Another seriously meta line in TLJ is Kylo asking Luke sarcastically if he’s come to redeem his soul.
The question on Kylo Ren’s redemption is the biggest remaining question in the trilogy. For many it’s already answered. Some say that after the events of TLJ there is no hope for redemption. For some, it can only happen if it precedes his death. And others still hold out hope that it is possible for him to come back to the light and that atonement is possible.
Kylo has realized that Rey will not have him as he is. That her mission was to redeem his soul and without that, she is lost to him. But he has seen himself as irredeemable since before he killed his father. (“It’s too late.”) And the idea that Luke would try now, after all this time, after Rey couldn’t do it, is laughable.
And when Luke tells him no. When Luke continues to taunt him. When he tells him that his anger will not make him go away but will have the opposite effect, I think he is telling us that it is not going to be up to anyone else to save Ben Solo. His family couldn’t do it. Rey couldn’t in the time she had and she cannot be tasked with it above her mission to aid the Resistance.
This has to be something he does willingly. Even if it is ultimately inspired by his love for Rey he has to do the work, and he has to come willingly. I think that anyone who is afraid her story and agency would be subsumed in an effort to save him should have had those worries allayed by this film. She did what she could in laying a foundation (and remember her efforts were borne as much from a belief that his redemption is for the good of the galaxy as out of compassion for him) but the rest is up to him.
This. Kylo has felt that he’s too far gone pretty much the entire time, we know he still feels that way now: “you’re a monster” “yes I am” but he still makes her an offer, because OF COURSE HE DOES, we’ve clearly seen Kylo act with no logic at all where Rey is concerned, and he continues to do that in thinking their late night ForceTiming is any indicator that she would want to rule the galaxy with him.
I am so glad that Rey left this film with 100% agency intact. She did what she could, but he has to wrestle his demons and find his own way out now. His redemption is already in motion, HE just has to be the one that makes it happen. He will realize he has no one left, but Rey, and he lost her (for now) by offered her something neither of them would actually want. He wasn’t ready to do the right thing fully yet. He doesn’t even KNOW what the right thing is, I mean he’s had a lifetime of grooming and mental torture and manipulation, his brain is cooked and he needs to get himself sorted. I’m confident the Ben Solo that Rey still sees in him will come through.
People keep saying if Ben is redeemed it’ll be a rehash.
But it won’t be.
Because Vader needed to be saved by someone else.
Ben will save himself. A redemption created all his own.
And in that way, I think he’ll “earn” his right to live – redemption through life, not through death.
One of my favorite scenes in TLJ is right after Luke has interrupted the smut hut and Rey goes all swingy stabby at him in defense of Ben Solo. Because it’s played really well, and it has such a great little sub-meaning to it.
Our girl starts strong, smacking the fuck out of Luke like WHY DID YOU TRY TO KILL MY SKYPE BOYFRIEND, THIS IS YOUR FAULT. YOU FUCKED UP NOT HIM. and you really get the vibe that Rey has got it super bad for Ben, like she is defending him, fighting this old Jedi hero for Ben’s honor. You’re like wow, Rey is super in love with Ben, they’re gonna go make out.
But then you hear the rest of it. If I go to him, he’ll turn. If Ben Solo returns, he could turn the tide for the resistance. She offers the saber to Luke first (even though I don’t believe she ever expected him to take it). She says Ben is “our” (aka the resistance’s) last hope. She cares about him, yeah, but whatever vision she had that made her believe that he would turn…. she immediately turns it into how it would benefit the galaxy at large, not the connection between them. She thinks of how Ben turning would save the resistance, not save him.
And it reminds me of those high school crushes people get. Where you have a great connection and you’re attracted to each other and you’re slamming doors and screaming at your parents because they “JUST DON’T UNDERSTAND TRUE LOVE.” And then when you really get down to it, you find you’ve idealized this person in your head. You want them to bring you flowers, but they’re not the type to do that. They want you to wear different makeup, but you’re happy the way you are. And even though you feel this intense connection at that moment, you realize how shallow it really is. You refuse to make changes for the other. You refuse to compromise. You want to change them and stay exactly the same. And you break up because no one wants to budge.
With Rian’s statements about how Kylo Ren is meant to be representative of adolescence… I think it’s apparent that the entire trilogy is about growing up.
The Force Awakens was about infancy, about learning skills, about taking your first steps. (Obi-Wan even says this to Rey in the forceback.) It’s about being a child, and growing from there. It’s why Reylo had hints, but nothing terribly explicit. Villainous crush? More like schoolyard crush.
The Last Jedi is about adolescence, with its themes of failure and rebellion from the parental figures (Luke and Snoke) and the insane sexual imagery. It’s about being a teenager and trying to find your own path. It’s why Rey and Ben’s love for each other ended so disastrously. They’re teenagers who only understand hormones and connection and having things in common. They don’t get what it really means to love someone, to be in a relationship. They don’t understand that loving someone means loving flaws as well.
Episode IX, just by virtue of the progression, is going to be about Adulthood, about coming into your own, about maturity. The arcs and growing up that the characters have been building up to? It’s going to come to fruition in this one. And once Rey reads those jedi texts, and learns about the prime jedi, and the how balance is really meant to work – she’ll understand compromise. And in that way, she’ll understand what it truly means to love, and Ben will learn that too. Instead of trying to pull the other to their side, they’ll learn to meet in the middle.
Reylo is endgame, kids. The themes are right there for us to read. Episode IX is gonna be crazy.
You have too much of your father’s heart in you, young Solo.
can we talk about how t i r e d he looks almost throughout this entire movie like please discuss
Considering that this is right after the battle with Rey, he looks emotionally and psychologically beaten down. I’m more than sure that his side is still sore and he hasn’t slept much. Never mind the fact that Snoke is being an extra ass towards Kylo for losing the battle to Rey.
He has obviously not slept or looked after himself at all since SKB, I very much doubt snoke shooting a lightening ball at him did much to improve his condition either
He looked totally exhausted. Where in TFA he wore his mask as a badge of honor, when he approached Snoke with it on, it was almost like he was hiding. Adam Driver was right when he said the thing he was excited for us to see was Kylo’s humanity.
It’s this really blatant yet classy reference to the sex act cunnilingus, my friend. so blatant that I clutched my pearls + gasped + blushed the first time I saw it.
The moisture was on Rey’s side of the bond (there are matching ‘sparks’ in the background of Ben’s side), and after their heavy-breathing interlude was finished, he lingeringly wipes that moisture off his mouth with his hand. Off his mouth. It’s all to classily imply that Rey is sexually aroused, that is “wet.” There’s no other reason for the water.
Don’t worry, this went over my mom’s head too – she has 6 adult children, but still has a very sweet and innocent mind, and she isn’t practiced in innuendo.
But don’t be fooled, we’re not just reading into it. There is no human reason why they would have Ben wipe moisture off his mouth after speaking to a woman if they didn’t mean to make it sexual. If they only wanted to show the Force Bond rule that materials could physically pass the bond to him, they could have shown it 1000 other ways – he could have just wiped his shoulder or something. Or it could have been something besides water, which is an inescapable innuendo and reference to sexual awakening – they could have made dust or grass or something cross the bond instead, if they wanted this to read as platonic.
but instead Ben is standing there sensually wiping off his mouth like he just finished eating her out.
Killing Snoke was not the result of a clever manipulation of Rey and betrayal of Snoke, as I’ve seen on many reviews online, where they also rejoice in the intense sexual imagery in TLJ but use it as well as a cautionary tale for bad romance and its dreadful and dangerous appeal. To me this is a prudish almost neurotic view on sexuality, by saying it’s unhealthy, that it is doomed, they make it unhealthy, anyway, I digress.
Killing Snoke was anact of love.
Kylo / Ben chose to save Rey.
When he said, “I know what to do”, I think that deep down he realised it was the only thing he could do, killing Snoke to save Rey, so she could be with him, stand by his side, “when the time comes you’re the one who will turn (meaning to me!)” which can be interpreted as: you will be my partner, my lover, my other half. Therefore loosing her was NOT an option. He did not go against Snoke, he chose Rey, and that is a huge difference. Choosing her, made him strong enough to kill the true monster, who had abused him for years.
several relevant symbols:
1) The use of the blue lightsaber, which is not his, which is not a weapon from the dark side (associated with anger and revenge). The saber was used to protect first, to save, it was a defensive strategy, any other decision would have resulted in Rey’s death, and ultimately his, for lack of balance without his other half, the person he needs to be WHOLE. Remember Rian Johnson calling them, 2 halves of a protagonist.
2) Kylo remains immobile, and with the flick of 2 fingers (yes it is a sexual allusion) brings the lightsaber straight to Rey, to her hand. He’s so focused and steady, so committed to his choice, there is no doubt in his mind. He wants to be one with Rey. But he is also completely trusting her, she won’t turn on him, but to him, and she does, for a while, until their personal needs change and they find themselves on opposite sides again. And this explains the depth of his rage after she left, the only thing he had left was anger and resentment, because he ‘gave everything he had to the dark side’, and then he GAVE IT ALL TO REY.
3) Snoke is split in half, literally it’s like a divorce, lol. As his body drops, which it’s almost comical, Rey’s hand appears on the screen and catches the weapon, the symbol at that moment of his love for her, of what he did for her. She is also committing herself, giving her hand to Kylo / Ben in some metaphorical way.
The moment that follows, when they look at each other, just breathing, almost communing is so perfect, it’s a moment of heartfelt understanding, of unspoken intimacy and that’s when they consume this love with this unbelievably erotic dance/fight sequence.
I think the most moving scene of TLJ was Ben staring at Snoke’s corpse, it’s such a powerful moment. He’s looking at 29 years of suffering and pain, at the monster who poisoned his mind from the very start of his life, and now he’s finally free. You can see from the beginning of the film that Ben is slipping out of Snoke’s grasp, that he is resentful and on edge. I think he’s seeing how deluded he was, how he spent so long believing Snoke was all powerful and yet he was able to defeat him. His abuser is dead, his reign is over, the chains have been broken and for the first time in his life Ben is free. I don’t question for a second why he doesn’t immediately turn to the light or the Rebellion. He can finally be the one in control, make his own choices, no longer be the first order’s puppet. If he goes with Rey, he will once again be under someone else’s control, he’ll be kept on a leash and “used” for his abilities like some kind of weapon. He doesn’t want that for Rey or himself. If they’re ruling together, nobody can control them or use them to fight for their cause.
This. Kylo must have felt intoxicated when he killed Snoke and stood side by side with Rey, for that’s the first time in a while, or maybe majority of his life, when he was ever that free and himself, with someone who sees him as him, and accepts him for that. Until it was over, and Rey brings up the fucking resistance ships. In Kylo’s mind, the Resistance, the jedi, the republic, the first order, literally everything and everyone can perish, for him and Rey. Together, they are enough. They are powerful beyond imagination, and have a whole galaxy in their reach. They could create new, better order to their image, and no one could stop them. Only, that’s just part of an equation, for Kylo needs Rey by his side for that, and she cannot accept that vision.
It’s not just Ben, though, who doesn’t make it work between the two of them. Rey’s motivation (at least, part of it) to go to Supremacy, to help Ben turn, is to win the war. She doesn’t probably really mean to use him just as a tool, the way Snoke did, for she clearly sees beyond a creature in a mask and sympathises with him at that point, but that’s part of her reasoning, nonetheless. It’s understandable that Rey wants to save her friends in the Resistance the moment comes when the fight ends. Though for Kylo, all he can see in that moment is yet again someone who he thought sees him, turns out to care about him only as a means to something else and not worthy on his own (mostly, Snoke, though Ben’s parents and Luke too saw him as ‘too much Vader/darkness’ in him, and let that overshadow Ben himself). He feels betrayed, and copes with that in the best possible way he knows – lashing out and crumbling everything to the ground, or at least trying, until he realizes that power he obtained means nothing. No matter how hard he tries to oppress and cover up his problems by obliterating them, the wounds in his soul are still there. It would take something entirely else to heal them than an entire galaxy at his disposal.
Intro | In this essay series we examine the Star Wars sequel trilogy through the lens of archetypal/aesthetic/alchemical psychology. This entry exploresthe nature of the human shadow as portrayed in The Last Jedi.
++Much thanks and all credit to @ohtze for editing this meta series and being a phenomenal writing partner to work with, always.
I have to add a late stage correction thanks to @adarmdriver and this amazing edit. Sorry to use your beautiful gifs, but this is the closest I’ve come to analyzing this scene in the 1.5 weeks since I saw it last and this is groundbreaking. Look at the shadows in this shot:
And then this one:
Kylo’s shadow goes from two times as big, including Luke, to almost nothing. And the true man without a shadow is revealed in the end–but how, why, what–there’s no reason Kylo/Ben’s should be that minimal at the same time of day, twenty feet apart. And Ben is facing the First Order, the Resistance at his back while he faces the man who would separate him from it.
There’s also the fact that this entire field of blasted, violent red is now covered with white (salt). It creates this amazing kind of peace where people were expecting violence. People thought we’d see Luke struck down in anger, another father being cut down in cold blood.
Deeply feminine wounds, blanketed in white. A man with a short shadow. No blood spilled, no wounds made–just healed. Luke’s story is elevated past the characterization we all expected into something perfect.
Peace and Purpose is such an amazing song in how there’s this strange build and melancholy to it, including Kylo’s themes (multiple) swelling into a drop that meanders back into Rey’s theme, going from happiness to sadness to hope, and to the Force theme motif, back to the Resistance. I have no music knowledge but this song needs to be dissected in how meaningful it is. On that note, someone, please, deconstruct The Cave before my headphones explode from listening to it too much.
Taking Drivers statement as a whole, I think it is pretty obvious he is torn in ways that have nothing to do with the Force, dark and light.
He is torn over the person he actually is, and here are a few points I would make regarding the narrative hints around his character.
Ben the Calligrapher: Here we are introduced to an aspect of his character that was interesting, but not necessarily surprising actually. He is an artist, he likes to create, for what is the definition calligraphy:
“the art of giving form to signs in an expressive, harmonious and expressive manner.”
“Harmonious,” BALANCE.
Ben the Intellectual: Despite his volatility, he most certainly isn’t stupid and you don’t study as a Jedi without academic discipline. Given his family, he is driven by legacy much the same way the prodigy is driven by their particular gift even if like the prodigy, they aren’t having fun.
He is also introspective.
Ben is emotional to the point of clinging as a child, and he craves family, connection and is lonely. He cried and cried until Han picked him up and held him.
In “Bloodlines,” Leia senses that “he will have pluck, and wit,” and will be a fighter, and he is all three, even if he has been corrupted and those attributes channeled in the wrong direction.
Which naturally leads us too……
Ben the Virgin: Given all the clues to his character, it’s not surprising that he has never connected with someone physically. At this point, he has already been disappointed and rebuffed by his family, as well as influenced by Snoke which means trust issues have begun to set in, so he isn’t getting close to anyone.
Leia remembers a time in his life when he had friends, but it’s likely they too grew to be afraid of him, which also would have hurt.
But more than anything, this emotional maelstrom is likely not to make Ben WANT merely casual intimacy, but rather something that is meaningful and won’t get up walk out the door the next morning.
In other words, Ben “sleeps for keeps.”
It also explains the complete and utter visceral reaction he has to Rey to not only her physical beauty, but the emotional intimacy he felt with her.
So again, it was not news to me that he is a virgin because it makes sense that he would be so protective of himself emotionally.
Ben the Warrior: His being artistic and creative doesn’t negate his martial abilities.While combat may not have been his first inclination, he excels at whatever he sets his mind to.
Ben is broken and torn because he can’t be true to himself, forced to choose one extreme over the other rather than taught to live with both aspects of his being, he became as jagged as his saber.
A man who had the great capacity to create and to love, was twisted into something hateful and furious, so Kylo tried to kill the boy and his “weaknesses,” without realizing that those attributes that Snoke so hated, were his greatest strengths.
While I don’t think that Ben would have ever been a Jedi choir boy because of his need for “attachment,” Rey sits more comfortably in the dark than Ben does because she has been largely her own “Master,” and i think by the end of Ep.9, we will see Ben again, and this time, he won’t be on his back, nor on his knees, but standing up.
With all of this discourse about potential abuse, I’d like to point out that from the first movie it was Kylo who always treated Rey like an equal.
Both TFA and TLJ make a clear effort to juxtapose how other men treat Rey with how Kylo/Ben treats her.
In fact, we blatantly see Finn always trying to come to Rey’s defense and rescue as if she’s a delicate princess in both TFA (mostly) and TLJ (less so, but still apparent with Finn trying to desert the resistance just to not put Rey in danger).
From their first interactions together, we see Kylo treating Rey more respectfully than he treats others. Best contrast we see is with how he interrogates Poe and how he interrogates Rey, but it is all out of fascination due to his connection with her and respect for who she is and what she’s capable of, not because she’s a girl. Honestly, he fails to even treat her like a typical enemy of the order and does the bare minimum to invade her. He even makes the effort to respect her with body language (squatting when she wakes up, bending down as her reads her mind, etc). In the TFA novelization, he even shares/implies how uncomfortable it makes him to put her in this dynamic at all. Moments later in TFA, he straight up describes and defends her strength in the force to Snoke. He offers to be her teacher after their fight in the forest because he’s blown away by her strength and power.
In TLJ, his respect for her is even more cemented as he attempts to engage in mutually respectful conversation despite her vitriol towards him, as he establishes her power as equal to his and something that Luke is equally fearful of, as he guides her to meet her full potential and let go of her weaknesses, as he hands her the lightsaber after killing Snoke so that she can fight by his side, as he keeps an eye on her, his partner, as she fights but letting her defend herself because he knows she can, and as he literally offers her a place by his side to rule the galaxy as an equal. All the while Luke has spent the entire movie treating her like some inhuman force monster, shrugging her off, and disrespectfully dismissing her.
All Ben ever does is try to persuade her to stand with him. He allows her agency and choice in her decisions. He tries desperately to win Rey over, by her own choice. He longs for her, his equal’s, acceptance and approval so much that he literally begs her with a quivering lip.
But suuuuuure Jan. Keep prattling on about how he “abuses” Rey. A respectful romance involving multifaceted and broken characters gets under your skin? your life must be really hard.
Reylo Source 