Killing the Past: The Dark Side and Kylo Ren
TL;DR: Kylo, as a true Dark Side apprentice, sees attachment as weakness and an impediment to power, and this explains a lot of what he does and why.
[Note: I’m aware that this has been circulating on Tumblr. I’m the original author, and posted this to the Facebook group Reylo Trash on February 24. User @empressrey13 put it up here to save it for posterity and told me about it, making sure to credit me, but didn’t know my Tumblr— honestly, I just reactivated it.]
Something that’s been rattling about in my head the last few days is putting together a coherent answer to Rey’s question to Kylo in the third Force Bond scene: “Why did you kill [your father]?” It’s easy enough to say, “Well, Snoke, duh,” but that answer diminishes both Kylo Ren and Ben Solo to the role of a mere pawn, easily manipulated and controlled, and I think that’s a terrible read on a very nuanced set of circumstances leading up to Han’s murder.
To look at this properly, we have to look at Kylo’s direct answer to Rey’s question, which at first seems like a deflection:
“Your parents threw you away like garbage. [REY: They didn’t.] Yes, they did, and yet you still keep needing them. It’s your greatest weakness. You’re still looking for them everywhere, first in Han Solo, and now with Skywalker … Let the past die. Kill it if you have to. It’s the only way to become what you’re meant to be.”
When I first saw TLJ, I thought Kylo was evading Rey’s question because it was too painful to answer, or because there was no logical way to explain something as arcane as a Dark Side rite of passage. Now, having reflected on it a lot, the answer seems clear. He IS directly answering her, but not in an obvious way.
One of the major themes of this trilogy has been to address the main failing of the Jedi (and the Sith, for that matter): the rejection of attachment. The Jedi forbade romantic love and attachment because, in their estimation, the passions stirred up by love can confuse a Jedi’s sense of what is morally right, and therefore is an obvious path to the Dark Side. But what is commonly ignored is how vehemently the Sith also rejected romantic love and attachment.
As Palpatine says to Anakin, “The Jedi and the Sith are similar in almost every regard.” What Palpatine declines to tell Anakin is that the goal of the Dark Side is the accumulation of power for power’s sake (“POWER! UNLIMITED POWER!”), and that romantic love, familial attachment, and compassion for others will always present barriers to that power, and limitations on personal ambition. It is perhaps the cruelest trick Palpatine employs against Anakin, baiting him into the Dark Side by promising him the freedom to love, and omitting that being a Sith Lord (at least under the Rule of Two era) would by definition preclude such attachment.
Snoke reminds Kylo that his training is not complete, and that he knows his apprentice is not nearly as committed to the Darkness as he would like to project. And the reason for this is apparent: Ben Solo still loves his parents, despite their failings. Snoke makes sure to position killing Han as a test of Kylo’s commitment to the Dark path, but the real goal here is to eliminate Ben Solo’s attachments, clearing the barriers to unchecked nihilism. But killing Han doesn’t bring the clarity Kylo was expecting, only more conflict and pain.
What he’s doing is telling Rey that it’s *because* he didn’t hate his father that he had to kill him, it’s a chilling view into the moral vacancy of the Dark Side. When Kylo says to Rey that her attachment to the myth of her parents is her greatest weakness, he means that it’s her desire for belonging that is her greatest weakness. He recognizes the same yearning in himself, and also identifies it as weakness, as he has been trained. And yet, he can’t resist the growing urgency of their bond, and the hold it has on him.
I think this is why he reacts to his feelings about Rey, particularly after the Force Touch scene, with such confused resolve. He knows what he saw in the vision, and in order to square that with his worldview, he has to invent a scenario in which being with Rey conforms to his overall goal to eliminate his attachments to the past. Of course, this desire is paradoxical, since he craves belonging with her, and eventually would be unable to reconcile his feelings for her with what he perceives as weakness in them both. It would have brought them both to ruin if she had taken his hand there.
This is the one thing that has worried me about Kylo’s arc. His reaction to waking up in the throne room and finding her gone is to double down on eliminating attachments and embracing raw power for its own sake. It’s a moment of dark catharsis, in which he decides to destroy everything, including Rey (notice that he wanted to do this indirectly, sending troops, or trying to shoot down the Falcon), in an effort to rid himself of this flaw he believes he has identified. That’s what makes Luke’s sacrifice so important: he gives Kylo the invaluable opportunity to kill another loved one without actually doing it. When Kylo strikes what he believes has been the killing blow against Luke, the look on his face is one of pained realization: there still isn’t any more clarity, and he is even more riven than before.
And now we come to the final Force Bond scene, in which the two of them are reminded that they are still uniquely joined by the Force. It’s a potent reminder to Kylo that destroying his attachments won’t free him from pain; that yearning for belonging and love persists, and the echoes of those you’ve loved linger on forever in your heart. Luke says this twice, basically: “No one’s ever really gone,” and “Strike me down in anger and I’ll always be with you; just like your father.”
I think the novelization will go a long way to resolving the questions around this, but it does illustrate how goddamn hard it’s going to be for him to let go of his hate, and accept that caring for others is not weakness, as he wants to believe, but instead strength, as he’s seen demonstrated by Rey. I still think Anakin’s going to have to sort things out with him, and set him straight about the price of the power he seeks.
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