Feminism (and Not) in Star Wars
I had posted this a few weeks ago, but I am reposting it now since in the meantime I gave it some more thought.
Warning: unpopular opinions ahead.
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During the last few years, I have often heard and read people arguing that the Star Wars sequels are “feminist”, that Rey in particular is a Mary Sue and, at worst, that “feminism ruined Star Wars.” So, I would like to add my two cents.
It cannot to be denied that the end of the sequels, and with it of the saga as a whole, is highly dissatisfying. But feminism is not what caused it.
The sequels are not feminist at all. Especially not in Star Wars, where the greatest hero Luke Skywalker had ended the conflict through compassion and forgiveness. TRoS in particular is a slap in the face of female dignity and virtue, both for the male protagonist’s mother and for his love interest.
Unfortunately, and that is one of my major issues, with the sequels, many things are not being said or explained. This might be due to the fact that Episode VIII was subversive and that so many classic fans ranted and stormed against it; but that didn’t prevent Episode IX from showing, if not saying, a lot of things.
Look at what is not being said.
Compare the attitudes of different people in similar situations.
„You cannot deny the truth that is your family.” Lor San Tekka in The Force Awakens
Rey was introduced as a positive female character but then, over the course of three films, her moral corruption was displayed under the lame excuse of a black and white morality (“I am all the Sith” vs. “I am all the Jedi”).
Rey seemed like a reboot of Luke Skywalker at first, but watching her throughout TRoS we see her fail in all instances where Luke had proved himself a hero.
Luke had forgiven his father despite all the pain he had inflicted on him. Rey stabbed the „bad guy”, who had repeatedly protected and comforted her, to death.
Luke never asked Vader to help the Rebellion or to turn to the Light Side, he only wanted him back as his father. Rey assumed that she could make Ben Solo turn, give up the First Order and join the Resistance for her. She was thinking of her friends and her own validation, not of him.
Luke had made peace by choosing peace. Rey fought until the bitter end.
Luke had thrown his weapon away before Palpatine. Rey picked up a second weapon. (And both of them weren’t her own.)
Luke had mourned his dead father. Rey didn’t shed a tear for the man she is bonded to by the Force.
Luke went back to his friends to celebrate the new peace with them. Rey went back letting everyone celebrate her like the one who saved the galaxy on her own - the woman who was tempted to become the new evil ruler of the galaxy and had to rely on the alleged Bad Guy to save both her soul and her body.
Luke had embodied compassion when Palpatine was all about hatred. Where he chose love and faith in his father, Rey chose violence and fear.
Luke had briefly fallen prey to the Dark Side but it made him realize that he had no right to judge his father. Rey’s fall to the Dark Side did not make her wiser.
Confronted by Vader’s disclosure of his true identity Luke was forced to face himself, to realize that he had been judgmental, arrogant and biased; and after the initial shock he accepted his origins as a part of himself. - Rey did not reconcile with Palpatine as a part of herself.
After realizing what he had done to his nephew, feeling responsible and disillusioned, Luke went into exile for years waiting for his death. - Rey also was appalled at herself, but she spent just a few minutes on Ahch-To until Luke appeared to her, this time telling her exactly what she would have wanted him to say to her on her first visit on the island. This scene was so ridiculously opposite to his attitude in TLJ that I believe he was a fantasy conjectured by her. (Like Ben’s vision of his father.)
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Rey failed where Ben had been strong, too.
Ben killed Snoke to save Rey. Rey killed Palpatine to complete her Jedihood. (Or at least, what she believes being a Jedi means.)
Ben loved Rey despite all she did to him and took away from him, and she didn’t even honour his name in the end.
Ben knew the stories of Luke, Vader and Palpatine well enough to wanted to end the Jedi and Sith at last and start something new and better. Rey only knew scraps of old tales and wanted to have them her own way.
Ben had been under an evil influence in his mind since before he was born; when he finally turned to the Dark because he had nowhere else to go, he was 23. Rey gave in to her Dark Side minutes after meeting her “mother” in the Death Star ruin; the same happened again with Palpatine on Exegol.
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On the ruin of the second Death Star, Rey is at her lowest on the same spot where Luke had won over himself thirty years before in RoTJ.
Vader had provoked Luke to make him turn - Kylo hadn’t.
Vader hat traumatized Luke - Kylo had protected and spared Rey repeatedly.
Vader never had had a kind word to spare for his son - Kylo had comforted her and shown her his human side.
Vader had lured Luke into a trap twice in order to keep him by his side. - Kylo hadn’t, on the contrary, he wanted to prevent her from running into Palpatine’s trap.
Luke did not know what had made Vader the way he was when he came to find him, but he was adamant to save him. - Rey knew by the time of their duel that Kylo was largely also a victim, and she stabbed him to death him anyway.
Luke always fought fair. - Rey used the distraction made by Leia’s reaching out to him to impale him, just the way she had seen him stabbing Han.
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It is ridiculous to say that it’s a victory of Good over Evil when a young woman uses Jedi training to kill her master’s own son, who was only on the defensive, with his mother’s help and blessing. Rey will rather kill the man she belongs to, or die herself, than admit that she needs him. If that is supposed to be “feminism”, it’s a very distorted idea of female independence and strength. Just like it’s not automatically “feminism” to make a girl pose as the heroine because she wants to be a Jedi no questions asked.
Fans discussed and argued about Rey’s family for years; it was a great move in TLJ when she admitted her parents were “nobodies” and that they left her on purpose. It was refreshing to see her carve her life and personality on her own. TRoS shattered this by making her the descendant of the most powerful man in the galaxy; and what’s worse, she wound up being a usurper just the way he was, taking over the Skywalker mantle.
The sequels are feminist only when the audience believes that it’s a happy ending if a female ends up alone with no one standing in her way. They are told from her point of view, so as viewers we will automatically believe that she’s the heroine and root for her (or not, but still believe that it’s her story). Looking only at the bare facts, Rey is much less heroic than she first seems.
At the end of TRoS Rey is alone with a few ghosts behind her, on a desert planet in company of a droid and with an old, wrinkled woman as her only interlocuter, the way she began, and her mind still has hardly developed beyond that of a child. She is willing to embrace the legacy of both Skywalker family and Jedi although the fate of Ben Solo (who is none other than her other half in the Force) should have taught her how fu***-up both of them were.
Rey doesn’t want to see. She’s in denial like when she pretended that her family was coming back for her on Jakku. Inside, she is still a child - everything she did was motivated by her desire to find the belonging she ardently craved. She can’t be blamed for that. But does that make her a “strong woman”, or even a “Mary Sue”, like many annoyed viewers claim? No.
“If you will not turn to the Dark Side, then perhaps she will.” Darth Vader in Return of the Jedi
In all honesty, there is something I find much worse than Ben’s patricide or Luke’s panic attack at the Jedi temple. Those were actions spurred by the moment, and both men regretted it immediately. Leia’s behaviour shows an unpardonable attitude for entire decades. Being a trained Jedi herself, she could have taught her son - instead she sent him to his uncle. This seems a practical choice since she was politically active while her brother wanted to start a new Jedi Order, but from the novels we learn that Ben heard his parents arguing and talking about him like he was a monster ever since he was a child, and that when he was sent away this seemed to confirm that something was wrong with him and had to be fixed. (From the novels we also learn that he actually had no ambition to become a Jedi and wanted to be a pilot like his father, but he had no say in the matter.)
After his fall to the Dark Side, Leia fought with the Resistance for years knowing that her own son was on the other side. What if she had met him and been forced to kill him (or if he had come into the situation, as we see in TLJ)? In TFA, she sent his own father to bomb Starkiller Base knowing well that their son might be on board. Leia had felt Snoke’s influence on Ben’s mind when he was still in her womb; so, she knew he had been manipulated for decades, but when she heard of his fall to the Dark Side, she automatically assumed he had made a choice. Only after he had been a part of a criminal organization for years Leia sent her estranged husband to him. She only reached out to him when she was on her deathbed, and I still am not certain whether she wanted to help him, or to make him stop fighting against the girl she had adopted in his stead.
Would Padmé have left her own son in the dumps? Never. Padmé refuted Obi-Wan’s disclosure about Anakin’s fall to the Dark Side adamantly, and went to a volcanic planet alone, with a highly advanced pregnancy, to see a terrorist and murderer because she still saw the good little boy he had been in him. And she would have gotten him out of that hell had Obi-Wan not interfered. If you don’t believe me, watch the scene again: Anakin’s expression changes totally on speaking with his wife. Padmé was literally reaching out to him, and she was succeeding. Love, as always, was stronger than anything else in him. And Padmé believed in her husband until her very last breath. “Obi-Wan, there is still good in him.”
Dindjarin, the Mandalorian of the eponymous tv show, is an outcast who earns his living with dubious business and has killed his fair share of people. But had anyone attempted to do to his little protégé what Snoke did to Ben Solo, I don’t doubt he would have marched on the Supremacy and strangled him with his bare hands. (At least, he would have died trying.) Han would probably have done the same, but Leia deliberately never told him of Snoke’s influence on her son’s mind ever since before his birth. By the time she finally does, as we witness in TFA, their son has been Kylo Ren for six years.
Leia, the princess, the general, the war heroine, had feared her son before he was even born because she sensed that he was like her own father. But she had no qualms and no fear accepting and instructing the granddaughter of her worst enemy. Why?
Because Rey doesn’t waver. She has no doubts. She is not conflicted between both Sides of the Force. In Leia’s eyes, Rey is pure Light Side, so she embraces her wholeheartedly as the child she always wanted. As far as I can remember, Leia has never, the way her brother did, offered love to anyone who didn’t fight on her side. And Rey, who had angrily confronted Luke for his moment of terror which “created Kylo Ren”, did not consider for a moment Leia’s responsibility towards her son. Nor does she realize that Leia’s love for her is not unconditional but that it is parallel to her Jedi training.
Most fans admire Leia for her fighting qualities. Nothing wrong with that, but it’s not necessarily such a good thing if one spends one’s whole life fighting instead of learning how to preserve peace. Leia is adamant that the side she’s on must win. Like every Jedi before her, she does not know, want or even consider that what the Force actually needs is Balance; and that both her father and her son were not evil because they were strong on both Sides, but that this meant they might have made balance possible.
Leia never approached her relationship to her father (at least as far as I know), never tried to understand him better and forgive him the way her brother had. Considering what Vader had done to her and her friends, she can’t be blamed for pushing away her memories and living in terror of the Dark Side. However, on the long run her incapacity for introspection is not a strength but a weakness. The one who paid the price is her son, and with his fall to the Dark, the whole galaxy again became prey to the terror that she herself had always fought against in first line.
Vader had been right after all: Leia did fall prey to the Dark Side, though unknowingly. Not only did she give up on her son, she actively helped evil come back to the galaxy by believing to do the right thing: she trained Palpatine’s granddaughter, she taught her to deny her own fears and weaknesses, she gave her justification for her actions, she helped her killing her own “evil” son. If that is not the Dark Side’s influence, I don’t know what it is. Leia had denied her son’s potential for good and given up on him long before his fate was sealed, and in the same way she closed her eyes on Rey’s potential for evil. The self-same “bad” son had to prevent the girl she had taken under her wing from becoming what the old devil Palpatine had in mind. Unfortunately, at the cost of his life.
I am not an advocate for feminism on principle. If females can be independent and self-assured, if they shed the cloak of “damsel in distress”, on the downside this also means that they can be or become villains just like men. Many people tend to believe that a woman is naturally better, kinder, softer than a man. The Star Wars saga never bowed to this cliché.
The idea that a woman does not necessarily need a man is positive on its own, but it becomes poisonous if it undermines female trust in men. Star Wars has a long story of lonely, unhappy men (all three generations of Skywalkers), who were denied their natural right to be needed by their women. One of Anakin’s dilemmas was that he saw Padmé as being too good for him and wanted to prove to her that he was equal to her in his own way. Ben, ironically, felt that he was not good enough for Rey because he was tainted by his heritage, so he wanted nothing more to be free of it and start something new and fresh with her.
A man naturally wishes to protect others, in particular wife and children. But in all three generations, we find these men whose personalities are split in two and cannot reconcile the two halves of their self: Anakin / Vader, Luke / Leia, Ben / Kylo. Due to the similarity in his two names, I expected the last of the Skywalker blood to finally heal the wound in his personality and become only one. Had anyone wanted and needed both, Ben and Kylo, he might have. But Kylo was an aberration to everyone including Rey. Kylo was a villainous figure and as a male, he was aggressive and arrogant, yet he made his own decisions and had chosen his own name, things Ben Solo never got to do.
This is not to say that the sequels are against strong females or prefer the guys over them: no, the guys f** up at least as often as the women do. But to pretend that Leia’s and / or Rey’s portrayal is unrealistically positive and that “feminism ruined Star Wars” is either extremely short-sighted or a mockery of femaleness.
It is true that women have more and larger roles in the ST, but I can’t see anything wrong with that. Not any more than with the fact that in the OT there was practically only Leia (the few other female characters almost had no impact on the story), and that there were few females in the PT, too. The Jedi Order consisted almost only of men, and you hardly hear anyone complain.
I know that many fans dislike Anakin and Ben, but this is not because these two are utterly detestable men with not one good bone in their bodies.
One reason is that in an action movie we usually value coolness in the protagonist above everything, and that the Skywalkers are all very emotional by nature; which is made worse by the fact that we usually expect coolness from guys in particular. Most fans prefer Darth Vader, Han Solo and the likes to the Skywalker men.
Another reason is that the filmmakers have deliberately manipulated our emotions. The prequels are told from everybody’s point of view but Anakin’s, and the same goes for the sequels with Ben. So, as viewers we automatically identify emotionally with anyone but them. We never get to really know the “villain’s” point of view, we only see how other people react to them; and since these reactions are much more often negative than positive, we get to the conclusion that both of them are inescapably evil, that they chose to be so, and that they deserve their terrible fate.
My suggestion: rewatch both trilogies again and this time try to look through Anakin’s or Ben’s eyes. (And possibly also read the novels and the Kylo Ren comics.)
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