It is not sex, it is desire: why has 'yearning' become fashionable in series and cinema?

BarcelonaPassionate gazes, fingers brushing, and sighs. The yearning for desire has become one of the keys to some of the audiovisual products that work best with audiences. In English, and on social media, the term yearning has become popular, which in its most literal translation would be anhel (longing), but which is closer to the construction of desire slowly and sustained over time. This concept is one of the central elements of Emerald Fennell's adaptation of Wuthering Heights, which has just arrived in cinemas: in this very free and somewhat baroque version of Emily Brontë's story, desire sustained over time and unfulfilled for many years has devastating consequences. To make this adaptation, the English director was inspired by her interpretation of the book when she was a teenager.

The concept of yearning, or longing, is also behind the success of series like The Summer I Turned Pretty,More Than Rivals or Bridgerton. In the first, Conrad wants to be with Belly, but has to suppress this urge because she is his brother's girlfriend. In More Than Rivals, the protagonists initially have an exclusively physical but intermittent and secret relationship due to homophobia in the sports world. The achievement of a romantic relationship doesn't happen until almost ten years later. In the fourth season of Bridgerton, the protagonists suffer social impediments that make their relationship impossible, which makes the coexistence between them a pressure cooker. On social media, the concept of yearning is mainly applied to the male protagonists: that is, many viewers sigh for men desperate with desire. One of the audiovisual markets that plays best and most with the delay in the materialization of desire was the Korean one, which in its dramas advances love stories very slowly and in small doses.

Ainhoa Marzol, an expert in digital culture, believes that viewers desperately seek yearning because in recent times it has been difficult to find it in fiction. "If we think about series, they used to have a format of 22 episodes per season and lasted six or seven seasons, there was time to build more slowly. Now you have much shorter, much more procedural series. Besides, everyone is waiting to see if they will be cancelled or not. Where is the space for a creator to develop real yearning? They are all false yearnings. It's very hard to find fiction that has this sustained longing over time, the slow burn, and these are very precious things," explains Marzol. "The great success of The Summer I Turned Pretty is due to the fact that they did the yearning very well. I would even say that More Than Rivals works very well because it tells a story that is very sustained over the years, even if it's condensed into a few episodes. The story spans ten years. People are looking for that," she adds.

The actors themselves in these fictional works are aware of this desire from viewers. In fact, during the promotional tour for Bridgerton, its protagonists, Luke Thompson and Yerin Ha, have spoken about it. "I think if we want to recover yearning in real life, we have to get off the apps. For there to be this yearning, there has to be a wait, and with apps and phones everything is instant. Maybe we don't give ourselves time to yearn," reflected Thompson in an interview.

An antidote to cynicism

Psychologist and content creator Sandra Parmo dissects and analyzes trending series through her Instagram. One of the series she has spoken about the most is The Summer I Turned Pretty. "I think we are now returning, albeit with a patina of modernity, to courtship, a word that sounds very old. That the interest and the search by both are visible, without it having to be asymmetrical," she reflects. The psychologist attributes this search for romanticism to the political and social moment. "We are in a time when everything goes very fast and everything is very cynical. It gives the impression that nothing is important. This has also transferred to the world of relationships: many people say 'Why start anything if it's going to end?' There is a lot of apathy and indifference," she says. Parmo assures that stories like that of More Than Rivals make people "regain hope."

However, the psychologist warns that among her followers on social media, she has detected a certain obsession with this type of series and with yearning. "When people watch these series, they experience them with great intensity. My followers send me videos, edited montages, interviews. I don't need to see content because they send it to me. There is a fan phenomenon that even worries me. People end up becoming obsessed with the actors, for example. These are fictions with a lot of emotional charge and, in the end, these things happen," she argues. Parmo recommends consuming all kinds of stories "so as not to lose sight of things."