Flipping the coin by Two-Faced in The Dark Knight

[robi9011235]

I read about Two-Face a bit, and I discovered that Two-Face gets his trademark coin from his abusive father, who would employ the coin in a perverse nightly "game" that always ended with a beating. This would instill in Dent his lifelong struggle with free will and his eventual inability to make choices on his own, relying on the coin to make all of his decisions.
Now, my friend claims that in The Dark Knight movie Two-Face, aka, Dent, use his coin (that both sides are head, and which he say in the movie it's his father lucky coin), yet no matter what the result might be, he himself is the one that decide what action to take. He is also base it by some scene he not quite remember with Rachel. This theory is completely in contrast to the character described in the comics that suffer from Flipism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipism) and lifelong struggle with free will and his eventual inability to make choices on his own, relying on the coin to make all of his decisions as a result of a tragic events.
Is this correct?

[brainticket]

Comics and movies are two different worlds. What happens in one, doesn't necessarily affect another.

[Ascended]

Never assume that the movies and comics line up. They never do. Comics have the benefit of decades upon decades of constant storytelling to evolve and explore their properties. Movies however, have to capture the basic essence of a character and distill it into a two hour experience. Shortcuts become mandatory.

Anyway, in Dark Knight, Dent's trademark obsession with duality and the coin flip comes into play ((spoilers?)) when, after the Joker puts both Dent and Rachael into separate traps and forces Batman to pick which one he'll save, Dent realizes that chaos is the only truly fair system of judgement. So he uses the coin, which is badly burnt and damaged on one side, to pick his course of action.

[quinnzel]

Anyway, in Dark Knight, Dent's trademark obsession with duality and the coin flip comes into play ((spoilers?)) when, after the Joker puts both Dent and Rachael into separate traps and forces Batman to pick which one he'll save, Dent realizes that chaos is the only truly fair system of judgement. So he uses the coin, which is badly burnt and damaged on one side, to pick his course of action.

It should also probably be mentioned that the coin-- prior to the explosion that blackens one side-- was heads on both ends in the movie. So he never left it up to chance in the first place before the incident that "creates" Two-Face.

[harpier]

I read about Two-Face a bit, and I discovered that Two-Face gets his trademark coin from his abusive father, who would employ the coin in a perverse nightly "game" that always ended with a beating. This would instill in Dent his lifelong struggle with free will and his eventual inability to make choices on his own, relying on the coin to make all of his decisions.
Now, my friend claims that in The Dark Knight movie Two-Face, aka, Dent, use his coin (that both sides are head, and which he say in the movie it's his father lucky coin), yet no matter what the result might be, he himself is the one that decide what action to take. He is also base it by some scene he not quite remember with Rachel. This theory is completely in contrast to the character described in the comics that suffer from Flipism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipism) and lifelong struggle with free will and his eventual inability to make choices on his own, relying on the coin to make all of his decisions as a result of a tragic events.
Is this correct?

Certainly, the other commenters are right in allowing distinctions between movie and comic universes, but I'd be more flexible than that, though many would disagree. The issue of biographical continuity for many of these characters isn't essential—literally essential, in the sense that it forms a core piece of their character—for me as a reader. The "tick"—flipping the coin as an impartial and unmotivated mechanism for making a decision—is the villain's defining feature. Different writers, comics creators, and filmmakers make different character and philosophical decisions about this detail. For me, one explanation may precede another, but that doesn't necessarily establish its primacy.

What's interesting is that each of the explanations—while varying wildly in their specifics and perhaps tone—often have similar relationships to the current version. For example, both the abusive father's coin flip, which would inevitably end in a beating, and the two-headed coin entirely eliminate chance as a factor in an activity defined by chance. The creation of Two-Face empowers the coin.