The catalyst in the creation of Kylo Ren is the precise moment Luke thinks about killing his nephew, albeit for a mere couple of seconds.
There are 2 different versions of that scene.
TWO different points of view.
Ben remembers seeing hatred in his uncle’s eyes while Luke remembers feeling shame… and seeing the fear in his nephew’s eyes.
Their emotions are colouring the way they remember things, especially Ben, because he was young and afraid. The brain is complex, and so is memory recall. You can be convinced of remembering something accurately, but your state of mind at the time might have altered your perception of actual events, worse even, the brain is actually capable of “reconstructing false memories” to fill in the gaps and recreate a story that never truly existed. The reasons behind that can vary from a trauma to ‘suggestion’ (made to believe it happened and thus creating the memory).
However, Luke did think about killing Ben and he did activate his lightsaber, that is not a lie. Variations between the 2 stories are subtle, but they’re not just about reading expressions and intent.
What started as a half-baked reactions and predictions post has now evolved into a multi-part breakdown of The Last Jedi (“TLJ”) and the Sequel Trilogy (”ST”) as a whole, including (in addition to the aforementioned topics) my thoughts on some of the criticisms of the ST and what the genesis of those criticisms may be (and why it’s problematic). This is ridiculously long, so I’ve attempted to break this down into sections so that folks can focus on the parts which interest them the most.
I actually wrote this for a casual viewer audience (and posted to my personal facebook first), so some of this might seem fairly elementary for the Tumblr crowd. Just keep that in mind when you’re reading along if it feels like I might be over-explaining certain things! Note that any pictures included in here are not mine – credit goes to the Tumblr user who shall remain anonymous who diligently captured the screencaps for our collective analytical use.
Also, I’ve linked any meta-analyses, articles, and other references (whether I directly cite them or not) that I’ve relied on at the end (and included numbered references and links herein where appropriate). I’m sure that I’m inevitably pulling in things I’ve read and agreed with here and there, but I’ve done my best to try to include things that I know have shifted my views one way or another. The meta especially have been incredibly influential on my personal engagement with the Sequel Trilogy, and to say that my thoughts on this trilogy weren’t heavily influenced by them from the outset 2 years ago would be an outright lie. Even if I don’t mention anything that specifically ties to these, they really have served as the basis for my own understanding and thought process on this trilogy. And please note this is not a meta-analysis; this is just an amalgamation of my own thoughts, with a bit of political and social commentary thrown in for sport. If you read anything at all here, skip down to the end where you can find actual analysis (as opposed to my non-analytical, semi-coherent waxing poetic) from folks who have far greater knowledge than I do on literary and film criticism, mythological tropes, and, honestly, Star Wars. If you have any comments, questions, criticisms, please feel free to comment or message me privately if you want to chat. Also, the formatting seems to look strange on the app, so it’s probably most easily read on desktop or in a browser. Okay! Without further ado~
Table of Contents:
The Last Jedi Review
Highlights
Criticisms
Sequel Trilogy Backlash
Reylo
The Last Jedi
High Level: Abuse and Gender Norms, Young Girls, Independence and Love, Racism
Sexism in Fandom and the Female Gaze
Removing Myth from Man: The Last Jedi as Meta-Commentary
The Greying of Morality: Episode IX Predictions/Headcanons
Art as Human Expression: Why Star Wars is so Powerful
Clarifications I feel the need to make
because I know this site:
-The Last Jedi is not a Vice News
documentary. I will be suggesting allusions to real-life events that are
controversial, to put it mildly. But again these are allusions, not political
statements. George Lucas doesn’t get called a Nazi sympathizer because he
redeemed Darth Vader, nor should he ever be referred to as such. Same goes for
Rian Johnson if anything I am about to say here is in any way true.
–This is speculation through a very
specific lens. There are many ways of looking at how TLJ may pan out. This is
one of them and I am not saying it is the end all be all.
Alright. Now that that is out of the
way….
“A lot of Star Wars was in response to
Vietnam and a lot of what I remember talking about with JJ and Rian was this idea of terrorism and two sides being
morally justified to behave however they wanted to to get what they thought was
absolutely correct.” -Adam Driver, Larry King, 2017
“We talked about
terrorism a lot. You have young and deeply committed people with one-sided
education who think in absolutes. That is more dangerous than being evil. Kylo thinks what he is doing is entirely
right, and that, in my mind, is the scariest part.”-Adam Driver, British GQ, 2017
The point that I want you to
pay attention to is that The Last Jedi
sends a message that things are not so clearly black and white. The boundary between good and evil becomes
increasingly vague and the relationship between Rey and Kylo is symbolic of
that. In fact, Kylo believes that his
actions are correct. -Daisy Ridley, Yahoo Japan, 2017
Adam’s initial discussion of Kylo Ren
on Larry King around terrorism and its influence on Kylo’s characterization got
me thinking about similar themes that I had read about in Dostoevsky’s The
Brothers Karamazov and The Demons. These themes stem from a theory in political
science referred to as “The Shame Model,” which tackles the roots of terrorist
motivations at the hands of western domination and humiliation of eastern
nations.
“The Shame Model” —most notably
theorized on by policy analyst Anatol Lievan in his essay “The Cold War is Finally
Over: The True Significance of the Attacks”—is when extreme, violent reactions
(terrorism) occur “wherever proud people with strong but in part irrational
traditions, feel defeated or radically unsettled by aspects of
Western-Dominated modernity.” Of course, this reflects on today’s modern-day
debacles between the east and the west and the different forms of terror that
each bring upon the other. Lievan writes that “humiliation of the Arab and
Muslim world by Israel is so infuriating to them in part because it is only the
last in a long history of defeats starting in the seventeenth century and
extending far into the twentieth—overwhelmingly at the hands of the Christian
Western world.” The consistent humiliation and defeat at the hands of more
economically, politically, and militaristically powerful nations has driven the
Mid-East into displaying abhorrent actions of violence in order to remedy what
they see as equally abhorrent actions of violence from the west. The model
attempts to look at these actions and strategize ways in which western
governments and western individuals can work to reduce feelings of shame placed
on eastern countries and cultures.
Given that people involved with The
Last Jedi have hinted at themes of terrorism and the blurring of the lines
between who is right and who is wrong, I am convinced that Rian will tackle not
only the thought-provoking and often divisive feelings of shame and its
accompanying violence, but more importantly what remedies these feelings. Dostoevsky
has handled these themes in the past, however, they were presented through a
nihilistic lens wherein a character’s shame was resolved by violently eliminating
the source of the shame. This was the case for Smerdyakov in The Brothers Karamazov
who had—like Kylo–committed patricide to right the negative feelings he held
towards his father’s neglect. According to J.P. Moran, author of “The Roots of
Terrorist Motivation: Shame, Rage, and Violence in The Brothers Karamazov”, “Smerdyakov
was lashing out violently at the very source of his humiliation [by murdering
his father]…after doing so successfully, his mission is complete.”
However, we know this was not the case
for Kylo Ren. When Kylo committed patricide, this marked the beginning of his
journey and not the end of it. As Adam Driver has pointed out, “patricide is
not all it’s cracked up to be.”
While we will get a further
understanding into why Kylo Ren acts the way he does, we also have reason to
believe this will not be a static narrative bent on making the “villain” look
one sided or irredeemable.
I didn’t feel prepared to review this film after my first viewing, since I felt too overwhelmed by what I had seen and I wasn’t able to properly articulate my feelings beyond the level of mostly incoherent squealing. I have just seen it for the second time and feel much more capable of writing about it now. This review will be chock-full of spoilers, so please don’t read it until you have seen the film for yourself (and I implore you to do so – it’s a brilliant ride).
This is an introduction to my Divine Union meta series, split into parts to best relay the multiple sources and themes I have been exploring over the past month. In these essays, we are going to move past Jung’s analytical justification for the symbolic into the world of aesthetic and alchemical psychology. By tracing a thread of universal symbolism from Eastern and Western origins into a current understanding of mythopoetics, I am going to try to understand the Star Wars series as a whole, and I will need your help to do it. Yes, you.
How do we know Ben understood this? And why does it matter?
Luke Force projects himself on Crait to face Ben, in a Space Western like showdown, where dirt has become salt and stings the bleeding wounds of Ben’s psyche.
But Luke is not there to save him. No!
He actually says it twice, to Leia first, then to her son. He is there to admit his guilt to the person that was hurt the most by his actions. “I failed you Ben, I am sorry”
He is there to atone.
Facing Ben, means facing the tragic moment he thought he should kill his nephew and finally taking responsibility for ALL the consequences. He is giving Ben a chance to act on his anger in a cathartic and healing way as @huntedbyacreature explained, but doing so, he is also punishing, literally sacrificing himself, because he knows, this will kill him.
He is taking away the guilt that Ben could have felt if he had truly killed him, while still allowing him to release his resentment. Watch Kylo/Ben pouring all his hatred into striking Luke’s image, where he appears exactly the same as the day he raised his lightsaber to his nephew. Luke is not only taking Ben back to this moment, but himself too. He is accepting of his fate, by lowering his lightsaber this time.
At the end of the showdown, we see Ben realising:
‘that man’ is only a ghost image of his uncle.
As he understands this, he whispers ‘No’…
Ben knows that Luke is now dying.
During his first Force connection with Rey, when he sees her he says:
“You’re not doing this. The effort alone would kill you”
Ben knows that such Force projection is at the cost of one’s life!
I think this barely audible no, was not said in anger and frustration but in shock at understanding Luke’s sacrifice, which is meant to help Ben heal his wounds and compell him to face the guilt of killing his father.
A little more on the context: The entire planet is covered in salt layered over a bleeding like earth. The colour red is striking against the white mineral. Salt hurts when placed on a wound but is also used to disinfect and cleanse.
Salt is traditionally seen as a symbol of life, friendship and healing.
The planet is, in a way, a metaphor for guilt and the pain that has to be endured during the healing process.
So I am coming back to my theory that Kylo/Ben experiences an epiphany at the end TLJ.
He has cleansed the gaping wound that created Kylo Ren, therefore the healing process can start. He is now ready to face his own sins, instead of focusing on his anger and those who wronged him.
No more excuses. No one else to kill. Just him and his conscience.
What’s so heart-breaking about Kylo’s dynamic in TLJ is that he does help Rey, but he does a disservice to himself directly after killing Snoke and I believe this is the reason why. Kylo has spent years under Snoke’s thumb. That’s unquestionable and canon and the act of killing his own father has been a thorn festering in his heart. He cannot let it go. The dynamic with Rey makes this readily apparent. What’s more, he betrays and kills Snoke for her. In that moment of triumph he embraces the idea he’s been chasing for years, because he thinks that now he understands what it all meant (or, at the very least, he hoped). It meant both he and Rey would begin a new order together.
The thing is… he’s so emotionally damaged in this moment that he doesn’t even realize when he’s yelling at her to let go that he is the one not willing to let go. He can’t admit to his sin and that terrifies him. His worst fears are realized when Rey rejects him (and rightfully so). Through this falsehood he’s built for himself a truth is realized: he killed HAN SOLO for nothing. The grudges he’s held against his family have been for nothing, regardless of their wrongs or his. He is the one caught in the past. He is the one unwilling to move forward, even as he helped Rey to admit her weakness he could not admit his own.
Turning on Snoke, killing him for Rey and her rejecting his idea of what they are meant to be was the final straw. Everything he’s ever believed in has come crashing down. In that, he finally admits to his own hell… where he’s been all along. It took his decision to save Rey for him to finally see the flames. He spirals completely out of control when he wakes to find her gone.
For what is Han’s death worth now? He killed him to free himself of his pain, to embrace what Snoke offered, which was nothing short of misery. Then, he kills Snoke. Everything Ben has poured his life into shatters, and in the beginning, it’s a wonderful liberation for him. But when Rey rejects him, the cold reality sets in.
Kylo is said by Rian to embody the passage from adolescence to adulthood. This is so true. But Kylo also embodies the complexity of borderline issues, and this is why he is such a modern character and that so many people can appeal to him, because it’s such a modern psychological problem.
The abandonment issues: he feel rejected by every member of his family. For him, his mother had other things to do in politics, Han was never there, and from his point of view, his Uncle tried to freakin’ kill him. Abandonment issues are the core of the borderline problem. Accordingly, he wants to erase all the past.
The identity problem: Borderlines have a strong identity problem. You can see that Kylo has a strong identity crisis. He was manipulated by Snoke since birth. He has a hard time to find who he is. He struggles with the legacy problem. He probably went crazy when he knew he was the grandson of Darth Vader. Ultimately he kills Snoke in an attempt to probably start anew and free himself from his clutches, to erase everything from the past, but in doing so, he wants to remplace Snoke by Rey to have guidance. He wants to start anew with Rey. “Rey, I want you to join me. Please”. He sees in Rey the only person that can help him. “You’re not alone. You neither.”
…And when she rejects him, he goes berserk. Abandonment all over again.The problem is borderline ultimately create their own fears.
The Hubris problem:Borderlines have 2 worlds : a good one and bad one. Light and Darkness. But Darkness consumes them, and makes them arrogant. When Kylo confronts Rey in the Throne room, he is in the height of Hubris in his will for Power. He speaks to her arrogantly, “You are nobody, except for me.” He downplays her part in all the legacy of the Force, saying she is no one without him. Rey. The girl that slashed his face in half. If that’s not hubris at its climax, I’m the Queen of England.
Violence and going to the extremes issues: Kylo is extremely violent, even if sometimes it is self-contained violence, which explode all of a sudden in the Temper Tantrums.™ But the contrast needs to be underlined : when he is with Rey he is calm, more balanced, sometimes speaking softly and gently to her (elevator scene hello) He needs her to balance him. The problem is that he has no center and the extremes rule him.
So the battle on Crait is so revealing in all the above. He killed Han and Snoke, his two father figures, in an attempt to erase his past. He interpreted his vision with Rey that she would join him. But she doesn’t, and that’s when he goes totally mad with blind rage, that he says he even wants to end her, when minutes before he was pleading her to join him. We see in the end that he meant nothing of it, kneeling in front of his Queen in a last Force Bond scene.
In his rage he wants to destroy everything, and ultimately, this is one of the biggest issues of the Borderlines, they destroy what they most love. His last look at Rey in the force bond is him realizing that he freaking screwed it. He looks so sad and broken it hurts.
Ben (voice over during flashback): “He had sensed my power, as he senses yours. And he feared it.”
Oh my god, I just realized – Ben is afraid that Luke is going to kill Rey.
Rey is on the island with Luke, and Ben thinks Luke wanted to murder him in his sleep as a boy. Ben is trying to warn Rey to get off the island before Luke kills her. Ben was trying to protect her; he was concerned she was going to get murdered in her sleep.
And think about it – this hand-touching scene ends with Luke bursting violently into Rey’s hut in the middle of the night, and exploding the entire building. And that’s the moment the force bond vision cuts off for Ben, with that image of a furious Luke in Rey’s hut.
Ben probably thought Luke had come to kill her. I can just picture him shaking as the feeling of her hand fades.
you know how there was all that “Son,Sun” symbolism tied in with Kylo in The Force Awakens?
Well remember how Holdo quoted Leia,
“Hope is like the sun. If you only believe it when you see it you’ll never make it through the night”.
And the direct parallel with Leia saying “the galaxy has lost all its hope” and “I know my son is gone” in a dark room with little sunlight, after Leia was looking through the giant bunker doors into the sunlight, and then turning away and closing it, effectively shutting out the Sun (her hope). Then when Luke walks in his shadow sort of looks like Kylo from force awakens with light behind him and it seems like hope has arrived.
But Luke is just an illusion alluding to the actual hope that exists with Rey (of light/hope), and neither Luke or Rey have lost hope for Ben, they just realise he’s got to save himself.
And then Luke having parallel phrases like “No ones ever truly gone.” to Leia and “Hope is not lost today,” to Ben.
And Rey was all like “Then he’s our last hope.” to Luke about Ben, at night after the sun had set on Ach-To. This after seeing a vision that was misinterpreted about the future of Rey and Ben from their own points of view, but was most likely still the truth.
And the broken saber, aka the fact that the kyber inside broke in two, and Kyber comes from the heart of the strongest stars/suns. So BASICALLY THE HEART OF THE SUN/SON IS BROKEN, just like his cracked bleeding heart reflected in his own kyber crystal in his light saber, where it was once silver and whole and blue. And now the heart/kyber is in two, representing ‘TWIN SUNS’ that will still work on their own but are stronger together. Two suns of hope, a Rey/ray of light and ‘Help me Obi-wan (Ben) Kenobi. You’re my only hope.”
And then there were all those sunbeams falling on Ben in his last scene, driving out the darkness that surrounds him and that had surrounded Leia, about lost hope being regained and or reborn (in a place where the rebellion/hope was “reborn”).
Also as other awesome people on this sight have pointed out (I’m sorry I can’t remember which blog it is so say if this was primarily you) about the sun rising and setting symbolism. And the last thing Luke sees before he enters the force, after having hope live with Rey and his belief in his nephew Ben, is not one, but TWO suns, both a call back to the start of his journey with the binary sunset, and a symbol of him passing on the torch.
That even though the “suns” pass beneath the horizon with his passing, they will both rise again tomorrow – and he sees it and passes away with “Peace and Purpose” – twins suns, and twin souls, of hope.
Yeah…
… imma just leave this here. Bring it J.J.
(apologies for the continuous ‘Ands’ I was in a mad dash).
Reylo Source 