Longing is at the heart of every good story. Characters long for someone or something that lies beyond their reach. Films and TV shows have different methods of creating that longing, drawing it out, and ultimately, resolving it. But the mere fact of a character’s longing drives the story and pulls us along with them. Here’s our Take on how creators use longing to hook us into their narratives, how it speaks to something profound in the human condition, and why we still empathize with characters who long for something, even if their object of desire is nothing we would ever want.
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Allie Hamilton: [Crying] “It wasn’t over for me! I waited for you for 7 years!” - The Notebook
Longing is at the heart of every good story. Characters long for someone or something that lies beyond their reach. Maybe it’s a new love or a better life. A prized object, or even just a vague idea of something else. What they long for changes, and films and TV shows of various genres have different methods of creating that feeling, drawing it out, and ultimately, resolving it. But the mere fact of a character’s longing drives the story — and pulls us along with them.
Here’s our take on how creators use longing to hook us into their narratives, how it speaks to something profound in the human condition, and why we still empathize with characters who long for something, even if their object of desire is nothing we would ever want.
The Stories of Longing
The Greek philosopher Aristotle wrote of longing in its most obvious sense — romance. As Aristotle put it, “He who delights in the form of another does not, for all that, love her, but only does so when he also longs for her when absent and craves for her presence.” Pining for another has remained our most familiar form of longing — it defines some of our greatest love stories of all time, from Romeo and Juliet to Titanic. But longing isn’t just about romance. It’s a part of nearly every story ever told.
In his roadmap for storytelling, The Hero’s Journey, Joseph Campbell laid out the foundational elements of one of storytelling’s oldest narratives: a protagonist embarks on a quest, then endures a series of trials and tribulations before returning home, forever transformed. Although there may be external forces that provide inciting incidents and conflict, what the hero is really motivated by is an internal desire — a core longing that drives them, even through the most arduous steps of their journey. This longing can be as grand as the desire to save the world from evil. Or it can be as small as finding someone who makes you feel less alone. But without longing, there is no story.
Robert McKee: “You cannot have a protagonist without desire. It doesn’t make any sense!” - Adaptation
In films, this journey often adheres to a three-act structure, in which the climax typically delivers on that desire established in Act I: The protagonist gets what they’ve been longing for, and we, too, are left feeling satisfied. Even films that give us a deliberately ambiguous resolution, upon closer inspection, still tend to resolve their central longing. Take Christopher Nolan’s Inception, which leaves us questioning whether Leonardo DiCaprio’s character has truly reunited with his family, or is only dreaming. Neither he nor we know for certain, but the film’s ending still provides the emotional fulfillment of his getting what he’s pined for — because he’s decided it doesn’t matter whether this final moment is real.
Longing plays out differently on television, where the lack of resolution is what spurs us to keep watching. A TV character might long for something or someone over the course of an entire series. Although newer, more immediate desires present themselves across season-long arcs, or even change from episode to episode, their primary, overall yearning keeps us invested. For the TV viewer, longing is more about the journey than the destination.
Moreover, finding ways to prolong that journey — and that longing — is often key to a TV show’s success. The 1985 series Moonlighting famously struggled in the ratings after it consummated its central sexual longing. And while the so-called “Moonlighting Curse” has since been debunked by plenty of series that allowed their romantic leads to get together — and continued to thrive — many did so by plunging the characters into a relationship, then finding new reasons to push them apart again. Jess and Nick barely lasted two seasons of New Girl before acting on their chemistry, but amid a tepid viewer response to their being in a relationship, they went back to pining for each other from across their apartment until the series was almost over.
Nick Miller: “Come on, please go faster, I’ve gotta tell my best friend that I’m in love with her!” - New Girl 6x22
Sam and Diane on Cheers endured five seasons of intermittent bliss and breakups until actress Shelly Long’s departure brought their romance to an abrupt end. But even as Cheers — and Sam — moved on, pursuing new desires for another six seasons, Diane still had to come back for the series finale. The show simply couldn’t end until their waylaid longing for each other was finally resolved — one way or another.
Sam Malone: “I guess I remember life being more comfortable!” - Cheers 11x26
There is perhaps no more successful — if often frustrating — illustration of how TV stretches out this sense of longing than Friends’ Ross and Rachel. Ross pining for Rachel drives the beginning of the show. But even after his affection is returned and the two become a couple, their happiness is short-lived. They spend the vast majority of the show’s screentime not together and constantly going back and forth on who’s longing for whom. But this unfulfilled longing is what kept their story (and much of Friends’ popularity) alive — and naturally, the show could only conclude with Ross and Rachel finally getting together, supposedly for good.
Rachel Green: “I do love you.”
Ross Geller: “Oh, I love you, too, and I am never letting you go again.” - Friends 10x18
Even if it takes many many seasons, eventually resolving this longing is key to completing the characters’ journeys. But in the end, obtaining the long-coveted object of desire isn’t always what they — or the audience — really wants.
The Illusion
What a character thinks they want is often not what they need — and it’s the tension between wants and needs that often fuels the story. When it comes to the audience, this can actually be a bit of clever misdirection, creating a longing for a resolution that’s revealed to be unsustainable, before delivering what’s actually necessary to complete the journey.
Disney’s Finding Nemo offers a simple illustration of this tension between want and need. Marlin desperately wants to protect his son, Nemo. But Marlin clings so tightly to Nemo that he only ends up pushing him away. After Nemo becomes lost, Marlin wants nothing more than to find his son and shelter him from any more harm, but eventually, the father realizes that what he really needs is to let go.
Dory: “Well, you can’t never let anything happen to him. Then, nothing would ever happen to him!” - Finding Nemo
2011’s Like Crazy centers on two lovers who prove that absence makes the heart grow fonder when they’re separated by immigration issues. But once they, at last, get to be together after so much struggle, the awkward reality doesn’t live up to the romanticized memories of their early love which have been fueling them.
Sometimes what a character longs for is even fundamentally at odds with who they are. In The Dark Knight, Bruce Wayne wants to be with Rachel. But he needs to be Batman. The Joker exploits this tension, forcing him to decide whether he will save Rachel or Harvey Dent — to choose what he wants over what Gotham needs. By following his own desires, Wayne falls into the Joker’s trap — and he loses not only the woman he loves, but the man he hoped would be Gotham’s savior. It’s only through this experience that he finally realizes that to be Batman, he has to sacrifice himself and his own desires.
Batman: “I’m whatever Gotham needs me to be.” - The Dark Night
In romantic comedies, we often see a character long to be with someone, only to discover that this object of their obsession isn’t who they thought they were. Often this discovery leads them to the person they should really be with, who better suits their needs. It’s a misdirection that’s become something of a cliche. Still, the pervasiveness of this trope speaks to just how much we romanticize the very idea of longing. In 1979, psychologist Dorothy Tennov coined the term “limerence” to define the kind of romantic attachment that’s not based on the reality of the other person, describing limerence as involving “an acute longing for emotional reciprocation, obsessive-compulsive thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, and emotional dependence on another person.” Some psychologists have even argued that pop culture has nurtured this idea of “limerence,” giving audiences an idealized version of things like love at first sight, romanticizing infatuation, and encouraging us to equate love with obsession. But movies and TV also occasionally show us that, while we often long for what we think we want, there is a more lasting happiness to be found in getting what we need.
Our Longing for Fulfillment
Every story about longing is rooted in self-fulfillment — the idea of seeing all our hopes and desires realized at last. It’s a concept that dates back to ancient Greek philosophers. Aristotle used the term eudaimonia to describe this fulfillment — a state of doing and living well that he said transcends mere, fleeting happiness. In his book Self Fulfillment, philosopher Alan Gewirth further characterized this idea as “a bringing of oneself to flourishing completion, an unfolding of what is strongest or best in oneself.”
We’re naturally drawn to characters who are striving to become those better, virtuous selves that we know that we need to be. Over four seasons of The Good Place, we watched as Eleanor Shellstrop and her friends were slowly transformed from characters who are focused only on their shallow wants into fully realized, self-fulfilled people, who understand their own capacities and how to best flourish within them.
Tahani Al-Jamil: “I’ve spent most of my life pretending to help people. If I were an architect, I could do it for real!” - The Good Place 4x13
Although they begin their journey seeking eternal bliss in the afterlife, eventually they realize that achieving eudaimonia and leading a virtuous existence is the more satisfying reward.
This kind of self-fulfillment is often remarkably hard to achieve back on Earth, where the demands and distractions of life make it difficult for us to figure out what would make us truly content. And as much as we are drawn to characters who strive to become better people, we’re equally fascinated by stories of those who fail. And we relate to characters who share a more undefined longing. We watch them become stuck in a series of temporarily gratifying, but ultimately unsatisfying relationships based on circumstance, shallow attractions, or limerence, and we recognize ourselves in them. We enjoy them because so often, it feels like we’re stuck in Act I of our own lives, unable to bring about a resolution to our own longing.
Thus, we can relate to those stories which don’t resolve the longing — because they remind us that it’s a natural, universal state of being. As Gewirth writes, “self-fulfillment is far more a process than a finished product.” Watching characters go through that process, too, reassures us that we’re not doing it alone. Everybody longs for something, and that pain of wanting something we can’t have may never go away.
Conclusion
Longing is a concept so all-consuming and fundamental to being a human being that no film or show — and not even the English language — can fully capture it. The Portuguese have the word saudade, which is loosely defined as “a deep emotional state of melancholic longing for a person or thing that is absent.” Strikingly, saudade can encompass both sadness and happiness: You can be sad over losing someone, for example, but still be happy to have known them at all. In the heightened emotional worlds of fiction, many characters exist in a quasi-permanent state of saudade. They are often both happy and sad — and they long for the absence of something that they have only begun to realize is gone, or to sense has yet to arrive.
For the Portuguese, to experience saudade is simply to feel. You can be grateful for the happiness of the present, wistful for the past, and yearning for something in the future — all at the same time — because that’s what it means to be alive. It’s no wonder, then, that this feeling is so key to the stories we tell ourselves, about ourselves. We never stop longing. Why would we ever want to?
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