My favorite scene from the 1993 film True Romance is when Sicilian gangster Vincent Coccotti, played by none other than Christopher Walken, pays a little visit to Clifford Worley, played by the late great Dennis Hopper, looking for the whereabouts of Clarence Worley, played by Christian Slater. The interrogation begins with Walken delivering one of my favourite lines from any movie ever:
“I’m the anti-Christ. You get me in a vendetta kind of mood, and you tell the angels in heaven you never seen evil so singularly personified, as you did in the face of the man who killed you.” Gives me goosebumps!
Aside from the brilliant writing and acting, what makes this scene so great is when Worley tries to lie his way out, Coccotti immediately picks out the fiband clocks him in the face. The second time he lies, he gets his hand sliced open and doused with alcohol. Coccotti decides to sit down and explain a few things to Worley:
“Sicilians are great liars, best in the world. I’m Sicilian. My father was the heavyweight champion on Sicilian liars, and from growing up with him I learned the pantomime. There are 17 things a guy can do when he lies to give himself away…. If you know them like you know your own face, you can beat lie detectors all to hell. Now what we’ve got here is a little game of show and tell. You don’t wanna show me nothing but you tell me everything.”
A pantomime in this instance means the conveyance of a story with facial expressions. As is the case in the scene, your words may be saying one thing but your face is saying something completely different. When a boy slips on a promise ring on her finger, his actions might be genuine, but is his face telling the truth? This is why Coccotti puts a bullet in Worley’s brain after hearing the story about Africans invading Sicily, having sex with their women and changing the Sicilian bloodline forever. He read Worley’s pantomimes, and knew the story had to be true.
A person’s face actually does many more than 17 things to give away that he or she is lying. Unless they’re psychotic, a liar will be under stress and their faces will act accordingly. Here are some things to look for in someone’s face when trying to separate the lies from the truth:
1. Licking of the lips.
2. Biting of the lips (Former President Bill Clinton did this when he told the American public that he did not have sexual relations with Monica Lewinski)
3. Scratching of the face, nose
4. Looking away, to the side or downward, looking for the next lie to say
5. Increased swallowing
6. Sighs and deep breaths
7. Touching your nose
8. Irregular pauses in speech patterns
9. Fidgeting with hair, beards or mustache
10. Excessive blinking
11. Use of phrases like “I swear to god” “To be completely honest” and “honestly”
12. Stuttering
13. Filling silences with “um” “er” “ah” “uh”
14. Tightening or puckering of lips.
15. Eye squinting, or closing
16. Face becomes slightly paler as blood is withheld from extremities
17. Brief displays of emotion, “cracking” through the otherwise straight face.
The last item on the list comes from new research conducted at Stephen Porter’s Forensic Psychology Lab at Dalhousie University. According to a grad student from the school “There are some muscles in the face you can’t control … and those muscles won’t be activated in the absence of genuine emotion—you just can’t do it.” It was these facial muscles that gave away murderer Michael White for killing his pregnant wife, despite his tear-filled public plea. When his plea was examined frame by frame, these uncontrollable facial muscles revealed moments of anger and disgust. Michael White is clearly not Sicilian. He didn’t wanna show the authorities nothing, but his face told them everything.
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