TRUTH AND CONSEQUENCESMICROEXPRESSIONS
Perhaps the most tantalizing way in which real subtexts are leaked
out through facial expressions is those fleeting images that psycholo-
gists call microexpressions. They are so fleeting, in fact, that in
ordinary talk they are missed entirely. However, they do have a
subliminal impact. I remember an incident that occurred while
shooting a movie for a drug company. We had set up a camera
behind a one-way mirror to film in the doctor's office. The drug
in question was a tranquilizer, and we did a series of shots, over
a period of a month, while the doctor interviewed patients before
and after taking the tranquilizer.
The patients, of course, were told of the filmed interviews,
and most of them readily gave us permission to use them. In one
interview, a young man, after a week on the drug, told the doctor
that he was doing very well, very well indeed.
"I don't believe him for a minute," the cameraman whispered
to me, and he was right. Two days later the young man was
back in the doctor's office, sobbing hysterically.
"I never suspected it," the doctor told us miserably. "He seemed
so cheerful, so convinced his troubles were behind him. You
guys saw the interview. What did you think?"
We assured him that we, too, were convinced by his patient,
but I remembered the cameraman's disbelief. What had he seen
in the patient's manner or heard in his voice?
When alone, I replayed the film of the interview. Watching
the young man instead of the doctor, I, too, felt uneasy. But
why? On a hunch, I ran the film in slow motion, and then I
caught it. Three times, in the course of the interview, while the
patient assured the doctor that he was all right, his face dissolved