Fool me twice?
Hello, my treacherous friends. Critical Darling would like to move forward on the assumption that you’ve all seen The Dark Knight. If that isn’t the case, we implore you to return once you have in a few days’ time.
Now that that’s dispensed with, group hug! Glad you made it. Let’s talk Harvey Dent, shall we? Or, more specifically, why Monsieur Two-Face needs to be dead as O-Ren, not just playing possum.
In Christopher and Jonathan Nolan’s Gotham, heroes and villains are created by psychology, not by (campy) supernatural forces. Because the world the Nolans have constructed for their characters is realistic (by now you’ve read or heard David Edelstein railing against this, boo), they must exist within certain boundaries.
Those boundaries are pushed and tugged at, no doubt, when people — ahem — survive free-falls from penthouses. However, a dude with exposed bone and muscle on half his face is not long for this world. Infection is inevitable, agreed? He’s not undead for Pete’s sake.
God knows Critical Darling loves the shit out of The Dark Knight (and Aaron Eckhart), but on a second viewing … well, let’s just say we’d hate it if Nolan drifted too deep into Pirates territory. If Two-Face’s got two films in ‘im, I believe in righteously bad skin grafts.
XO.
