Always Smiling, Part Two: Empathy

Sen. Patrick Leahy, portraying an unidentified gentleman at Bruce Wayne’s party for the new District Attorney Harvey Dent, replies to the green-haired man, “We are not intimidated by thugs.” The Joker momentarily contemplates, examining this man’s facial mien, before replying, “You remind me of my father; I hated my father.”

With The Joker’s knife blade seeking a new victim, Rachel Dawes interrupts by stepping forward. The Joker comments ostentatiously on her beauty and notes her nervous nature. He asks, drawing close, “Is it the Scars? Wanna know how I got them?”

After forcefully compelling Dawes to look at him, he explains tenderly, “I had a wife, beautiful like you.” His wife gambled and got “in deep with the sharks,” yet she thought he need not “worry” and to just “smile more.” When the “sharks” collected their returns out of her facial assets, the young couple had “no money for surgeries.”

His wife did not handle the scars well; moreover, he “just want[ed] to see her smile again” and for her to know he did not “care about the scars.” So, he inserted into his mouth a razor, thusly scarring himself, but because of this, she would not even look of him. She eventually just leaves.

The Joker mentions he found understanding, “Now, I see the funny side;--now, I am always smiling.”

With understanding that through caring, physically and emotionally, for the traumatized one also becomes such himself, we learn the infectious and destructive nature of trauma.

Giacomo Rizzolatti, a neuroscientist at the University of Parma, states, “Mirror neurons”--neurons that fire both in the response to an individual’s actions and in the observations of these acts by another--“allow us to grasp the minds of others, not through conceptual reasoning, but through direct simulation. By feeling, not by thinking.”

These simulations are what allow one individual to share in another’s joys and/or another’s sadness. It is these mirror neurons that direct us in our emotional comprehension of others, particularly, through “empathy.”

“And if you see me choke up, in emotional distress from striking out at home plate,” Marco Iacoboni, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, exemplifies, “you automatically have empathy for me. You know how I feel because you literally feel what I am feeling.”

Empathy, in general, as Jean Decety, a neuroscientist at University of Chicago, explains begins with the involuntary “shared emotion.”

“This is something that is hard-wired into our brains--the capacity to automatically perceive and share others’ feelings.” He notes, how when a baby hears another cry how it begins to cry, as well.

“People of all ages,” Decety continues, “will unconsciously mimic the facial expressions of those they see.” Difficult it is to refrain from laughing, when amongst a crowd of a jovial character.

When an individual loses himself in another’s pain, Decety explains, the self experiences “personal distress.” The “other-oriented” nature of empathy is put to the side and “personal distress turns inward.” So, basically, one now forfeits his ability to assist in the recovery or treatment of the other.

The scars The Joker’s wife received, in consequence for her own actions, and then compounded and internalized by his love for her leaves him equally scarred. It is through the trauma, in direct relation to his empathy and compassion, that he now faces the world, at large.

Interesting how the traumatized despises the traumatized, as in his wife’s leaving, after he eventually becomes the same as she, yet nonetheless.

Just curious how trauma is passed from one to another, as simply as a joke or even just a smile, if only it faded as soon.


This is the most interesting story for which The Joker gives as an origin to his scars, at least in the The Dark Knight film. I have for a few years now found Neuroscience quite interesting;--one of the many fields of economics that I enjoy is the peripheral branch of Neuroeconomics. Nonetheless, important it is to understand the effects of trauma, if it is from childhood stress or empathy at any age. Once we understand that a little is good, a little is natural, a little is evolutionary, then we can be able to deal with ourselves more fully.