Say “hand flex” to a fan of the 2005 adaptation of Jane Austen’s “Pride & Prejudice” and they will know exactly what you mean.
The gesture comes early in the director Joe Wright’s sumptuous version of the story. Keira Knightley’s bold Elizabeth Bennet is leaving Netherfield Park after picking up her ill sister Jane (Rosamund Pike). The reserved Mr. Darcy, played by Matthew Macfadyen, helps Elizabeth into a carriage. She had previously overheard Darcy insult her, calling her “tolerable,” and the tension between them is palpable.
But when he touches her, something happens. She looks down, her gaze lingering on his gesture. As he walks away, the camera captures Darcy’s hand. His fingers stretch outward like an impulsive, unconscious tic. Her touch is almost too intense for him to handle.
In the nearly 20 years since the film came out, the hand flex has become perhaps the defining beat from Wright’s take on the novel. It’s the subject of countless social-media posts, critical essays and TikTok dissertations. Search “hand flex” on TikTok or X and you’ll find the term even being applied to scenes from other films and TV shows. “This is my equivalent of the hand flex” is shorthand for “this tiny gesture gives me butterflies.”
The word I kept encountering when talking to people and reading about the hand flex is “yearning.” Darcy, in the early phases of the story, keeps up a mask around Elizabeth, but his subconscious actions reveal just how much he desires her. To many, it’s devastatingly hot. And now, for the anniversary rerelease of “Pride & Prejudice” on April 20, the hand flex is commemorated with official merchandise.
Focus Features is selling a pin of the moment and a T-shirt featuring a close-up of Macfadyen’s hand. The studio acknowledged the moment’s importance, saying in a statement, “It’s those cultural touchstones we lean on to help reintroduce the film to audiences.”
In an interview, Wright said the idea of a hand flex T-shirt was “lovely.” He is not on social media and became aware of the moment’s virality only last year.
“I find it really interesting how you can drop a little pebble that you think is kind of nice, but nothing special, you’re just trying to convey a moment in a story,” he said. Then “the ripples you can kind of watch and it’s beyond me.” He said he was humbled by the reception “because it feels like it’s taken on a life of its own.”
For years, the definitive romantic image from any version of “Pride & Prejudice” had been Colin Firth sopping wet after a dip in a lake in the 1995 BBC mini-series. Firth’s Darcy has just had a private moment when he unexpectedly runs into Elizabeth (Jennifer Ehle).
The show’s creator, Andrew Davies, apparently didn’t consider the scene particularly sexy. “It was about Darcy being a bloke, diving in his lake on a hot day, not having to be polite — and then he suddenly finds himself in a situation where he does have to be polite,” he told the BBC. “So you have two people having a stilted conversation and politely ignoring the fact that one of them is soaking wet.”
The reason fans glommed onto the Regency equivalent of a wet T-shirt contest is evident. Firth’s white shirt is clinging to him, and Ehle is clearly taken aback to the point that you may read arousal into her expression. Even if the moment was not meant to be sexual, it still is cheeky.
The hand flex is a subtler expression of longing. In fact, it’s so fleeting that it first felt like a secret that only the most perceptive fans noticed. The writer Lainey Wood added a disclaimer to her 2020 essay for the online journal Bright Wall/Dark Room explaining that she thought she was the only one obsessed with the moment and didn’t realize how widespread the passion for it was.
Mimi Harlow Robinson, an actor who posted a multipart video dissection of the flex on TikTok in 2021, told me that she watched the movie in high school: “I remember feeling like, ‘What is that? That moment?’ I didn’t really have the language for it, but I remember kind of gasping a bit.”
Robinson noticed social media conversations about the hand flex taking off during the pandemic when fans rewatched their favorite movies and TV shows in lockdown. Not long after that, Kristen Quinn Williams began making hand-flex-themed earrings and selling them via her online shop, Lassoed Moon.
Why would people want to wear the flex on their ears?
“It’s just romantic,” Williams said in an interview. “I think we all want our romantic partner to be that affected by us and just a simple touch of our hand.”
She isn’t worried that Focus is producing hand flex products of its own.
“I think the more ‘Pride & Prejudice’ merch out there, the better,” she said. (She also has tickets to see the rerelease twice.)
The gesture wasn’t designed to be iconic and spur copious analysis, Wright said. “But I remember going into shooting the scene knowing that we had to capture that moment,” he added.
Wright speculated that the flex had resonated with so many fans because it feels as if they are witnessing something private. “I was just trying to do something real,” he said. “We’ve all felt something that maybe we weren’t expecting or supposed to feel, and I think there’s something about the intelligence of our bodies that outsmarts our minds sometimes.”
The memeification of the hand flex speaks to the filmmakers’ instincts, but also to the internet’s power to turn something into a symbol. What onscreen is a subtle expression from a complicated man has been transformed into a universal signifier of the kind of desire many crave from a partner.
For centuries, people have fantasized about having the kind of romance Elizabeth and Darcy do, even as they bicker and misunderstand their way to eventual happiness. The hand flex makes that fantasy literal. Only the medium of film can capture something so tiny yet meaningful, but only the internet can make it a phenomenon.
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