Facecrime

Facecrime is the Newspeak term in the novel 1984 for a punishable offence committed by the face: wearing an improper expression when the Party requires a proper one. The book's most concrete example is looking incredulous when a victory is announced, and the category is broad enough to include a nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, or a habit of muttering to oneself — anything carrying "the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide." The offence matters because it criminalises not an act but an appearance, and because in Oceania there are no laws to define it.

Definition and Appearance

The term surfaces during Winston Smith's uneasy lunch in the canteen of the Ministry of Truth, when he realises how long Julia, the dark-haired girl from the Fiction Department, has been watching him. His reflection runs directly from that danger to the word: "In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face (to look incredulous when a victory was announced, for example) was itself a punishable offence." There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime, it was called. The offence is not a matter of criminal intent. It was terribly dangerous to let his thoughts wander in any public place or within range of a telescreen, because "the smallest thing could give you away"; facecrime is the name for the moment when the face does the giving away.

Enforcement and Detection

Enforcement rests on permanent uncertainty rather than on visible policing. A Party member lives from birth to death under the eye of the Thought Police; he is never sure that he is alone, and everything about him is scrutinised — "the expression of his face when he is alone", the words he mutters in sleep, even the characteristic movements of his body. Winston's own practice is shown during the Physical Jerks, when the instructress singles him out: "His face remained completely inscrutable. Never show dismay! Never show resentment! A single flicker of the eyes could give you away." The rule is taught as survival instinct, not as a written statute.

Amateur observers extend the surveillance network. In the canteen Winston cannot tell whether Julia is an agent of the Thought Police, but that hardly matters: "it was precisely the amateur spy who was the greatest danger of all." He does not know how long she has been looking at him — perhaps five minutes — and facecrime makes the unknowable duration of her glance into a possible charge.

Consequences and Significance

Facecrime exposes the legal paradox at the heart of Oceania. Nothing is illegal, since there are no longer any laws, yet merely opening a diary is "reasonably certain" to be punished by death or by twenty-five years in a forced-labour camp; similarly an expression can be punished although no rule against it has ever been formulated. The Party demands not only right opinions but right instincts, and many required beliefs and attitudes "are never plainly stated, and could not be stated without laying bare the contradictions inherent in Ingsoc." The naturally orthodox member — a goodthinker in Newspeak — knows the desirable emotion "without taking thought"; facecrime is the penalty for those whose faces betray the gap between trained orthodoxy and involuntary feeling.

Like other Newspeak crime words such as sexcrime, facecrime compresses a whole range of forbidden conduct into a single label whose force is to make the crime appear objective and unavoidable. It takes its place among the terms through which the Party trains the body to testify for the mind, and it marks the point where the surveillance state's smallest unit of evidence becomes the human face itself.