“Ben?”
Kylo Ren kidnaps Rey, interrogates Rey, tries to kill Rey, tries to kill Rey’s friends, and kills his own father in front of Rey. He watches as planetary systems with billions of lives are destroyed. So why, one might ask, does Rey spend so much time trying to fix him? Why, one might ask, does she kiss the most destructive presence in the galaxy?
Isn’t this a less than stellar message about relationships?
The answer is, in the real world, it’s a dreadful one. If someone treats you like Kylo Ren treats Rey? Even sort of? No matter how they apologize? Do not kiss them.
In Star Wars, the answer is more elusive. In Star Wars, Kylo Ren is not Ben Solo in a mask. In Star Wars, Kylo Ren and Ben Solo are different people.
Star Wars is, among other things, a story about redemption. Redemption in theory is beautiful. Redemption in reality is harder. Some religions treat redemption as an absolute: confess your sins and all is forgiven. Some individuals make the case for redemption by saying that we should not be defined by the worst thing we have ever done. Some believe forgiveness can only come after punishment. Some believe in redemption in theory but find their personal limits in practice. Are we going to forgive, for example, Alex Jones for how he treated the familes of the Sandy Hook victims?
This is a Substack about Star Wars. I am not really qualified to adjudicate the nature of redemption and forgiveness. I can, though, identify the way Star Wars handles forgiveness for the unforgivable. Star Wars distinguishes the good person from the evil person that has subsumed them.
This is deeper than adopting a new name. Name changes are endemic in the Star Wars galaxy. Leia Organa is an adopted name. Han Solo is a chosen name. Finn is named by a person he’s just met as a replacement for a number. The Emperor (appropriately) is called by many names: Sheev Palpatine, Senator Palpatine, Chancellor Palpatine and Darth Sidious. Count Dooku is also Darth Tyrannus. Obi-Wan Kenobi goes by Ben Kenobi. Senator and Queen Padme Amidala is also “Padme Naberrie” when she pretends to be her own handmaiden. (This gets particularly arcane, as she’s called Amidala in the films, the Naberrie name is never used on screen, but a toy was sold with her as Padme Naberrie and according to what I’ve read, her real full name is Padme Amidala Naberrie, so blessings upon those trying to keep score.)
Some of these names are disguises. Others are victories. When Rey assumes the name “Rey Skywalker” she rejects her birthright in order to embrace her adopted lineage. Her name is the spiritual ending of the entire Saga.
Kylo Ren and Darth Vader, though, are neither victories nor disguises. They are distinct identities. We meant to see Ben Solo and Anakin Skywalker as having been replaced by their alter egos. They are not changed so much as possessed.
In the original trilogy, the idea of Anakin Skywalker being distinct from Vader spelled out. Ben Kenobi establishes Vader’s villainy by telling Luke that his father was killed by Darth Vader. We, as an audience, don’t discover that isn’t true until the very end of the second film.
Darth Vader’s redemption is not, in fact, a theme of either of the first two Star Wars films. The idea that he can be turned back into Anakin Skywalker is introduced and resolved in Return of the Jedi. Audiences then would have seen Darth Vader removing his mask as removing the Vader persona. He is redeemed by his son because, in the end, he is no longer Darth Vader. Vader’s mask is burned, and Anakin returns. The two are separated.
In a way, Darth Vader is not redeemed. He is defeated and Anakin Skywalker is returned to himself. Even so, if you wanted to view Darth Vader as being redeemed, I would argue that the original trilogy makes that far easier for the viewer. Vader’s crimes in the first three films live comfortably within the cartoon villany of the era. He fights good guys, kills Rebels. He tries to destroy our heroes.
But we don’t see Darth Vader order the execution of innocent villagers or kill younglings. We haven’t seen Vader break an innocent person’s neck, the way he does in Obi-Wan Kenobi. Collateral damage is implied in the original trilogy, but we don’t see very much of it.
The prequels come along to complicate, well, everything, but especially the idea of redemption. Anakin Skywalker’s journey to the Dark Side does not appear to be based on mystical possession. His fear and aggressiveness and naivety are used to bring him around to a selfish desire for control. He does things that are distinctly Dark Side before he is dubbed Darth Vader. The story lays out all the psychological reasons an innocent boy might choose Palpatine. That’s about as far from possession as it gets.
The implication, though, is that when he kneels before Palpatine, he rises as someone else. You hear it in his voice, he takes on a new affectation, there’s something off. He seems like someone pretending to be Anakin and just barely pulling it off. For all the political machinations, in the end, Palpatine is a spirit of evil and once Anakin succumbs to that spirit, he does cease to be Anakin Skywalker. Anakin Skywalker would not have led the charge into the Jedi Temple after Order 66. Darth Vader would.
There’s a reason that Obi-Wan Kenobi just added a content warning. Order 66, in the wake of all these children in danger, feels different to watch these days. It did, though, feel extremely jarring back in 2005. Vader and the clone troopers attacking the heroic Jedi felt like a part of the story we were all expecting: warriors fighting warriors. But when that Padawan winces at Anakin’s blade in Revenge of the Sith? It’s about a grim a note as could be played. I know many parents who now wonder if that note needed to be played at all.
I would say that very little in Star Wars is meant to be taken literally. Even the death of younglings is a code for ‘he has gone too far.’ Nonetheless, the way Lucas navigates the story around the idea that we are meant to forgive and redeem a murderer of children? Is to imply that Anakin does not commit these crimes. It’s only someone that looks a lot like him.
The mask of Vader helps us distinguish between those two personas in the original trilogy. In Revenge of the Sith he is both a Sith and maskless for much of the film, but we are meant to think of him as Darth Vader already.
The sequels make this even more challenging to decode. We never see Ben Solo turn to the Dark Side. Kylo Ren is far more adolescent than Darth Vader. Plus, the performance of Adam Driver shows that Ben Solo is somewhere in there, just trying to get out.
I suspect a piece of this is just the result of popular tastes: we prefer psychological intricacy in our storytelling. (Even Thanos, in the MCU, is made more like a sad misunderstood monster than he was originally conceived in the comics.) The idea that there is a human being under the mask of Darth Vader is a revelation. In contrast, Kylo Ren is all too human.
Kylo Ren is one of the many ways the sequels create a distinct story from the films they quote. He’s a roiling ball of hurt, throwing tantrums and blame in every direction, going from moments where we cheer to moments where he is indefensible. Even his mask comes and goes, as if he can’t decide what it means to him, if he wants to wear it at all.
Because of this seductive suffering, Kylo Ren inspires sympathy. This sympathy is used as a tactic by Snoke in The Last Jedi. To quote Snoke himself, “It was I that bridged your minds. I stoked Ren’s conflicted soul. I knew he was not strong enough to hide it from you, and that you were not wise enough to resist the bait.”
The result is that the audience shares in Rey’s struggles. Can Rey save Kylo Ren? Should she want to? Can he become the savior Luke refuses to be? The answer at the end of The Last Jedi is, in fact, no. Rey symbolically slams the door to the Falcon on Kylo Ren, leaving him alone with his anger. He is still, at the end of The Last Jedi, Kylo Ren.
Kylo Ren is not defeated by Rey’s sympathies or hope, in fact. It takes a village. I’ll save a deeper discussion of how he is returned to himself for another essay, but the sequels, for all their complication, are not confused about the rules of Star Wars. The memory of Han Solo says it clearly: “Kylo Ren is dead. My son is alive.”
It’s unmistakable in The Rise of Skywalker if you’re watching for it: Ben Solo is an entirely different person after he throws his crossguard into the sea on Kef Bir. He makes jokes. He shoots without looking. He smiles. We only spend a few minutes with Ben Solo, but in those minutes we meet him for the first time.
Mental illness. Addiction. Q Anon. Pick your allegory. There are countless ways we can find ourselves wondering where the person we knew went, and hope for them to come back to us.
Is this the right way to view individual responsibility? I think that depends greatly on your point of view. Sometimes trying to save someone is not in our best interests. There are considerations in real life that fantasies do not have to weigh.
At it’s heart, though, Star Wars has a hopeful view of human nature. That hopefulness is on full display with its relentless optimism about the nature of evil. Evil, in Star Wars, is not who we are. It is something that replaces us until we can return. This may feel like a distinction without a difference, but it’s the key to the choices the characters make and the position Star Wars takes on redemption.
Rey, more than any other character, and more than probably the audience itself, makes a continuous and clear distinction between Kylo and Ben. Ben is the prince trapped in the tower that she is trying to save. Kylo Ren is the tower.
Like Luke in the original trilogy and Padme at the end of Episode III, Rey believes there is still good in him. In Star Wars, the heroes see the good in their enemies. Even and especially when those enemies are not themselves.
A brilliant analysis, especially of the nuances of redemption and forgiveness.. with significant parallels to basic classic Christian theology and wrestling about these things. “At its heart… Star Wars has a hopeful view of human nature. That hopefulness is on full display with its relentless optimism about the nature of evil. Evil, in Star Wars, is not who we are. It is something that replaces us until we can return.”
Very much akin to the Christian sense of souls… a “who” that is truly who someone is… but can be distorted. An identity one can take on… embodied in a name change…(biblically Saul becoming Saul, Abram Abraham — and traditionally with new names at baptism). And that one can become “possessed” by something darker and evil… (demon possession.)
All of which play out more complicatedly in “real life.”