Two-face
Two-Face is a fictional character to which the American entertainment company WarnerMedia holds the rights. The character is the main character in a number of comic book publications in the program of WarnerMedia-owned DC Comics and has also found marketing in a number of merchandising products including action figures , posters and trading cards .
The character of the Two-Face gained notoriety above all as a recurring opponent of the superhero character Batman in his comics and cartoon series, and more recently in the movies Batman Forever (1995) and The Dark Knight (2008).
The character was first featured in a story in Detective Comics # 66, August 1942. This story was written by Bill Finger , while the drawings were by Bob Kane , who are therefore considered to be the joint creators of Two-Face.
Publication history
Over the decades, DC-Comics has published numerous one-shots and mini-series that focus on the two-face character, such as the graphic short novel Two Face Strikes Twice by Jean Marc DeMattheiss from 1995 or the anthology Two Face and the Riddler from 1996.
Fictional biography
Two-Face's real name is Harvey Dent and is the former Gotham City District Attorney who has been severely disfigured since being attacked with acid by a defendant in the courtroom. The film adaptations often deviate from the original version. As a result, Dent's face splits in the middle into two completely opposite halves: the immaculately beautiful, attractive, handsome right half of the face and the acid-eaten, scarred and repulsive left half of the face.
Two-Faces physical disfigurement was followed by severe emotional damage, which essentially corresponds to the split in personality , but is supplemented by all sorts of flashy, conspicuous ingredients that provide narrative material. For example, Dent only wears clothes that are divided in color in the middle. In German-speaking countries, the figure was also known for many years as "Doppelgesicht" or "Januskopf", whereby it should be noted that Two-Face named Janus , in allusion to the double-headed Roman god of doors and gates and without the responsible American authors anything suspect from the older German translation of the figure name, occasionally used as an alias in the English-language original.
Two-Faces trademark is a silver dollar, which is embossed with a head on both sides and which serves as a decision-making aid. The head on one side is scratched, the head on the other is spotless and clean. The two heads of the coin obviously symbolize the two halves of Two-Face's personality. When Two-Face is in a situation where it is necessary to make a decision, he will throw the coin in the air, catch it and base his further action on which of the two heads has fallen up. If the intact head is visible, Dent acts in the sense of his "good half", if the scratched head is visible, he acts in the sense of his "bad half".
Fictional biography in The Dark Knight
In The Dark Knight , Two-Face is also a prosecutor named Harvey Dent, who has sent a large number of felons to prison. That is why he is celebrated as a hero and called a white knight.
However, as the film progresses, Dent and his fiancée Rachel are held captive by the Joker in two different warehouses. However, Commissioner Gordon and Batman can find out where they are, whereupon Batman makes his way to Rachel and Gordon to Dent. When Batman arrives, he realizes that it's not Rachel who is in this warehouse, but Dent, who fell into a pool of petrol while trying to free himself. While trying to save him, the gasoline ignites on the left side of Harvey Dent's face. Gordon fails to save Rachel. The Joker brings Two-Face out of the hospital and motivates him to avenge Rachel's death. He finds out that Commissioner Gordon couldn't get to Rachel on time and takes his family hostage. However, Batman can prevent worse by killing Dent.
origin
The figure of Dent, split into a good and a bad personality, has recognizable references to the title character or the title characters from Robert Louis Stevenson's novel The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde from 1878 on. It can also be assumed that the relatively recent American film version of the subject in 1932 with Fredric March in the lead role inspired Finger and Kane to create the figure of Two-Face. Even on current posters, Jekyll and Hyde are often depicted with half faces to indicate that they are the same person. This goes so far that in the musical version Dr. Jekyll is right-handed and Mr. Hyde is left-handed.
Appearance
Two-Face is generally portrayed as a stately man with all the characteristics of classic masculine, “ Apollonian ” attractiveness, both in terms of his stature and his physiognomic features in the right half of his face. However, the left half of his face is mostly depicted as a "swollen mess". Dent's disfigured facial area, especially the severity of his injuries, has been depicted differently in the past.
Dent's left half of his face is a kind of fleshy, musky mass that is criss-crossed with scars and overgrown with countless bumps and bumps. The color of Dent's deformed left half of his face varies considerably between chrome oxide green (when he first appeared), moss green, purple, orange, pink, gray and brown. It therefore seems to be primarily left to the discretion of the colorist who works in each case which color shade is used in the individual case. In the movie Batman Forever , Dent's face was painted a pungent pink tone, in the animated series by Bruce Timm he was shown with a light blue face. In the movie The Dark Knight , his disfigurement is attributed to a severe burn instead of acid, which is why the half of the face here looks badly burned. Dent's elevations on the face are usually depicted as being significantly receded: his left eyelid is shortened and sometimes even completely disappeared, so that a bulging, staring eyeball seems to grow out of the eye socket. The left half of his lip is also often badly damaged or has disappeared, so that his teeth are sometimes visible. Dents auricle is also severely damaged or even absent in some cases. Overall, a zombie-specific interpretation can be seen in more recent works.
In English-language video games, Two-Face often has an extremely grumpy-creepy-sounding voice, the changing intensity of which is used to clarify his emotional fluctuations.
In earlier versions, Dent's hair was shown as being only slightly damaged (which would have simplified plastic surgery), while newer versions show it as changed in color or even completely destroyed by Maroni's acid attack.
According to the publisher, Two-Face is 1.82 meters tall and weighs 83 kilograms. His eye color is blue, in many versions there is an iris heterochromia , his hair is sometimes shown in different shades of black or brown, nuanced, in rare cases also white. His wedding ring is still on his right hand .
characterization
In Dent, there is always a conflict between a good side that seeks to do good and a bad, dark, criminal, and vengeful side that seeks to do “bad”. Not only do the good and the bad Dent alternate in phases, in the sense of an exclusive domination of the man by one of two polar personalities, but sometimes also exist at the same time, violently at war, in conflict with one another. Accordingly, Dent's emotional state is subject to great fluctuations: sometimes he is relatively calm and thoughtful, other times he seems downright hysterical and unstable; The hyperactive urge to take action alternates with clarified nonchalance. On some occasions his mental illness seems to have a more neurotic character, but sometimes it slips into a psychotic one , with the accompanying loss of reality.
Recent stories often emphasize his former good friendship with Commissar Gordon and / or Batman / Bruce Wayne. Thus it stands as a symbol of how deep even the righteous can fall in the fight against evil .
Character biography
Harvey Dent was named Harvey Kent when he first appeared in Detective Comics # 66. However, the name Kent was very soon changed to the familiar "Dent" to avoid confusion among readers due to an obvious association with Clark Kent ( Superman ), another character in the publisher's range of figures. The two-face character appeared three times in the 1940s and twice in the 1950s (plus some copycat characters used after Dent was healed for the first time, first Dents Butler Wilkins, then an actor named Paul Sloane , who was to portray Dent in a film adaptation of his résumé and eventually fell into the delusional idea of being Dent himself, and most recently a man named George Blake).
In the 1960s, Two-Face was removed from the series in favor of more child-friendly opponents. In 1971, Dennis O'Neil reintroduced Two-Face to the Batman series, making him one of the archenemies.
While Dent's youth and early adulthood went completely untreated for many years, they were examined retrospectively in the 1980s and 1990s. Batman Annual No. 14 established Dents' disturbed relationship with his father, and the one-shot "Batman: Two Face" from 1995 added in retroactive continuity that Harvey Dent was often beaten as a child by his alcoholic father and - hinted - even sexually had been abused . From this father, Dent also received his famous double-headed silver dollar coin, Two-Faces later trademark, as a lucky charm (in earlier versions the silver dollar had originally belonged to Salvatore Maroni, Dent's later attacker). Mr. Dent himself used the coin to weigh when to hit his son and when not. All of these subsequent biographical additions were primarily intended to increase the psychological credibility of Dent's character.
The traditional ingredient of Two-Face's creation is his background as a professional high-flyer: After his admission as a lawyer, Dent embarked on a career with the Gotham public prosecutor. Because of his professional skills and his good looks - the press christened the beau "Apollo" Dent - he was promoted to district attorney as a young man after a lightning career. Dent found personal happiness in his marriage to Gilda Kane, who, to the chagrin of both, remained (apparently) childless.
The mainspring of his actions were abnormal professional zeal and a burning urge to pursue his own vision of justice. Two of Dent's main allies in his fight against the rampant crime in Gotham at the time were Police Captain James Gordon and the ominous vigilante Batman. The "triumvirate" worked together very successfully for several months in the fight against the Gotham underworld. While Batman found the criminals' hiding place, Gordon carried out the arrest and Dent usually represented the charges against them.
The meeting with Dr. Rudolph Klemper, a psychiatrist charged with several murders. However, since the public prosecutor's office could not convict Klemper due to a lack of evidence, Dent was forced to release the doctor from police custody. Before his release, Klemper, who was actually a serial killer , gave Dent in a haughty manner, hinting but unequivocally, to understand that he had actually committed the acts accused of him. He also let it be known that he sees himself as a double personality: an amalgam made up of the honorable citizen Rudolph Klemper on the one hand and the murderous criminal Rudy Klemper. Klemper thought instinctively to meet a kindred soul in Dent, believed that he also had a second personality and tried to "awaken" it.
In fact, Dent began to develop something like a “second self”, which quickly gained enormous momentum. Dent first murdered Klemper in a desperate attempt to demonstrate their otherness by destroying his house with an explosive device. After that, Dent's change began to become more and more apparent: he suggested fabricating evidence against suspects he otherwise could not get hold of, and even suggesting the murder of criminals who could not be legally "pegged". His allies began to doubt Dent's sanity, and public opinion began to turn against him.
Dent hoped to restore his public image through the large-scale trial of gang leader Salvatore Maroni. Due to the overwhelming burden of proof, the "Maroni" case seemed to be as good as won. But at the trial, Maroni took revenge: Adrian Fields, Dent's personal assistant, who was on Maroni's payroll, smuggled a cartridge filled with vitriol (a sulfuric acid) into the courtroom. This threw Maroni Dent in the face in the courtroom during his plea . The left half of Dent's face was severely disfigured. Maroni was shot dead by the guards in the courtroom, Dent was admitted to hospital.
Shocked by the sight of his disfigured face in the mirror, the "bad Harvey", who had been dormant in Dent's subconscious for a long time, finally won the upper hand and took control. He scratched the silver dollar he had received from his father and from then on made his actions dependent on the toss of the coin.
In the 1980s, the Two-Face Origin story was revised by the famous author Frank Miller : Miller established a bipolar personality disorder coupled with paranoid schizophrenia as the root cause of Dents suffering. According to Miller, a dispositive susceptibility to this had always been inherent in Dent, due to his difficult childhood, latently pronounced and finally due to the shock experience of Maroni's attack or the sight of the disfigurement caused in this way.
Dent's first act as Two-Face was the murder of his former assistant Fields. When he tried to kill his own father shortly afterwards, he met Batman for the first time since his "accident". Since then, his unpredictability and once close relationship with Batman has made him one of Batman's most dangerous opponents. Dent later killed Aldrich Meany, who had taken his place as District Attorney for Gotham, and dealt a heavy blow to Batman's partner Dick Grayson aka Robin , who indirectly contributed to Meany's death. Grayson ultimately gave up his identity as Robin as a result of this incident and became Nightwing.
Another complication of the relationship was established in the 1980s by the establishment of a bond between Two-Face and Jason Todd, the second Robin: in Batman # 410 and # 411 it was revealed that Todd's father, Willis Todd, was named after the serious illness of his wife with cancer had joined Two-Faces gang and had offered this as a henchman. Willis Todd was later shot by his client after he failed on an order or the coin chose the wrong side. Todd was later able to arrest Two-Face, but decided to spare him in favor of Batman's ideals.
The marriage with Gilda Kane (or Dent) eventually divorced when she came to the realization that Dent could no longer be cured. She later married Paul Janus and conceived a pair of twins from Dent using in vitro fertilization ( Batman: Two Face Strikes Twice , 1991). Dent, who still loved Kane, tried to win her back and accuse Janus of crimes, but ultimately had to admit that his ex-wife was lost to him forever. Later, Two Face likes to surround itself with two young women who symbolize the angel and devil principle . To what extent he enters into a physical relationship with Light Women, however, is - as with most villains in Gotham City - unclear.
Dent has already cooperated with a large number of Gotham criminals, such as the Joker, the Penguin , Doctor Moon , the Ravager and the Tallyman. His position fluctuates continuously from simple hitman to gang leader.
Earthquake and no man's land
After the great earthquake of 1998, which left Gotham City behind as a landscape of rubble and resulted in the American government declaring the city a no man's land and separating it from the rest of the United States, Two-Face became a warlord . He gathered a large number of people around him and occupied a large part of the abandoned city, which he declared to be his domain. What was striking was the brutality that Dent showed when dealing with other people: he proceeded with great ruthlessness when expanding his territory and when advancing into the territories of the other parties fighting for Gotham, and in particular killed during an attack on Batmans "Bat-Sector" several dozen of its residents.
Dent, along with his accomplice and executioner, the Tallyman, kidnapped his former friend Commissioner Gordon and put him on a show trial for his activities following the declaration of Gotham City as no man's land. In this "trial" he acted in a dual role as judge and public prosecutor. Gordon eventually outwitted Two-Face by calling Harvey Dent to be his defense attorney. With his brilliant plea, he succeeded in obtaining an acquittal for his client. The confused Two-Face, who had not counted on this old part of himself and the judgment, then surrendered and placed himself in the care of the Blue Boys, the faction of the former Gotham City police.
Unhappy love, healing and relapse
Dent fell in love with the policewoman Renee Montoya during the no-man's-land period, a love that went unrequited. In order to win Montoya over, Dent came out as a lesbian and accused her of murder - in the hope that she would turn to him in the desperate situation of her own. Meanwhile, Montoya was able to prove her innocence and evade Dent's wishes.
Dent played a role in the insane Tommy Elliot's attempt to assassinate Batman to satisfy his irrational hatred of the crime fighter. Elliot, a talented surgeon, used plastic surgery to restore Dent's damaged face using plastic surgery to encourage Dent to cooperate. What Elliot hadn't considered, however, was that restoring his face would restore Dent's sanity. Dent then helped Batman fight Elliot and apparently shot him while fighting on a bridge over the Gotham River. Elliot's body, which fell into the waters of the river, has not yet been found. Dent, meanwhile, was declared sane and rehabilitated.
Since then he has nevertheless helped the Joker to escape from the psychiatric hospital at Arkham Asylum , but also declared himself - under the significant name Janus - in Batman's absence, but at his express request, to protect the city of Gotham ( Detective Comics No. . 817). After three months of training by Batman, Dent and Batman defeated the criminals Mr. Freeze and Firebug , whereupon Batman left town and left them to Dents custody. Upon Batman's return, Dent gave up his vigilante activity, but was overcome by feelings of superfluity that fostered a resurgence of the two-face personality.
In the meantime, Dent has apparently murdered criminals Margaret Pie, as well as Arnold Wesker and Anatoly Kniazev ( Detective Comics No. 817), two of Batman's most dangerous adversaries, with double shots in the head. His motives for doing so are so far in the dark.
Eventually, Dent was mentally wiped out in an internal conflict between the Dent personality and the Evil Harvey personality, and Two-Face took control again. With nitric acid and a scalpel he destroyed Dent's left side of his face again and has been volatile ever since.
Alternative versions
In the alternative world story The Dark Knight , Dent's face was also restored, but this meant that the good Harvey personality was irretrievably destroyed with the face restoration. So the monstrous two-face personality was left alone.
In the crossover comic Batman / Daredevil, in which Batman and the comic book hero Daredevil of Marvel -Verlages clashed, it was revealed that Harvey Dent and Matt Murdock (Daredevil's alter ego) had studied together.
Appearances in other media
Two-Face in Live-Action Series
In the Batman series of the 1960s, Two-Faces was not performed because it was feared that such a cruel and gloomy figure would counter the humorous, lively tone of the series. Regardless, a two-face episode was briefly discussed in 1968 with Clint Eastwood in the role of the monster (this time as a news presenter, in whose face a monitor had exploded).
Harvey Dent appears in the first two seasons of the crime series Gotham , played by Nicholas D'Agosto . In the prequel series, set many years before Bruce Wayne's transformation into Batman, Dent is shown as a young district attorney in Gotham City. At this point, the prosecutor has not yet been disfigured by an accident and is portrayed as a friend and ally of James Gordon.
Two-Face in the cinema
Even so, Two-Face could claim to be one of the most famous Batman villains. This was taken into account, among other things, by his appearance in the film Batman Forever from 1995, in which Tommy Lee Jones took over the part of Dent / Two-Face. Originally, when the Warner Brothers Batman film series began in 1989, actor Billy Dee Williams was slated to play the ambivalent villain. Accordingly, Williams also had an appearance in the first Batman film from 1989, here as Harvey Dent in a supporting role.
It was planned to develop him further in the second part, possibly to bring the Maroni assassination into the film and finally to appear as an opponent of the hero in the third part of the Batman series, after the transformation into Two-Face. Williams' lack of awareness among the general public, as well as protests from fan circles who did not want to see a black actor in the role of Dent, who has always been portrayed as white in the comics, prompted the producers to replace Williams.
In the second part, Christopher Walken took on the role of the debonair villain acting in the background as intended for Williams - which was also rewritten by a powerful, politicizing lawyer into a ruthless entrepreneur - and died, unlike Dent, at the end of the film. To avoid any discrepancies, Walken's character was also renamed from Dent (as he was called in the first exposés and scripts) to Max Shreck. In the third part of the series, directed by Joel Schumacher , Dent finally appeared after his transformation into Two-Face. Williams received a severance payment under a clause in his 1989 contract for not having the role.
In contrast to the comics, Dent's incarnation on the screen appears as a pitiless killer, detached from any inner conflict and torments of conscience. The melancholy, contemplative side of the figure was also left out in favor of a hyperactive, screeching overexcitement that is atypical for it. Like the Joker and the Penguin before him in the films of 1989 and 1992, Two-Face died at the end of the Batman film in the final battle with the title hero by falling into a shaft from a great height. Differences to Two-Face in the comics included his responsibility for the death of the Grayson family, the family of Batman's sidekick Robin, as well as his tendency not to bow entirely to chance when tossing his coin, but to throw the coin over and over again to throw until it lands on the side he wants (that is, the outcome he wants occurs).
Harvey Dent appeared in the 2008 Batman Begins sequel The Dark Knight , played by Aaron Eckhart . Here he appears more like a tragic hero than a villain. Harvey Dent is engaged to Rachel Dawes, Bruce Wayne's childhood sweetheart. His face is disfigured by the fire in a severe fire, while Rachel dies in another at the same time. This loss, as well as the influence of the Joker and the pain of the injury complete Harvey Dent's transformation into Two-Face. As such, he takes revenge on everyone he sees responsible for Rachel's death. However, he dies at the end of this film and was only two-face for a short time.
Two-Face in cartoon series
Two-Face also appeared in the Batman animated series by Bruce Timm and Paul Dini . In the English-language original, the actor Richard Moll lent him his voice. Here Dent's personality disorder stems from a deeply rooted trauma that goes back to years of suppressed aggression and caused him to develop a second personality ("Big Bad Harv"). This second personality, in contrast to his noble appearance, was moody and aggressive. It expressed itself in the form of brutal outbursts of anger and fits of rage. Dent's psychological files eventually got into the hands of Rupert Thorne, an underworld grave who tries to use the compromising documents to blackmail the district attorney into acting on his behalf.
In the naturally resulting argument between Dent and Thorne in a chemical factory, the sensitive technical systems were pierced by bullets and a serious explosion occurred that affected Dent's entire left half of the body. The shock of this experience led Dent to go insane: as the criminal master brain Two-Face, he committed from then on deeds that always revolved around the topic of the number "2". For Batman, who was close friends with Dent in his secret identity as Bruce Wayne, the arguments always mean a heavy psychological burden, but only in the beginning.
Based on the idea of portraying Harvey Dent in the Batman films as a colored man, Harvey Dent in the animated series is also a man with Afro-American roots, which, however, is never discussed in detail.
In a later episode, Dent suffered yet another, third, personality split and developed the identity of a vigilante judge (English "The Judge"). This tried to put an end to the crime in Gotham with brutal methods. Two-Face, who had no idea of his identity with the new crime fighter, tried to get rid of the judge, but naturally failed, and this worsened Dent's condition further. In the Batman animated series, Dent is also responsible for the death of Jack Drake, the father of Tim Drake (Robin III). This story appears to be modeled on the relationship between Dent and Jason Todd in the comics. The Robin of the Animated Series is thus a mixture of Jason Todd's personality and Vita and Tim Drake's name. Jason Todd's character does not appear in the cartoon. Tim Drake follows directly after Dick Grayson as his successor. This is probably due to the fact that Jason Todd was brutally slain by the Joker in the Batman story "Death in the Family" and this was not expected of the audience. In order not to have an explanation, the character of Jason Todd was completely omitted from the series. According to other sources, this can also be interpreted as a response to the readers' response to the Batman comics at the time, because Jason Todd was anything but popular with readers. So in the end it was the audience that let Jason Todd die.
Two-Face has not yet appeared in the cartoon series "The Batman". In Batman Beyond , Dent only appears as an illusion in a training simulation that Terry McGuinness, Batman's designated successor, goes through in the Bath Cave.
Two-Face in video and computer games
Two-Face appeared in various Batman video games, usually as the final boss of a level. In Batman: The Animated Series , he was taken hostage by Poison Ivy and Batman must free him. In The Adventures of Batman & Robin (SNES), Two-Face appears as an opponent in the fourth level. In the various adaptations of Batman Forever , he also appears as the final boss in two levels. In Batman: Chaos in Gotham he is the final boss. Two-Face also plays an important role in the video game Lego Batman: The Video Game . There he must also be defeated by Batman in two final levels. He can also be found in Batman: Arkham City , where he acts as the final boss in the Catwomen episodes. He is also an opponent in Batman: Arkham Knight . There Batman has to thwart the bank robberies planned by Two-Face in several side missions. In the latest bank robbery, Batman arrests him and takes him to the GCPD holding cell.