ST Kylo Ren/Adam Driver Discussion Thread

The podcast Bald Move, while talking about House of the Dragon, had one of the hosts comment that everyone *should* acknowledge we all have “problematic faves” - characters or plotlines that aren’t “morally acceptable” and are enjoyed more than the heroes in part because they’re the villain/a jerk/a scumbag. It’s not approval of the actions, mind you, but rather the enjoyment of the entertainment, the rebellion against the “rules,” etc.

And I actually think no one really debates that by itself - everyone’s got a favorite villain or questionable “ship,” in the same way everyone has “guilty pleasure” movies, books or tv shows they know are “bad” or objectionable.

…But defining the exact limits of where or when something becomes a “problematic faves” or “guilty pleasure” can be a lot more of an argumentative issues.

Like… saying “I enjoy Kylo Ren when he’s on screen” doesn’t cause any issues by itself, nor does general praise or inspiration from Adam Driver’s appearance or performance.

But debate will come out when it’s pointed out that Kylo’s an abuser of Rey, Rey’s an enabler of Kylo’s crimes and violence against others, or that TLJ tends to require retconning characters from a more progressive and “heroic” story to a more reactionary and “amoral” story… which is where there’s problems because the art can just plainly be problematic or objectionable, and a person’s appreciation of it can’t change *that* anymore than them appreciating it makes *them* have problematic views or opinions.

The “forty tale”/mythological defense sort of fascinates me because I sort of agree with it in principle… but think that just means that the changes in the fairy tale or mythological aspects then deserve to be compared and judged against or with each other.

Rey’s got much more in common with fairy tale and mythological characters like King Arthur or Conan the Barbarian in TFA - and then transitions pretty heavily to a “foolish girl” archetype or “princess in a questionable story” in TLJ.

Her popularity dipped significantly, as did the popularity of the ST as a whole.

Kylo’s somewhat different, however - he pretty much *only* ever has the characteristics of basic villains like the Big Bad Wolf or Mordred… but the films try to switch between “hate this ******” to “This is the character you should favor over everyone else.”

It’s literally going between less problematic mythological and fairy tale themes and much more problematic ones - and mostly by just demanding other characters change and double standards be pushed over the story rather than doing anything different with Kylo.

Also, female earthlings as a main target demographic of the film.

…And it appears to have missed and decreased overall female interest in spite of getting praise from parts of that demographic anyway.

 

I think there can be a tendency to call something “complex” to excuse the bigotry or tell those of us who are bothered by it that we are watching it “wrong.”

…and before this gets turned on me, yes, I am saying that those who like the sexist dynamic are wrong.

 

The “what she learns about Luke” part is problematic in and of itself because it means she is willing to accept ‘but he made me!’ from Kylo.

I will look when I get home but I heard quite a bit from Reylos about how Reylo is *actually* feminist and I just want Rey to be a “man with boobs”.

 

Fair point that women who think that Rey being a docile healer and fixer of bad men is “actually” feminist because it is elevating “feminine” traits, and people who want her to be more like Leia, Jyn, or Hera just want a “man with boobs”, are very likely TERFs, which means they do not deserve to see portrayals they like.

OK, getting to the articles now.

The Refinery one lost me with the headline.

“Kylo Ren’s Pecs Prove Star Wars is About Women Now”. What. The. Actual. ****. This “Anne Cohen” needs to know we are not all so shallow and brainless that we go to movies just to look at “pecs” on a whiny mass murderer. That’s downright insulting. Also Star Wars has always been about women. We’ve been here since 1977. Her assertion that Leia was created “just for men” or the “male gaze” makes me think that she didn’t watch the originals or didn’t understand them. Leia was never a “symbol.” Did Cohen not see her leading Alliance troops in both ESB and ROTJ? Maybe she was too focused on Han’s pecs to pay attention to what mattered. The “Princess Leia in the gold bikini” moment was not about a gaze, despite some misogynists (and apparently, some bloggers with internalized misogyny) seem to think—it was about choking her abuser with the chains he put her in. Too bad TLJ was not nearly as feminist as ROTJ. “The film as a whole is an indictment of toxic masculinity.”. OK, I just spit out my drink. I didn’t know “indictment” meant “proponent”. Then she threw in a nice ‘let’s blame Luke for Kylo’s turn’ statement with the one about Luke’s “hands being dirty”.

The WordPress blog did a little better until it started focusing on “feelings” as strictly a feminine trait. As she said about the Jedi philosophy, that’s bull****. And then she said Kylo had “been through trauma,” and I spit out the rest of my drink. What trauma? Han didn’t let him fly the Falcon?

The FeministShop article was actually pretty good. The Culturess one was OK.

The one from the Mary Sue was absolutely brilliant and spot-on.

If the only point was that ‘there are different perspectives on this movie,’ you and I probably both just wasted half an hour of our time, because it’s not like I haven’t been discussing Star Wars for years and wasn’t aware of that.

 

I don’t think the elements themselves being problematic is being debated among anyone whose opinion is worth taking seriously.

As I said—Anne Cohen’s opinion seems like it comes from a TERF, or at best someone who thinks that leaning into antiquated stereotypes about women is “acktually” feminist and anyone who disagrees just thinks feminism is about women “being men” (again, probably TERFism).

If people admit to enjoying something problematic—no argument there. All of us can likely point to something problematic that they enjoy, myself included, mostly films from the 80s.

Pretending that misogynistic portrayals are actually feminist, though? Nah.

So you didn’t really show that these elements are being debated among people with “seemingly similar values.” I can’t imagine that there is much of anything that Cohen and I would agree on.

 

I keep on harping on this, but I think it’s possible those types of arguments are more products of the “necessary double standards” that trying to focus on TLJ’s themes creates - especially around Kylo - that frequently requires treating other characters like **** in comparison to Kylo getting treated like a golden boy.

If someone who holds feminist views wants to see Holdo as a feminist character in TLJ, than they are automatically sort of “required” to ignore Rey’s torture and violation by Kylo in TFA when it was coded in a very clear SA resister/survivor manner. If they want to see Poe as a victim of his own toxic masculinity, than they “have” to ignore Kylo’s clearly toxic and very fascist idea of masculinity. If they want to see the film indict child slavery being accepted by the elites of capitalist societies, then they “must” ignore that Finn himself was a Kylo’s slave.

All those inconvenient, much more substantial facts of the story would expose the themes, metaphors, and “audience connection points” as meaningless or even reversed into something a lot uglier and reactionary.

But like @TaliaJoy said, it’s likely that the heroes having much higher stakes and much more sever trauma is a “turn off” for someone like Rian Johnson, and that Kylo having such petty and nearly non-existent issues with his family paradoxically makes him more relatable to some viewers - “relating” to Kylo feeling disappointed in loving, heroic parents or blaming his loving but scared uncle requires less suspension of disbelief, because you simply don’t believe or invest in the actual stakes and traumas of the story.

…But *that* just means that TLJ is founded on an inherently insubstantial, double-standard-riven story at the expense of much more substantial and sincere story elements from earlier films, and that TLJ forces its audience to ignore or dismiss deeper and more solid storytelling that gets in its way - even just on a plausibility level in-universe.

TLJ needs the audience to agree that, from Rey’s perspective, her own torture and violation at Kylo’s hands, or Finn’s former status as a dehumanized slave, matters less than Kylo seeming immature and dissatisfied with his family.

Which is messed up if you connected with those heroic characters or felt empathy for the horrors they’ve endured.

 

It shouldn’t be mutually exclusive to enjoy and relate to both heroes and villains - and I’d argue TFA actually succeeded in acknowledging that and using that fact successfully. After all, Kylo was never more popular and had nothing like his current “hatedom” in TFA, even though TFA bluntly encourages the audience to see him as a loathsome monster and uses his vile nature and whatever revulsion the audience has against him to help gain support from Rey and Finn because they’re his opponents and victims. The audience - in general - was perfectly capable of being intrigued and interested in Kylo and Ben Solo without taking anything away from Rey and Finn… and more importantly, since they matter more than him, the audience’s interest and love for Rey and Finn didn’t make Kylo fans insecure (… at the time.)…

But Rian Johnson wrote a film that *did* treat sympathy, intrigue, and investment in Rey and Finn as finite, exclusive to one at the expense of the other two, and encouraged audiences who liked TLJ to reject sympathy for Rey and Finn to have such for Kylo.

In TLJ, is Rey “coded” like the victim and resistor of attempted SA and clear, unabashed torture at Kylo’s hands as she was in TFA?

No; in fact, Johnson himself has multiple times made it clear the romantic reading of TLJ is intentional.

In TLJ, is Rey written to treat Kylo like he nearly murdered Finn (her clear best friend, adopted family, and let’s be honest, romantic interest in TFA) and maimed him for defending her?

Nope; in fact, Rey never brings up Finn in relation to Kylo, and barely talks about Finn at all, and never even exchanges words with him… and Finn’s own story is runaway attempt to retcon his TFA story and get him out of the spotlight.

Is Rey written as though she lost her surrogate father figure in Han to Kylo, after a film that made it clear she wants family more than anything, as in TFA?

Nope; in fact, Rey’s now written to have a much less emotional identity crisis and to basically wave off Han’s death in favor of investing in the (im)plausibility of Kylo being redeemed.

Heck, is Kylo written with awareness that he’s already defined himself as the “worse than Vader” guy by murdering Han, who’s also a slave master, fascist, and mass murderer

No; instead, he’s instead “coded” as a teenage metaphor in Johnson’s own words… even though his vile nature is still stated by the film.

Johnson sacrificed or rejected most of Rey’s story and personality, all of Finn’s story, and even most of Kylo’s… so we could have a tepid story that runs on this stuff:

Rey should hate Kylo at the end of TLJ, as she does at the end of TFA… but instead she has an ambivalent look on her face.

Even TLJ’s idea of disappointment in Kylo is inherently unwilling to let him be seen as any *one* thing he is - slave master, fascist, mass murderer, torturer, violator - while it unnecessarily attacks Finn’s story and acts like it couldn’t see Rey as anything but a pretty face.

And that’s before getting into the film arguing Han’s death only applies as a “sad factor” for Kylo himself, or how it argues “Luke scared Ben!” has to be more disturbing than “…And then Ben murdered everyone.”

 

With Anakin I could see a bit of ‘but for the grace of [insert deity here], there go I.’ Who couldn’t see themselves reaching for any level of power to keep loved ones alive, especially after being faced with the level of loss he did?

With Kylo not so much. I see no reason that he would turn evil, other than ‘I didn’t get my way all the time and people aren’t worshipping me,’ and that is not something I could ever see myself selling my soul over.

Of course it is possible enjoy heroes and villains. I enjoy the hell out of Asajj Ventress, and find her relatable. I also enjoy Vader, and Dooku.

When a movie pretends I am supposed to feel sorry for the villain for no other reason than he says he is sad or “torn apart” about doing evil, it loses me. Nothing enjoyable or relatable about that. **** or get off the pot Kylo.

 

I still, oddly, feel like the bigger things Kylo needed was to have other important characters continue to react to him with abhorrence, fear, shock, and hate - to provide a sense of scale for how “condemned” he was and create drama over his possible redemption by acknowledging it *should* have been considered a long shot even compared to Vader… and to have Rey be related to him to create a personal stake that wasn’t toxic regarding his fate.

It’s the insistence by LFL that Kylo’s redemption and heroic turn should be considered a fait accompli by the audience (thus demanding judgement of his actions be disregarded or dismissed) and that Rey should care about him in a romantic light while completely disregarding what he’s actually done that causes the main dysfunction with his presentation.

The motivation is still important - and with Kylo, the continued to desire to try blaming his parents or a legacy of heroism is a misguided liability to the franchise, not just the character - but I think Vader, Maul, and Ventress all benefited more in their redemption or nuanced recession into “lesser evil” by having heroes still treat them as villains, and with Vader getting the main redemption because Luke had that personal tie to him that he couldn’t choose.

The biggest thing that changed was likely LFL determining Kylo was the only New Skywalker, either because they let Finn Johnson make that choice or suggested it to him… and then inevitably using that fact as an excuse to promote Kylo to the “real” male lead and “real” main character because the Skywalker couldn’t end on a purely antagonistic note, so they simply prioritized treating his obligatory redemption as the most important thing in the trilogy.

That led to them becoming insecure about how many people would actually care about Kylo/Ben’s redemption, that insecurity manifested as a rejection of his villainous arc and nature as the ST went along. While in TFA he starts a “villain gets worse” arc and is treated as the main villain, it’s only a few minutes into TLJ that the ST is already *starting* to reject that idea by dumping his helmet, insisting he’s “split in two” over Han’s death, and swiftly demanding Rey not treat him as a villain. I think they’re still somewhat trying to do the “rise of the villain” arc with him by making him the Supreme Leader… but not nearly as much as they wanted to defuse the feud with Rey, emphasize Kylo as more important than Rey and Finn, or (at least in LFL’s opinion) plant seeds for his redemption arc (which I’d argue Johnson didn’t really do because he didn’t care to think beyond his own film or take it seriously, but LFL and Ben Solo fans ran with it anyway.)

It wound up leading to an obsession with tying to give him a major heroic role in the last movie, rather than just having him get a final redemption. The initial Episode IX script had Kylo as the main villain, resolving the main conflict by himself, and dying redeemed… but got rejected by LFL because Ben Solo didn’t get a heroic sequence himself and they wanted him to fight some out-of-nowhere “Bigger Bad” instead. That led to the first writer and director trying to solve this impossible problem through multiple drafts, failing to give LFL what they wanted, and Johnson being approached to make Episode IX and turning it down so Abrams was brought back, and went with the onky answer that could really work for LFL - Palpatine.

Eh… this is probably the DC superhero and supervillain fan in me, but I think you’re limiting what “opposite of Character X” can mean.

Batman has a whole slew of “Opposite” villains who have very little in common with him. The most famous *explicit* “Anti-Batmen” are Wrath/Prometheus (“My criminal parents were killed by cops!”), Bane (“I was raised in absolute hell as a child prisoner for my absent father’s crimes, and had to make myself the peak of humanity to escape and dominate the world!”) Owlman/Hush (“I hated my parents and killed them!”)… and that’s before getting into how other villains like Joker (“Madness and Misanthropy are the proper reaction to trauma!”) or Ra’s Al Ghul (“I am an old rich ‘champion’ of humanity, and have the right to judge mankind as I see fit!”), or any of his other main villains if someone wants to.

And of course, several legacy character in comics were pitched as “opposite” of their predecessor - Wally West as the publicly known, lady-killer “jock” Flash compared to Barry Allen as the secret-keeping, one-woman-man “nerd” Flash, or for the literal Reverse, Eobard Thawne as the totally sociopathic fan-from-the-future-gone-mad Reverse Flash 1 trying to replace or torment Barry for all time compared to Hunter Zoloman as the friend-turned-twisted-“helper” Reverse Flash 2 trying to make Wally “better” by traumatizing or challenging him.

…So “The opposite of Vader” could mean a lot of different things:

- “Hero Goes Bad versus Villain Goes Good” - Which Anakin does himself in the PT.

- “Young Villain Grows Worse versus Old Villain Gets Better” - Which Kylo started doing in TFA (much like how Finn and Rey reverse Han, Leia and Luke).

- “Female Revolutionary Hero versus Male Oppressor Villain” - Something that Rey started out doing.

- “Joyously Evil Villain In White versus Despairingly Evil Villain in Black.”

- Your own “very evil person turning to the light, but reverting to the dark.”

Etc.

I think it’ more accurate to find fault with Abrams and Kasdan not planning ahead for Kylo and the other characters behind d broad, easily modifiable ideas, rather than claiming that their starting brainstorming idea was bad in and of itself.

 

Abrams, like Johnson, was onky very vaguely thinking about anything after his (first) film. And things get ambiguous about whether or not *anyone* at LFL was thinking forward at all, since the only thing LFL have ever suggested they actually expected was Ben Solo getting a redemption by the end.

And I’m only saying “expected” because I think even the most forgiving analysis of LFL, Driver, and other’s comments still wouldn’t be able to use “planned” or “ordered” to describe it - especially since Colin Trevorrow thought the natural follow-up LFL wanted to TLJ was Kylo as the main villain choosing redemption at the end as he dies, and LFL categorically rejected that because they apparently expected Ben Solo to be a/the hero at the end.

So *nothing* in TLJ reflected any actual depth of forethought on LFL’s part for the characters of plot, and it’s likely the same is roughly true of TFA - with the probable exception that Abrams may not have been “torn” over what should happen with Kylo because he wasn’t thinking of Kylo as the *only* new Skywalker, so he might have genuinely thought of Kylo as the main villain of the story.

To me… the smartest thing you could do with Kylo, Snoke, and the “Big Bad” role is 1) make Rey a Skywalker so that Kylo can be a character apart from his family’s legacy, then 2) have Kylo kill and replace Snoke as TLJ did, BUT only at the end of an arc focusing on Kylo being Rey’s personal enemy and getting a crushing victory over her, 3) make it clear he’s somewhere between a fanatic and a completely irrational victim of brainwashing, so that 4) the audience enters the last film certain Kylo is the main and formidable villain of the ST, but is unsure of whether Kylo he “has” to die or “has” to be redeemed.

Ideally, he could have been an antagonist closer to how a certain split personality of a certain Bob is in a certain film that got released this weekend…

 

Vader owned his behavior and was fun to watch. So that’s an opposite.