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Did You Buy Harvey Dent's Transition Into Two Face?


I don't know if I do. But if you do, then tell me why it was believable to you. Perhaps there's something I'm missing.

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I buy it. He lost his future wife, which alone is traumatic. But look at his face too. How exactly is he supposed to go on with life that way? His whole life in society was done. I think if Rachel had died just the same but Harvey hadn’t lost half his face, he would have been able to cope: he could still work as a DA to get those responsible, and he could probably find a new lover. But without his face, he can’t do anything. The combination of losing Rachel and his face kind of got him to turn bad. Even before he spoke to Joker at the hospital, he yelled at Gordon

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I have to disagree with the face thing, he doesn't seem so vain that losing half his original face would drive him insane by itself. The step is too steep to be relatable. He also does not need his face unblemished to work as a DA. Plastic surgery exists, skin grafts, and face transplants. He could get his face back to a very high degree within a few years at most.

Rachel's death and the loss of a future life together must be traumatic, but he knows the police and Batman were doing everything they could. There's no reason for an intelligent man to turn on them. He doesn't seem so unstable to accept the world view of the very person who did those things, and that's another step to far. I certainly would not flip my world view so casually, and I sense that it would be difficult for so many others as well. Dent would need to have that bitterness, yearning for violence and misanthropy somewhere within him, and that simply is not shown or foreshadowed in any significant way.

Sure, he was ambitious and confident, but not a narcissist or psychopath to any degree. So the psychology does not work in TDK, certainly not in this very short descent into madness. The comics having an already unstable and in later versions abused man coping with his pain his whole adult life go insane makes a whole lot more sense.

So, in conclusion, it happened too fast and there were very few storytelling cues and details shown for it to be believable. If it had been slower, shown more and the 3rd film would have been about Dent, that would have been so much more enjoyable.

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He was still more watchable than Ellen Page's transition to Elliot

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Got to agree with this. I always thought his transition from nice guy fighting for a good cause to bad guy was too unbelievable even after his experiences. He'd need to have some serious inner demons in place already to want to be prepared to commit pedicide thereafter.

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Nah, I agree with redman even though I'm not the biggest fan of this film. The loss of a chick probably was just an add on after becoming a complete freak and being setup by all the corrupt cops. While all the procedures you are talking about are possible it is still such a sudden change that he would have been pissed and hopeless enough to snap. It would take years and years to look even remotely normal and he wouldn't be able to do shit legally in that time. Plus he thinks everyone is corrupt so he's fighting a lost cause.
I do agree that Joker's visit was the least convincing thing I've ever seen, like they just wanted Two Face an Joker in a scene together because there is no way Harvey would be persuaded to do anything by what Joker said. He was already at the point of taking justice into his own hands.

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He already showed signs of instability throughout the movie. A man with well intentions yet not able to see where the line was drawn between the good guys and the bad guys. A perfect example of this was after the faked Gordon assassination when he started doing the coin toss with the prisoner before batman stopped him.

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