These Scars, Part Three: Responsibility

With The Dark Knight pinned beneath a steel rail, stories above the pavement, and with the weight of The Joker compounding the existing encumbrance, Batman remains on his back immobile. When The Joker mentions that “It’s a funny world we live in,” The Joker stops and looks at his incapacitated foe.

Continuing, he says, “Speaking of which, know how I got these scars?” Batman, drawing from an earlier scene in which he receives from Lucius Fox a new batsuit, responds, “No, but I know how you get these…” With his spiked vambraces now equipped to propel the spikes forth, he does so, striking The Joker and giving himself the ability to become free.

As we have learned from The Joker’s two differing tales of the origin of his scars, scars originate and manifest in equally different manners, nevertheless, leaving the same result--a scarred individual.

In the past two weeks, The Joker, as we have come to understand, actually, highlights within his own unique allegoric pedagogy and acute blend of postmodernist surveys of anthropology, psychology, sociology, and the neurosciences.

First, we discover that high stress experienced in the early developing years of childhood can alter the essential structural hardware of the brain, having a direct effect on the mind’s software. One cannot simply delete or erase these neurochemical scars.

As English poet and polemicist John Milton penned in Paradise Regained, “The childhood shows the man / As morning shows the day.” More often never does it seem that a bad morning extends into a good day.

Second, we find that empathy, one of the key elements to our very humanity, can be what initiates the trauma that separates us from our fellow man, leaving each to mirror the scars of the other.

As economist and ethicist Adam Smith observed, to merely draw into one’s mind the plight of “our brother upon the rack” was enough for one to “enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him.” As keen as this notion of “fellow-feeling” is, he ends before mentioning how the “brother upon the rack” sees his fellow man, and in that, comes the “personal distress” and the separation.

Yet, how far can society go in addressing these types of issues and the actors that propagate forth from such?

The Greek philosopher Diogenes of Sinope states, “No man is hurt but by himself.” If seeking a more modern translation of this concept, one need look no further than a recent Country song, in which one will hear, “[W]e all live with the scars we choose.”

One should question if a contradiction exists between the science and the philosophy. However, no contradiction does.

When examined further we come to find that trauma, and thusly, its scars, can be navigated through in time and with fortitude. The mind can never be swiped clean, yet it can learn to augment itself with new software to assist in the participation of the traumatized with the societally functional.

Jean Decety, a neuroscientist at the University of Chicago, notes, “One way to regulate emotion is to get more information.” From this, he continues, “[I]f you are able to separate yourself, then the non-overlap in the neural response frees up processing capacity in the brain for formulating an appropriate action.”

We have the choice in how we approach our trauma;--that is, to let it affect us, or for us to control it, to funnel it into something productive or just something that does not obstruct our progress.

Take Bruce Wayne--a child left in a damp alleyway alone holding the hand of his dying father, after witnessing both his parents being shot--he made a choice about his trauma, he learned through information and the acquisition of knowledge how to understand his trauma, and he focused his mental and physical being around these scars.

Batman comprehends that each individual--no matter his chaotic childhood, no matter his emotional trauma, no matter his past, in general--is responsible solely for his actions and must bear the consequences thereof.

To understand why and how one does as one does is to only prevent future traumatic experiences, and therefore, similar situations, yet negates naught of the actions that have already befallen.

This finishes this thought on The Joker's Scars and the society. It was not the most actively received of columns, yet life goes on.

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.

Why So Serious, Part One: Child Abuse

As the purple clad and face-painted Joker springs forth from the pool table with knife in hand, he commences somewhat in meekly manner in his own self-indulgent query, “You wanna know how I got these scars?”

The Joker continues detailing a narrative of a father that “was a drinker and a fiend.” Recalling one night when his father goes “off crazier than usual” and how his mother “gets the kitchen knife to defend herself,” he tells that his father does not approve of this and how he “takes the knife to her, laughing while he does it.” As a matter of consequence, the young child witnesses this gruesome scene, yet whence his father realizes his son’s presence, he turns to the child saying jovially, “Why so Serious?”

From there the father inserts the knife blade in his son’s mouth and blares, “Let’s put a smile on that face.” Then, The Joker nonchalantly asks his present victim, “Why so Serious?”

Yet, seldom does a father so intentionally, so deliberately, so literarily scar his child. Nonetheless, the actions of our parents and the mentors of our youth bear heavily on our psychological, sociological, and neurological development. We are the products of our up-bringing.

As Jill E. Korbin, a cultural and medical anthropologist, Case Western Reserve University, explains “[t]he intersection of childhood and violence raises several problematic issues that demand a synthesis and reformulation,” she continues “[a]lthough it is perhaps simplistic to say that both childhood and violence are culturally constructed categories, it is nevertheless the case that violence is not a unitary phenomenon nor is childhood experienced similarly everywhere.”

For without these fundamental assumptions being explicitly stated, “it is impossible to understand the variability of experience involving children and violence.”

Martin H. Teicher, a psychiatry professor, Harvard Medical School, notes that “in the early 1990’s mental health professionals believed that emotional and social difficulties occurred mainly through psychological means.”

Interestingly, “[c]hildhood maltreatment was understood either to foster the development of intrapsychic defense mechanisms that proved to be self-defeating in adulthood or to arrest psychosocial development…”

Basically, the mind was viewed by researchers as essentially software in which any problem could be amended, reprogrammed, or just altogether erased.

The research of Teicher and his colleagues seems to lead to a failure in the hardware of the mind, due to biological and chemical alterations. Teicher explains that significant brain-wave abnormalities were clinically found “in 54 percent of patients with a history of early trauma but in only 27 percent of non-abused patients.” These electroencephalogram (EEG) anomalies reached 72 percent in those with “documented histories of serious physical and sexual abuse.”

When abuse of children occurs, it happens during the critically formative time of experience, as the brain is physically sculpting its structural self, as an artist with a chisel. The severe stress of these experiences “can leave an indelible imprint on its structure and function. Such abuse, it seems, induces a cascade of molecular and neurobiological effects,” as Teicher states, that are irreversible.

Ross Macmillan, a sociology professor, University of Minnesota, records that while “[c]ontrolling for earlier involvement and a host of sociodemographic characteristics, adolescent victimization almost tripled the odds of both violent and property offending in adulthood, doubled the odds of domestic violence, and increased the odds of problem drug use by almost 90%.”

So, basically, each generation lives out the habits, violence, and scars of the preceding generation. It can be said, that the “life trajectory,” which Macmillan discusses more in his research, would be to describe The Joker, as a stray bullet, without any form of agency.

The Joker embodies the now embrowned sins of his father, as we embody those of our parents, and as our children will embody from us. If only each lived in a vacuum, one would not be burdened by the scars of his elders, yet we live not as such, but as institutions produced by many.


This is my second column for the term, and it commences a three part series drawing on The Dark Knight;--mainly, outlining the different stories given by the Joker about the origins of his scars. I use actual scientific research to explore the macro-picture of this subtle and differing stories.