Last night I rented the DVD of the movie The Recruit, starring Al Pacino and Colin Farrell. It's basically a story where Pacino is a CIA talent scout and scopes out Farrell, a young MIT graduate, to be a case officer.

The movie has a several laughable scenes of lie detection. In one polygraph scene, this hot blonde is asking him some relevant questions, and of-course, no post test interrogation (why wasn't she the one doing my polygraph?). During this polygraph, Farrell's character had a curious attachment on his head with a sensor seemingly directed towards his eye. In a later scene, on  "The Farm", this head appendage is later revealed to measure the size of the eye's cornea, the claim being that the larger the dilation, the greater the degree of deception. That's a first for me.

Ultimately though, the pinnacle of stupidity is reached when the female lead of the movie asks Farrell's character to feel her pulse and look into her cornea to verify the truthfulness of what she is saying. I couldn't laugh hard enough.

I'd recommend the movie in general, but for many of you, the passages dealing with lie detection will evoke many a  . This movie does show that the myth of lie detection is alive and well in American pop culture.

Neither is polygraphic lie detection.

Even us intellectuals like a good comedy once in a while. Wait, The Recruit wasn't supposed to be a comedy.