July 9, 2008

'Dark Knight' Explores Yet Another Side Of Harvey 'Two-Face' Dent

By Larry Carroll, with additional reporting by Shawn Adler and Jeff Cornell (MTV.com)

What if Barack Obama were killing off bad guys in his spare time, all in the
name of "change we can believe in"? What if we discovered that Mahatma Gandhi
had inspired all those movements for civil rights by secretly doing away with
those who opposed him? What if a crusading attorney general for a city known as
Gotham was exposed as breaking the very laws he claimed to enforce, revealing a
dark side that lusted for ... $1,000-an-hour call girls?

OK, maybe that last one isn't so much of a stretch.

The themes of "golden boy" politicians, the fine line between enforcing the
law and breaking it, and the Jekyll-and-Hyde hidden lives of those who represent
us existed long before such scandal-inducing names as Clinton, Spitzer and
Nixon. And for 63 years, they've fueled the story of Harvey "Two-Face" Dent,
who'll receive a vivid new chapter when Aaron Eckhart brings the character back to the big screen in href="/News/200805/12015899.html">The Dark Knight.

"I was familiar with Dent as much as I knew he was an iconic Batman
character," the Thank You for Smoking star said of the scarred Gotham City district attorney. "I didn't
know the ins and outs of Dent. But when I got the part, thank goodness,
[director] Chris [Nolan] sent me the comic books, and I started to do research and I met people. It's
funny, because when people knew that I was going to be Harvey 'Two-Face,' they
came out of the woodwork, and the most unlikely people were coming up to me with
facts. It was like baseball facts, like the 1932 World Series, third inning. ...
How do you know this stuff?"

The fact is that although Joker, Penguin and the Riddler make up the holy
trinity of comicdom's most vividly painted supervillains, it is Two-Face whose
visibility has grown the most over the past two decades. When the character made
his first appearance in Detective Comics No. 66 (August 1942), the
legendary Bob Kane and Bill Finger conceived of him as another gimmicky villain,
along the lines of the Dick Tracy villains so popular at the time. But as the
decades passed, Dent's backstory became far more complicated.
"It speaks to that core in all of us, which is that we have a light side and
a dark side," explained comic book writer Jeph Loeb. "He's just a goofy guy with
half a face who flips a coin and decides whether or not that should be the
reason to commit crimes, until you realize who he was and why he believes in
anything."

While many things about Harvey have changed over the years (like his cheesy
dependence on committing crimes at, say, two o'clock on February 2 in honor of
his name), certain key elements have remained largely in place: his crusader's
representation of Batman's better instincts; the acid bath that opens his eyes
(eye?) to the unfair flipside of life; Batman's guilt over not being able to
save him. And then, of course, there's the coin - a long-standing cinematic
device that Kane and Finger reportedly swiped from the 1932 film Scarface, and
which was most recently recycled by Javier Bardem in No Country for Old Men.

"I don't have the coin," Eckhart said. "I enjoyed playing with the coin, but
I don't have it. I didn't keep it."

When Batman really came into his own with the 1960s TV show that bared his
name, loyal comics fans wondered where Two-Face had gone. The character had
fallen on hard times, making only a handful of recent comic appearances while
being phased out for more "kid-friendly" villains. The campy nature of the Adam
West show sought to maintain that tone.

"Yeah, but the Riddler was dark. And obviously, they would have made him
pertinent for that time," Eckhart argued of the character's omission. "I would
have liked to have seen him, because I watched that show."

In 1971 writer Dennis O'Neil returned Two-Face to prominence as one of Bruce
Wayne's key enemies, and later work by Frank Miller, Grant Morrison and Andrew
Helfer gave Dent a complicated backstory that dug deeper into his schizophrenia.
Various books have explored what would happen if Dent could surgically repair
his appearance (it still won't fix his mind) or if his coin were taken away
(again, bad results), but it wasn't until 1989 that Dent took baby steps toward
true superstardom in Tim
Burton's Batman.

None other than Billy Dee "Lando Calrissian" Williams was cast in that movie as an unscarred Dent, a
role Burton had hoped to develop further in the sequels he'd never make. In the
years that followed, Two-Face would adapt to the kid-friendly leanings that had
once kept him in the background, leading to Tommy Lee Jones becoming the
first actor to ever take on both sides of the role.

"I thought he died," Lee replied recently when we told him Eckhart was
bringing the character back. "Aaron is a good actor. He can take care of
himself. But that makeup is difficult!"

"It's a different movie, it's a different tone," Eckhart said of TLJ's
performance in 1995's Batman Forever. "The tone of that Batman is completely
different than Chris' vision."

And as fans will soon see, the look of the character is quite different as
well. But at his core, Harvey is still tapping into those same shadowy themes
that he has for decades.

"Chris has taken [Two-Face] in a slightly more realistic, darker tone,"
Eckhart explained. "I love Harvey Dent. When I read the script, I was amazed by
the trajectory and transformation that Harvey has. Given the fact that the Joker
is in the movie and propels the action, I was surprised by how much Harvey had
to do, and what a light he is in the movie. It's interesting to get to know
Harvey as an altruistic leader of Gotham City who wants to clean up the crime,
and confronting the issues that others won't confront. And then to see his
transformation into Two-Face, I think that the audience is going to have a
little more empathy and understanding."

Summing up his modern spin on the duality of a villain who'd leave his crimes
up to the flip of a coin, Eckhart added: "If you notice who Harvey Two-Face
disposes of, it's not random. It's not. It still has a sense of justice attached
to it. Ultimately, Harvey still can't get away from his own true nature."