Darcy’s Pride & Prejudice hand flex is inimitable, but these 14 TV and movie moments come close
Exactly 25 minutes and 23 seconds Pride and prejudices, Darcy de Matthew Macfadyen flexes his right hand. A small step for films, a giant step for annuals.
If you are not familiar with the Hand Flex ™, let me join you under the rock where you live and explain. M. Darcy – Tout, Beautiful, Nonchalant – presents Elizabeth Bennet – Sharp and head – in a car. Their hands touch. Mr. Darcy moves away and the camera gets in his hand, which flexes imperceptibly, almost involuntarily. This makes you want to send an SMS to this guy in which you are in a situation, even if you accepted that the romance is dead.
These three seconds of screen time inspired deep academic dives on YouTube, dramatic stories on Instagram and long and unsatisfactory narrative arcs in my dreams. To vacuum to someone, wanting to want them, need to touch them but to hold back – that’s what the withered hand of Pride and damage East. It is not only romance, it is desire. The genre that makes me ask me: “What if?” What if there is a version for me in this big and bad world of being left in reading? It leaves the question suspended in the air, the tension so thick, you can cut it.
Here are 14 moments of cinema and television which, almost, perhaps, perhaps near him:
