May
5
The movie “Darkman” cost me a good night’s sleep for two full months when I was a kid. At 11, I may have been a bit too young and impressionable for the amount of carnage Sam Raimi put on the screen. In the film, Dr. Peyton Westlake’s face is not only partially eaten away by boiling acid, but also barbecued in a laboratory explosion. Liam Neeson, buried under pounds of makeup and Ace bandages in the title role, plays the hell out of the character’s emotional anguish at being turned into a burnt match. I think why the movie’s so resonant is that it’s not just about a walking horror that fights for justice — like, say, the Toxic Avenger, who’s seemingly okay with his problem skin. This guy’s actually hurting, inside and out, his scorched dermis a grim reflection of his inner turmoil.
With the final trailer for “The Dark Knight” pwning “Iron Man” audiences, fans are still forced to speculate at just how gruesome Aaron Eckhart’s Two-Face will be. The character’s only glimpsed in profile for a fleeting moment, and the shot favors his good side. It’s implied during the trailer that he’s burned by fire (the left side of his face is pressed against a pool of what appears to be flammable liquid that’s more than likely about to be set aflame) rather than scarred by acid, like his comic book counterpart.
Acid scarring, being a type of disfigurement most people aren’t terribly familiar with, allows for a bit of creative license. Dozens of comic book artists, animator Bruce Timm on “Batman: The Animated Series, and Hollywood makeup legend Rick Baker on “Batman Forever” generally took a similar approach to Two-Face’s a horrific, but stylized mug: teased out hair, ragged laugh lines, lots of pustules — what we would imagine someone who’s disfigured by acid might look like because we’re idiots.
Burn victims, however, we’ve all seen, their features hopelessly incinerated and what remains is so much dead ashen tissue. This is apparently the approach Christopher Nolan’s taking with his interpretation of Two-Face, at least from what I’ve discovered on the always reliable Internet movie sites. I suppose it’s more real, which is what he went for with the first film — verisimilitude. But good Lord, Two-Face makes Darkman look like the prom king.
And so, the next generation of adolescent super-hero buffs are but 10 weeks away from being robbed of a good night’s sleep for months on end after seeing “The Dark Knight.” In a way I envy them.
-Brad Lohan
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