

Later still, he's hiding under a bed when someone is shot on top of it and the girl falls to the floor, seeing wow this guy under her bed she didn't know was there. In a moment that you can tell will haunt Harry for the rest of his days, he holds a finger to her lips to keep her from saying anything to alert the gunman who is still in the house that he is there as well, but he refuses to actually break eye contact with the dying girl until she passes. He then immediately avenges her death in a particularly cathartic execution.

Basically the other half of his recognizable heroism, but good luck getting him to notice or even acknowledge that caring and sympathizing with other people is anything other than normal. New York City's taught a lot of the Indiana boy about keeping some things to yourself, but Harry just happens to be a very open person, about most things. It's not always that awesome a trait to have.

See: Harry is a fantastic example of the dogged underdog.

Harry also is straight up not very good at most common things people define as skills. He can't math for shit, nor does he have a particularly firm grasp on English grammar. He doesn't know Denmark from Denver, and sometimes he says fairly insulting things when caught up in the heat of the moment and whatever his mouth is saying this time. However, despite this, he never appears particularly at a loss. For what to do in that moment, sure, sometimes, but he is amazingly adept at giving himself a moment to be upset, and then dragging himself back up to his knees, then his feet, and moving on with the next task. He does this three times throughout the film to varying degrees.

The first is when the police inform him (incorrectly) that Harmony shot herself. Harry has a moment outside by Perry's car where he's remarkably sad about this, and then he picks himself up and goes inside. Later, just after basically executing that one guy, he has another moment in someone's kitchen where the gravity of what he's just done catches up with him. That time, he gets to hug a dog to speed up the process, but he still gathers himself back together and moves on with the narrative. The third and final time is the most dramatic, when after he and Perry have both been shot and are bleeding out on the highway, a phone call from Harmony and a callback to their shared childhood literally has him get back up on his feet and save the day. There are constantly roadblocks in Harry's way – several of them placed there however inadvertently by himself – but he never stops moving regardless.

See: Harry actually can be skilled when he isn't thinking about it.

There are a few things Harry can do. He's obviously got some understanding of electrical equipment, based on needing to know which things to steal, and how to get around various sorts of alarm systems. He's been arrested five times, which insinuates his knowledge isn't exactly extensive, or perhaps that he simply sucks at planning out all the rest of the robberies, &c., but as it is, he wouldn't be able to be making a living at it if he weren't at least knowledgeable.

Similarly, Harry has a pretty awesome amount of hand-eye coordination. This is evident in his ability to steal small items, and within a couple certain bits of sleight-of-hand performed twice in the movie, as well as his ability to shoot and kill like ten people by the end of it – some of whom are in moving cars, or are standing on the overpass he's currently dangling from. He pulls off some spectacular shooting at the end of the film, but all of these things happen basically when he is either not thinking about them, or is otherwise feeling confident. If anyone else nearby is more competent, Harry will immediately defer to them in most cases, lowering even the number of actions he takes. Fairly consistently, he only accomplishes anything of note if he is the one offering the assistance, or no one else he cares about is paying attention.

Honestly, Harry tends to be one of those people that you either almost instantly find annoying, or tolerate in a sort of wayward-puppy kind of way. He doesn't really mess around with social etiquette – not on any conscious, buck-the-system level, but simply because they're something that requires at least a little bit of consideration for what you're about to say versus what you maybe perhaps shouldn't. He can be polite, when he's not thinking about it, and he reverts back to what you know is a result of his mother attempting to foist some midwestern manners on her poor son, with his 'sirs' and 'ma'ams' between his New York City defensiveness. Some people find such innocent honesty as his own to be somewhat nice, others find it fairly offensive; it really depends on their own personalities. He likes the idea of being the Bad Boy, but he generally winds up falling into the Best Friend category instead, and oddly doesn't really have a problem with that. You mix his big city cynicism with a farmhouse optimism, and you get someone who can be annoyingly naïve but not always where or when you'd expect him to be. He's romantic, even if he has less idea of how to actually go about that than he does mental math, and he repeatedly becomes involved in danger that doesn't actually involve him because he's a little hard-headed and doesn't know how not to stick up for people who seem to need it, even if they actually don't. He can be quick thinking but usually doesn't seem to think at all, and pinning down how smart he actually is or isn't would... take a while.

But yeah, normally he's pretty alright.

Abilities, Weaknesses and Power Limitations:
Harry Lockhart possesses no particular preter, super, or even slightly unnatural abilities, except for possibly being consistently the luckiest slightly-below-average man on the planet. Really all he can lay claim to is having somewhat remarkable hand-eye coordination, attributed by himself to having 'used to be a magician'.

Inventory: Half a pack of cigarettes, a lighter, his clothes, and probably more gum than one person can actually chew in a month. Also his wallet.
Appearance: He looks remarkably like Robert Downey, Jr. without any of the tattoos or Marvel copyright Tony Stark facefur.
Age: 36.

AU Clarification: n/a

S A M P L E S
Log Sample:
Harry was a little more... Shall we say, 'scatterbrained' than usual today. He was in to open the shop as a favour to Jonesy, and had effectively been arms and legs and more occasionally mouth a-kimbo since he'd woken up. The way over here - he'd had to go pick up something from some place he'd already forgotten being to only two hours ago - had been a combination of walking, falling, and awkwardly sort of doing both at the same time. Actually being in the shop had admittedly calmed him down a little bit, but partially inversely made it look and feel as though he were more frenetic than before, since now there was an enclosed space thing to be concerned with.

Having already nearly knocked over a shelf, Harry was currently very concerned with space. If he had to put a bookshelf back up to rights and reorganise all the books that had fallen off it, he would effectively be able to say goodbye to and of the other things he might have only in passing wanted to do today. That, and he just wanted to not leave things in a state for Jonesy. Jonesy was a cool guy. He liked Jonesy. From what he could tell, most people did. The universe liked Jonesy. Harry suspected it had something to do with how much fun it was to say 'Jonesy'. People who had names that were awkward to get out or sounded odd or Germanic tended to have a harder time with popularity, he thought. Unless. Unless you could nickname them. Then the field was even. Actually Jonesy was in itself a nickname, and since the man's first name was 'Mortimer', he supposed that all of this matched his just-now-created-theory. Two points for Harry.

Given the proximity issues he was having with solid things today, he was doing most of his checking from a relatively safe distance. It was much more difficult to knock bookshelves over when you were standing a full two feet away from them, squinting at the book titles, owing purely to your not-being-close-enough-to-them-to-knock-them-over. It was like trying to attack castles with marshmallows and cinnamon rolls - you wouldn't make a dent but it would be sort of amusing to watch you try, and all the people/things that everyone secretly wanted to be around would eventually fail and go do something else. ...Something like that, anyway. His simile got away from him.

So, all in all, a fairly normal day in the bookstore. Shortly hereafter he would finish the crosschecking he was looking at and actually just start being a helpful bookstore owner by sitting in one of the chairs reading a book and answering questions if anyone happened to want to ask someone who looked like another customer just there to enjoy a novel of whatever their particular preference happened to be. Today he planned on reading a selection of Calvin and Hobbes, but that was only because he'd finished reading all the mystery books last time he'd played shop owner and for some reason they'd left him needing the nice grounding presence of mind that simple pranks tended to provide. It was like some sort of obligation to his own motor neurons.

Having finished all the things mentioned though, rather than either Calvin or Hobbes, the first person Harry set eyes on was Gabe, somewhat sullenly wandering around in that manner that most indie directors tended to do, and particularly indie directors who were Gabe, who Harry thought sort of had the angry indie director thing down probably in some former life as well as this one.

'Gabe!' He limbed his way over, by which I mean the legs did the propulsion and the hands set about gesticulating to words that he hadn't even started speaking yet. 'What're you doing in here? I mean, not that seeing you is odd. Just early. I think. Might not be. What're you reading?'

Harry liked Gabe. He really did. He wasn't sure why he liked Gabe so much, equally as much as he wasn't sure why Gabe so tolerated his presence, when honestly it normally felt like he was just annoying him all the time. Maybe Gabe just wanted more spontaneity in his life. Or enjoyed being interrupted when he was trying to read. Or knew that that much annoyance and grey sort of creeping aura around anyone will actually honestly, really not help things no matter how much you might think that it doesn't have an effect. (He'd read through the self-help books the time before last.) Harry sort of doubted a number of these trains of thought, but until Gabe turned and responded to him, there wasn't much else he could do but follow them. And rock back and forth on the balls of his feet a little.

Comms Sample:
[Video opens very prematurely. There's a full thirteen seconds of nothing but a slightly canted room, and then someone from the bridge of the nose up appears from the side of screen. The screen adjusts to be more fully on his face and then over-corrects to be slightly tilted in the other direction.]

So, like, where is this place? I get that it's a ship, but... There's loads of those things all over the place – I can even name you a few – so... where is this one? Is Gay Perry here? If anybody knows where he is then you can just... Beam me to him and he'll know what to do, I guess. Unless any of you guys – or gals, I don't wanna get things thrown at me again like last time – knows where he is then I'd sort of be happy if you could, you know... Do that.

Oh! Is there anywhere to get a decent pizza round here? Or... The money for a pizza, and then the pizza. Maybe anybody who already wants a pizza and doesn't mind sharing with me for now. That would work.