{"id":41130,"date":"2017-11-29T16:32:36","date_gmt":"2017-11-29T21:32:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=41130"},"modified":"2017-11-29T16:32:36","modified_gmt":"2017-11-29T21:32:36","slug":"doing-batman-right-5-the-penguin-and-two-face","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=41130","title":{"rendered":"Doing Batman Right 5: The Penguin and Two-Face"},"content":{"rendered":"

I should’ve mentioned last post that I was planning on taking Thanksgiving off. But now I’m back with The Penguin and Two-Face.<\/p>\n

As I explained in the first of these posts, one of Batman’s strengths as a property is versatility – the ability to go from goofy to serious and everything in between and back while still remaining Batman. This same quality applies to some of the Rogue’s Gallery as well, and the flexibility inherent in the property allows for individual performances to drive the change.<\/p>\n

The Penguin: A Tale of Two Actors<\/h3>\n

The Penguin first showed in Detective Comics<\/em> #58 and subsequent issues of the same, dressed like the monopoly guy, wielding trick umbrellas, and occasionally riding around on an ostrich. He seemed destined for the second-string villainhood he so richly deserved, and, for a while at least, he fulfilled that destiny.<\/p>\n

Then came the Adam West show, and with it Burgess Meredith. Did you know the old Penguin was played by the same guy who played Mickey in the Rocky<\/em> movies? I went almost my whole life without realizing that, and have since lowered my opinion of myself accordingly. Meredith played the Penguin using the method shared by Cesar Romero, Eartha Kitt, and other notable villains: he turned the ham up to eleven.<\/p>\n

Don’t take that as criticism. (It’s my belief that all of the best acting is overacting anyway.) The show’s writers liked his Penguin so much they always kept a Penguin script on ice in case he became available. He was used often enough that he graduated from the second string to the first, and has been considered a “main” (for lack of a better word) Batman villain ever since.<\/p>\n

So for a while we all thought we had a pretty good handle on what The Penguin was. Then came Danny DeVito.<\/p>\n

It's always sunny in Gotham.<\/div>
It's always sunny in Gotham.<\/div><\/p>\n

While up until this point The Penguin was a relatively normal dude who happened to dress like a gilded age railroad baron, the DeVito\/Burton incarnation of the character was a grotesque flippered mutant who lived in a sewer and gorged himself on raw fish. He also had a prominent hooked nose, twice interrupted a Christmas tree lighting ceremony, and eventually planned to kill every firstborn in Gotham. As near as I can tell from reading the accounts of the filmmakers, this unlikely confluence of anti-semitic tropes appears to have been a genuine accident. I didn’t notice them when I first saw the movie, but on later rewatches I could see someone finding it at the very least uncomfortable.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Regardless, the Batman mythos has reconciled these two radically different takes on the character in its usual way: by having its cake and eating it too. Today’s Penguin is rarely a literal mutant, as DeVito’s was, but it has incorporated an element of the grotesque – in practical terms, The Penguin got uglier. So did his motivations – while tempted by money and power, he’s also driven by resentment driven by his appearance. He’s determined to prove a villain, and hate the idle pleasures of these days.<\/a><\/p>\n

To top it all off, he’s got maybe the best name in all of Batman. Oswald Chesterfield Cobblepot. You can’t go wrong with that one. Charles Dickens himself feels a twinge of professional envy when he reads it.<\/p>\n

Most Batman villains exist somewhere between a traditional comic book-type villain and a gangster like you might see in a detective story. The Penguin is one that works best, in my opinion, when he’s closer to the gangster end of the spectrum. Periodically Batman has used him as an informant, a role that also suits him well. I guess that’s my closest thing to a “Penguin rule”: give him a role that showcases his wits rather than his various trick umbrellas. Having him get into a straight-up physical contest with Batman is rarely satisfying.<\/p>\n

Two-Face: The Origin Story That Never Ends<\/h3>\n

On the long list of things that The Dark Knight<\/em> got right, Harvey Dent and Two-Face are at or near the top. First they got the Dent\/Gordon\/Batman alliance right, and then they showed something important about Harvey Dent: the dark side of him was there the whole time. It was Harvey Dent who first approvingly referenced the Roman habit of appointing dictators, and Harvey Dent who later threatened one of the Joker’s goons with a gun, seeming to enjoy the power he had over the man’s life.<\/p>\n

Had you not deflected the acid, we would have had to just call him One-Face.<\/div>
Had you not deflected the acid, we would have had to just call him One-Face.<\/div><\/p>\n

The disfiguration of half his face is often cast as Two-Face’s origin story, but to me it works just as well as the end of his story as the beginning. It’s the frustrated idealist that becomes the most broken person of all, and the burned face is an expression of that brokenness, not the cause of it.<\/p>\n

Post-scarring, Dent often serves a predictable and somewhat repetitive role: to tease Batman (and the audience) with the possibility of redemption, only to backslide into villainous ways once again. For this reason really good Two-Face stories are relatively rare. The Dark Knight<\/em> handled the problem deftly by just killing him off not too long after his face-heel turn.<\/p>\n

If you do<\/em> want to go past the “origin story,” the best Two-Face material is to be found in the relationship between Dent and Two-Face, and the exploration of how the “Apollo”-like golden-boy prosecutor (incidentally, Aaron Eckhart was the perfect casting choice) and his twisted alter ego are fed by each other. One particularly clever gimmick (during the “Cataclysm” event where Gotham was in shambles due to an earthquake) was a storyline in which Jim Gordon was put on trial in a criminal-run kangaroo court. The prosecutor? Two-Face. The defense attorney? Harvey Dent.<\/p>\n

Part of what makes Two-Face work is the sense of moral danger he brings with him. If Harvey Dent could turn bad like that, then so could Batman. In fact, what if Batman already has<\/em>? Bruce Wayne shouldn’t be able to look at Two-Face without seeing something familiar.<\/p>\n

I was going to finish this week’s post off with the Joker, but while writing it I realized there was too much to say on that subject to make him the third part of a three-parter. Instead, he’ll get his own post next week.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I should’ve mentioned last post that I was planning on taking Thanksgiving off. But now I’m back with The Penguin and Two-Face. As I explained in the first of these posts, one of Batman’s strengths as a property is versatility – the ability to go from goofy to serious and everything in between and back […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[607],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-41130","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-batman"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41130","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=41130"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41130\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=41130"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=41130"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=41130"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}