Those members of the moviegoing public who aren’t steeped in Batman lore may be wondering why Aaron Eckhart’s turn as seemingly upstanding but bland District Attorney Harvey Dent is getting so much play in the ever-expansive Dark Knight marketing campaign. That’s because one of the most indelible members of Batman’s rogues gallery has never gotten his due on the screen.
“On the campy 1960s Batman television series, the writers imported pretty much every major villain from the namesake comic book -- the Joker, the Riddler, the Penguin and Catwoman, etc. -- but not Two-Face,” writes Geoff Boucher in the Los Angeles Times. “He was simply too gross.” Two-Face is the villain Harvey Dent becomes after half his face is scarred with acid. You may or may not have gleaned this from Joel Schumacher’s overstuffed Batman Forever, in which Tommy Lee Jones…I don’t want to say acts, exactly, but at least appears onscreen as Two-Face. If you blinked, you missed the brief clip explaining the character’s origins and were left to wonder who this cackling doofus playing second fiddle to Jim Carrey could possibly be.
In theory, The Dark Knight will rectify this slight, but so far the marketing team has shown rare restraint, keeping the character under wraps while letting the Joker run wild. There’s plenty of Dent in the trailers, but no Two-Face. “That's right, people don't really know yet," Eckert told the Times. “I can tell you that, basically, when you look at Two-Face, you should get sick to your stomach. Being the guy under all that, well, that was a lot of fun for me. It's like you would feel if you met someone whose face had pretty much been ripped off or burned off with acid. I can't talk about it beyond that because I don't want to give away too much of the plans by Chris.”
It’s probably too much to hope that the character will remain incognito until the movie opens, which is a shame. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could all get sick to our stomachs together?
