You Can See Everything has taken the world by storm, and we are not immune. In particular, the film deals with many themes about how people deceive and are deceived, which is unfortunately extremely relevant to our contemporary politics. Jerusalem Demsas and Matt Yglesias discussed this and other aspects of the film in our latest podcast, recorded in the lull before the midterms. Paid subscribers can watch or listen to the episode ad free or read the transcript. Free subscribers can watch the episode on YouTube or listen at their podcast provider of choice.
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A modern reader looks at the title of Jane Austen’s 1811 novel, Sense and Sensibility, and sees two words that mean pretty much the same thing. But to readers in Austen’s time, they were opposites. “Sense” meant judgment or reason, just as it does now. “Sensibility,” however, meant the capacity to feel (and to feel in the body specifically).
Austen came down firmly on the side of sense. But the director of the latest film adaptation of Sense and Sensibility doesn’t want to take a stand either way.
“It’s not one or the other,” Georgia Oakley said of Sense and Sensibility in an interview with the Australian newspaper The Nightly. “That’s what is so lovely about the story because neither one nor the other way of being is right or wrong.”
Austen would be surprised to hear her own novel described in this way.
Sense and Sensibility is the story of two sisters, Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, whose father’s death leaves their family financially vulnerable. As a result, the sisters’ prospects for marriage are severely constrained, a challenge they respond to very differently. The elder, Elinor, feels deeply but prizes restraint, judgment, and duty; Marianne, on the other hand, believes that true feeling should never be suppressed. She recklessly throws herself into a relationship with the man she falls in love with, Willoughby.
Austen’s last word on Marianne Dashwood — the sister who is a conscious embodiment of the cult of sensibility — is that she “was born to discover the falsehood of her own opinions, and to counteract, by her conduct, her most favourite maxims.”
Oakley’s new adaptation, which was released in October and began streaming yesterday, equivocates on the fundamental moral question of the book.
Maybe that’s because Oakley knows that the zeitgeist is on the side of sensibility: “In this day and age, sensibility has essentially won over.”
The cult of sensibility returns
Your feelings are valid.
This therapeutic escape hatch has become a fixture in contemporary vernacular. Valid does not just mean “real” in this usage; it means “well-grounded or justifiable,” “logically correct,” and “appropriate to the end in view.” We live at a time when the expected response to someone’s emotional outburst is not mere comfort but affirmation.
The implication is that feelings are not only to be experienced or named or investigated — they are definitive evidence of something true about the real world. In Oakley’s interview, she framed sensibility’s victory in therapeutic language: “We understand that talking about one’s emotions and being true to who we really are is healthy.”
But the problem Austen was probing is, well, what if your feelings are wrong?