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The rain had started to come down, she could tell it was one of those rare storms, soon the pressure would increase in the atmosphere, intensifying gravity, and send down the heavier, rain infused with metallic particles, but she was determined to confront him. The moments after her release of regret, her conscious regained dominance and her anger surfaced. She marched to his quarters and didn’t find him there. She closed her eyes and sensed his presence; she whispered a spell to detect its location.
In the cave past the meadow she found him pacing. Instinct led her hand to her waist even though she knew their lightsabers were with Master Luke.
“What were you doing out there?” She interrupted his brooding.
“What about you? A witch! Infiltrating the Force with your spells.” She clenched her teeth together; her hand without a saber grasped its absence tightly.
“It’s not witchcraft. You have no understanding. All your talk about evolving the Jedi, changing the order, drawing on the diverse powers of this galaxy, this universe to strengthen the Force, and you’re questioning that I draw on unconventional resources to enhance the Force?”
He retreated into the cave as the air pressure became denser. She, using a spell remained outside, cornering him in his retreat, the metallic rain beading off of the shield she conjured around her. The pressure of the atmosphere pushed him down to the stone floor. Angry as she was, she felt sympathy as he struggled with the the pressure. She entered the cave and altered the pressure. She smiled, acknowledging how she could set the spell and relinquish her control as opposed to the Force where she had to keep energy focused on what she made it control. At least for now that was the limit of her control with the Force.
“Thoughts on my abilities, now?” She stood over him as he regained composure. He looked up at her; his pupils dilated, eyebrows raised and she sensed the pulse of his heartbeat so strong it felt as if it was directly pressed against her own. Her gaze penetrated through his as she took a deep breath, elongating her posture, entrenched in the moment of this immense control, the power she felt over him, a power she had never felt over anyone. And then it became a weakness as he Force-pushed her and her arrogant stare back. Her spell broke and so had the rains. The pressure of the atmosphere had returned to a state acceptable for their species. The remnants of the metallic downpour streamed into the cave pooling around her as she sat prone on the ground.
“Your complacency with those obscure spells is your weakness.” He stood over her now, but only momentarily as his statement returned her anger to her and she hopped up from the ground. Insults about her heritage were unnecessary, but she was prepared to return them.
“Your aspirations to be your grandfather is yours.” Saberless, she tried to pierce him with these words; they locked in a stare but both shared the fear of what any attempts to control the other with the Force or what hand-to-hand combat might lead them to. He was no longer the lanky awkward adolescent for which she felt a silly girlhood crush for; he was a young man, body built and cut by intense training, and she was surprised at her lack of power to resist being drawn to him, into him....
She sat upright next to him, drenched by perspiration that streamed down her bare chest, awakened from a vision of the metallic rain, a disturbance, masked figures. She focused on making her breath short deep gasps into slow breaths. She glanced back down over her shoulder at him, certain he would have felt such a tremor in the Force, but he lay vulnerable in his stripped slumber, cloaked only in such comfort she glimpsed for a moment the innocent boy emerging from the loneliness and isolation of his time in training. Such comfort his peace gave her that she lay back down on his pale, bare chest and slept until uninterrupted by the late rising of the eastern suns cutting through the redwoods and into their shelter. Impulse requited.
She had devoted a portion of her strength controlling her impulse to use some of the forbidden arts of her culture. She wanted to learn the ways of the Jedi, pure, unaided by ancient spells and powers. Training was getting more difficult as was her ability to keep this skill set repressed. She was proud as she excelled past those with whom she had begun training, even after her injury, and often detached from the moment wondering how much farther she could excel if she had allowed herself to use those powers. The distraction was so disabling but it set a great contrast to those moments that she could clear that from her head and allow the Force to flow throughout her, she felt more powerful than any spell ever made her. She worked on forgetting her past, the traditions, her mother’s teachings to keep her mind consistently clear. She made a deal with herself to stay away from the archives just until she could have complete control of thoughts of her culture, then she promised herself she would return to her research.
Ben and she had found other places to meet. He saw the acceleration of her control of the Force and on hiatus from their research, they would test each other in their secret meetings. He had a such a surge of the Force that she wanted to match; it seemed more powerful sometimes that he could not control it. She began to imagine that she could match his power if she returned to her culture’s craft, that ability would help her equal the surge of the Force in him. And soon, the memory of being intimidated by him became distant and implausible.
In their training with Master Luke, she and Ben were paired up to spar. She feared that Master Luke would sense her use of that craft but more feared losing a match to Ben. She exploited his confidence and lack of control over the immense Force flowing through him. She held back on using any of her familial arts for half the spar; he had seemed to be holding back; he feared any similarities in their methods could reveal their secret training, and then he became unpredictable. Luke cautioned Ben on the the feelings he sensed, confused about the fear he sensed Ben was trying hard to conceal. She decided to provoke him, to push him to reveal that fear because it would give her an advantage.
In spending time together, she could push taunting him. He revealed good humor and patience with her contrary to the rumors she had heard about him reacting strongly to any attempts to reveal his vulnerability. She had seen glimpses of it in his training with Luke who knew the potential Jedi inside of Ben, pushing him harder, testing his temper.
Suddenly in sync, the flow of the Force released any control that she felt, including drawing forth her craft, the act of defeating Ben no longer required her conscious thought. He seemed to move in increasingly slower movements, she could see the molecules vibrate with each of her moves, her saber leaving trails with each movement. Then she felt a shattering in the Force, and Ben no longer moved in slow movements but in erratic, fierce pulses. The swings of their sabers left intertwining glowing trails in the air as they no longer sparred but fought. As they charged for each other and locked sabers, their master held them in place forcing them to stare at each other, to fix on the expression of the other, to silence the growls of their attempts to use mind tricks against each other. Their muscles began to burn frozen in this stance and Master Luke shut off their sabers and took possession of them and pushed them away from each other, both falling to the ground. He looked back and forth between them, finding a moment of weakness as the adrenaline drained away.
As she felt her thoughts slip from her control, she felt Ben panic at her slip then felt his anger at her use of her culture’s spells and those thoughts became clear to Luke. “Much more training do you both require.” He turned and walked away. Vulnerability on display brought a surge of relief and she began to cry; there was no need to expend any more energy on these secrets. She wiped her tears and stood up and looked across at Ben. She knew that anything between them had to end, had to be let go in the flood of regret between them.
Her chin rested on the force field and her shoulders dropped as she sighed; she turned the pages of the ancient manuscript protected beneath. Her touch separated by millimeters of field -- so close to feeling the delicate pages that held so much power -- a power granted by its rarity, ability to survive a purge to hide the positive accomplishments of a man many planets urged its people to see as a demon, to be feared not revered. She pressed more for her face into the field to get closer, her fingers pressing hard onto the page an incomplete, interrupted caress of the page. She rested her head on her arm on the field, an exhaustion from the late hour and from the realization that what had been constantly challenged and denied to her in this place but shared with her as a child back home, ideas and points of view vehemently rejected lay in truth, millimeters from her touch. Jedi were willingly following lies about the Sith, perpetuated by the galaxy. A myth glorifying, denying, hiding the other points of view, pushing an incomplete picture of the truth.
The medical droid gave her clearance to start her Jedi hand-to-hand training again…with the younglings. There was no contact in the sessions just technique drills. Everything was muscle memory, but the muscles on the left were so contracted and stiff.
After 3 months of this humiliation, she was cleared for one-on-one training with a Jedi guard. Then after that was able to rejoin her age group, not at the level she had been, but at least she wasn’t the tallest one in the room. Impatient about returning to where she left off, she pushed her training; every move was exaggerated exertion, every punch harder, every kick stronger, every saber spar pushing the limits. Hesitancy disappeared from thought, which released the flow of the Force.
Master Luke granted her permission to use the training hall for practice in the early morning. The room took on a new persona when she was in it alone, no droids or assessors in the upper galley looking down on her; it was just her, the space all to herself for her to recapture her ability. Her moves were second nature but the muscles still screamed out from disuse. However, by the end of the first hour, balance had returned, the ability to sustain positions became not quite easy, but natural, places where she was supposed to be. Every time she felt the inadequacy of the recovering parts and the synthetic bone in her thigh, she thought of him and her strikes strengthened. Since his clumsiness put her in the infirmary, not once had he come to see how she was doing, perhaps maybe even apologize.
The next day, she wanted to start practice earlier. A violet mist lingered among the piercing cold scarlet dawn, hovering over the plaza between buildings, trailing behind her as she entered through the viewing galley of training hall. Expecting the silence to preface her practice, a voice below called out.
“This space is occupied. You must leave.” Down below, Ben and a Jedi temple guard were face to face, as she turned to hurry out, she heard their sabers ignite and lock. Stopping and looking down, she expected to see the clumsy moves that had disappointed her perception of him and injured her before leaving, and as she peeked down, Ben and the guard looked back at her. Her eyes grew wide and she backed up, running out of there and back into the violet mist.
Well after her actual granted time before returning for her practice, she returned to the hall. He was still there, alone, standing in the middle of the mat, eyes closed, hands linked behind his back, surprising her as she set up her space.
“I’m so sorry for interrupting this morning.” She called down. If this had been before her injury when she held him on that Skywalker pedestal, she might be afraid that she had made him angry. But since the accident and his failure to even check on her recovery, she wasn’t very fond of him anymore, saddened that the grandson of a warrior so revered in her culture had been such a disappointment.
“Apprentices should not overstep their bounds. You should be aware how unusual it is for you to have been given special permission to use this room and be more cautious when entering before your unprecedented granted time.”
At least an apology or a pale attempt feign regret might could have been attempted, she thought. Whatever his cultural traditions, certainly it was appropriate for a person to do if they had injured another person so grievously. But then, it hadn’t been a comfortable situation when they had interacted before then. He had intruded on her work in the archives, and read her thoughts on the page but not a lot was said between them. And after experiencing the disconnect happening in his body that caused her injury, she thought that perhaps he just didn’t know how to coordinate himself enough to interact with her.
She also wanted to tell him not to forget that he was an apprentice, too. But, although she kept the words from being vocalized, he read her thoughts and glared at her. After slight embarrassment by her sass came irritation; he should remember his place, too; the special privilege everyone knew he had as Master Luke’s nephew, as Darth Vader’s grandson was seen by some as unfair, that every padawan was entitled to just as rigorous a training as he was.
“I know you know that,’ She began after being certain he captured those thoughts. “All of us here have every right to expand our training; we all have a unique descendancy, gifts from our ancestors that deserve attention to enhance our ways with the Force.”
“I am the descendant of the “chosen one.” He responded and stepped towards her.
“The chosen one from a certain point of view.” She vocalized, and stepped towards him. “Now, can I have my given time in this room?” He stared for a moment, and she smirked, carefully examining his face and the dark eyes that had looked on her crafted thoughts with intrigue a few weeks ago, to tell him she wasn’t intimidated, nor impressed by his legacy, but she knew he’d know that was a lie. Her eyes traced over his features and felt his muscles tense. Then she blushed as he read a thought of hers that she didn’t expect and couldn’t stop.
“Go.” She turned away and finished setting up her space. He smirked back at her and turned and walked out. She had to struggle to keep her eyes off of him as he left. Her heart was beating so fast that she didn’t think she could calm down and practice. Covering her eyes with her hands at this last tender thought of his, she treaded upon a fine line between sobbing and laughing from embarrassment and was able to fall upon the latter.
After walking out, he reentered the viewing galley and watched her. He felt immense guilt for injuring her as she struggled with the positions on her left side and tears came to her eyes when her injury did not allow her to complete a sequence. Unable to balance in a routine the hologram deemed simple she threw down her saber then punched the wall and shouted. She looked up to the ceiling and sighed, and he backed against the wall of the viewing gallery.
© Sheila Wright and Squire of the Knights of Ren, 2017. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Sheila Wright and Squire of the Knights of Ren with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Learning that Ben was that Skywalker intrigued her, but she had always kept her distance from him, avoiding any remote possibility of engaging in non-training conversation with him. His disposition made it easy as he seemed to not want to interact with others beyond their roles as padawans. And no one really talked about his lineage, at least not out loud. She wanted to make sure it seemed that she saw him just another Jedi in training with her, not letting anyone know that she had spent a long time researching his family intrigued by the history learned in her school. But now he knew.
Among her people, Anakin Skywalker was a admirable warrior and his legacy as Darth Vader was not communicated as a bringer of evil but as a more complex nuanced figure, a survivor, a victim fighting a battle that he fought internally and extrinsically. His prowess in the Clone Wars had set standards for the guards defending the city in which her family lived.
She was honored that Master Skywalker had thought enough of her to pair her with Ben, but she was worried that her skill would be nowhere near his. Although they were close in age and in years of formal training, he was a Skywalker. She tried not to let it and him knowing her secret study in the archives intimidate her.
From the start of the match it was a challenge because she didn’t expect her disappointment. His gangly build betrayed the strength that lay behind the blows of the saber. But his build did not betray the disconnect he seemed to have with his own body. With every strike was a clumsy recovery she saw the potential in exploiting. In a feat of acrobatics she avoided a strike on her saber by his, and in his attempt to head her off, he threw himself off balance, and, as he tried to recover, he lost control of his saber and it pierced her leg as she landed behind him.
“Stupid, clumsy...” was her attempt to hurl an insult at him as she lay prone on the floor. The saber had immediately cauterized the gash on the back of her lower leg, but the compound fracture of her thigh caused by the fall severed the artery in her leg. The rapid and extended loss of blood as they worked to stabilize her, released her head back into unconsciousness.
A sweet, warm, tangy scent, soft sunlight fruit orbs on stone walls, draped in ivy...I imagine its nectar would make a compelling ink. The wall is tall and I am looking across the way at it and then following the ivy down as it falls down to the ground below.
Out of the Bacta tank, she could walk a bit, but she would have to work her way back to stamina and strength that she had before the accident. The synthetic bone was strong, but the artificial muscle and tendon around it needed to adapt.
“After a few more weeks, you should get clearance to start Jedi hand-to-hand training again…with the younglings.” These were the first words she heard in these first moments out of the tank. There was no contact in those sessions just technique drills; it would be ridiculous: basics, going backwards, an undoing and redoing.
“Certainly, muscle memory will prevail,” she began, “I won’t be starting completely over, though. Right?”
“That will depend on how your body accepts the implants.”
The idea that there might be some remote possibility that she might not be able to return to her current skill level let alone continue to improve was impossible for her to process. She forced herself to sit back down on the bed to resist the urge to kick something...well attempt to kick something. Then she wanted to scream, and then she wanted to find Ben. Some Skywalker. This was all that clumsy idiot’s fault. And she felt the last of her energy drain from her with this small fit of anger.
The medical droid monitored her as he injected a serum. “This is to keep the infection from returning.” He explained. “No visitors until it’s eradicated.” He paused, reading the data he had just collected and prepared another hypospray. “You need more rest, now.”
“Wait! No.” And he injected her with a sedative. It felt like gravity changed, pinning her to the bed and her thoughts took her away from this room.
Something is making me consider the jump. It’s not a sense of urgency or instinct to flee, just a sense that I can make it. I can do it. To my left is an ongoing teal sky, darker above, lightening on the horizon. The wall protects a walkway in front of a stone tower, behind it trees, and that scent. It must be coming from the pale orange and red blooms.
**************
© Sheila Wright and Squire of the Knights of Ren, 2017. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Sheila Wright and Squire of the Knights of Ren with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
I'm addicted to and obsessed with Kylo Ren. There is this conflict amongst the Star Wars audience about this character, a conflict that parallels the conflict he feels between the light and the dark side (Writers usually have intent behind every aspect, every word (or at least they should) in everything they put on a page, and I think they are cognizant of this conflict, implicit in it). Ren/Ben is the son of one of my favorite couples, and I can't remove him from my head, and I find myself trying to understand his point of view, empathize with him attempting to research the cognitive and emotional processing he may have experienced when hearing the stories about Vader. I have to admit there is the lust factor, too. I had never seen this actor before The Force Awakens, and my attraction to him increases my desire to take Kylo Ren's side in this whole matter, and I'm finding those reasons to take his side, which frightens and fascinates me.
I wrote that expanded response on Facebook to this question: “Who is your favorite Star Wars villain?” Darth Vader and Princess Leia were my favorite character of Star Wars: A New Hope. Boba Fett tied Leia and Vader as my favorite characters after Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. So two of my favorite characters, not just of the villains, but of the entire cast of characters, represented the dark side.
When I saw The Force Awakens (TFA), I felt how my love for Star Wars consumed many of my moments – wake or asleep – that I have no control over its powerful pull. Han Solo’s death really impacted me. I became fascinated by the strong emotions in that scene, why fictional characters could be such a part of my psyche that when one was killed and the other was being lost to a life of dark choices, that I grieved intensely. That level of grief surprised me, and I felt ashamed for having such strong emotion for a fictional character. But that got me thinking how is it even possible to feel such a real reaction from fictional characters? How does a text achieve that?
My intent is to examine the cognitive connection to emotion in TFA, particularly those felt by Kylo Ren and about Kylo Ren by the other characters and the audience. “Links between cognition and emotion have been acknowledged within neuroscience and psychology (e.g.,Damasio,1994).This paves the way for psychological and philosophical theories of emotions and affect in cinema (Grodal,1997; Plantinga & Smith,1999; Tan,1996; Vorderer et al.,1996), providing a complement to psychoanalytical and sexual approaches to emotion” (Persson 38). Because neuroscience “acknowledged” these “links between cognition and emotion,” there needs to be an examination of the TFA using “psychological and philosophical theories of emotions and affect in cinema.”
In The Force Awakens, the neurology of a terrible act is manifested in Kylo Ren’s face after he kills Han Solo. We see the endorphins released as a result of an act of patricide.
It takes a moment for Ren to process the action, which is described by Holland:
“perceptions going to and from the amygdala immediately arouse feelings of fear. The amygdala has two kinds of output. One process creates a rapid response. It projects directly to the hypothalamus…and then on to the brainstem and spinal cord to move the body.” The “second…process is more cognitive. The signal has gone more slowly from the amygdala to the frontal lobe which evaluate the stimulus and reaction” (91).
In The Force Awakens, the audience sees it took Ren a moment to process what he had just done to his father. He had admitted during that scene that he is conflicted, so he did feel love for his father, and the loss of his father could cause pain. There is a moment of disbelief in his face, then he gasps, perhaps with grief, some pain, and then his pupils dilate; his eyes widen as if a drug has just been injected into his body, calming him, then making him relieved, anticipating euphoria. The reward center of his brain is activated.
In “Cruelty’s Rewards: The gratifications of perpetrators and spectators” it explains, “It is incomprehensible that the infliction of pain on the self is both pleasurable and also sexually arousing. This unlikely conjunction has long puzzled moral philosophers and psychologists.
This is Ren. Finally choosing a side may have brought Ren comfort to a life where he felt a lot of pain, abandonment, resentment. He may have felt a moment of pleasure, but there is debate whether he feels the relief this resolution was to bring. Then my reaction was, despite him just murdering a beloved character and sending from me a cry of grief, in the theatre, I still found him arousing, but, initially kept those pangs of lust to myself. I took pleasure in him, before, during and after this horrific act, and, although evidence says humans do that, it doesn’t mean that humans aren’t ashamed of feeling that way. Ren serves to show us a side of humanity that we may not like but is biologically a fact. Humanity’s sadism is innate.
Yet, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), Becerra et al. (2001) report that a pain stimulus (a probe heated to 468C applied to the skin) activated the brain’s reward circuitry, following a pathway similar to that of the pleasure response: protein from the cfos gene shows “that many neurons in the amygdala that are aroused by aggressive encounters are also aroused by sexual activity” (Panksepp 1998, p. 199): the underlying motivation may be the seeking of safety (“Cruelty’s Rewards”)
Kylo Ren reveals the biology of being sadistic. However, the film does not keep us as mere observer of a sadistic person. The audience becomes implicated. Lisa Zunshine explains that in films, when a character is in pain that the camera turns away, that people turn away when another person is experiencing a strong emotion. People don’t want to look at a character’s face when they are feeling a strong emotion. Zunshine describes:
The same effect is achieved when other characters refuse to watch an individual who is experiencing strong emotions and the camera moves away from him or her at a crucial moment. The assumption behind this strategy is that sometimes people’s faces expose their feelings to such a degree that they become painful to watch, unless a person who watches has a sadistic streak. It is transparency by omission: we can’t see the actual face, but our imagination magnifies its emotional nakedness. (93)
The camera focuses on Kylo Ren and his father’s (Han Solo’s) face during his act of patricide. The audience is forced to have a sadistic streak because the filmmakers show us the face of a character in pain and the scene of Ren crying then killing his father. The audience is the characters in the film that did not turn away--the Stormtroopers, Finn, Rey, and Chewbacca--and the theatre audience. It is not too painful for them to watch. If Zunshine concludes that only a sadistic person would watch, then all of these witnesses are sadistic in not turning away from the strong emotions being shown on Han Solo’s and Kylo Ren’s faces. The humanoids and wookiee have a certain degree of innate sadism. Kylo Ren’s actions make us question if our sadism any worse than Kylo Ren’s patricide?
Kylo Ren takes pleasure in the pain of killing his own father just as the audience takes pleasure in the pain and these strong emotions because they do not turn away. It shows us a side of humanity that is sadistic, biologically. Human beings have a degree of innate sadism. Do we feel it as a flaw and does that reality then cause us pain? And if pain stimulates the reward center of our brain, do we experience a smidgen of euphoria, perhaps a small delight in this dark side of ourselves that we’ve found?
Our strong emotional response to the murder of Han Solo is the result of the feelings we bring with us to our viewing of TFA. Kylo Ren is the son of our favorite scoundrel and we get to “see” some of Han in him in scenes where he has humorous lines [need to include link to video of this]. And some of us felt pangs of shock amongst sympathy when he finds out that the droid he’s seeking is with his father; his voices cracks when he eeks out “He means nothing to me.” and he asks for Snokes help “By the grace of your training, I will not be seduced.” He is at the end of this scene alone, small on the screen in this dark room. His parents sent him away, Snoke questions his ability to resist the light and he is alone –it’s hard for me not to feel sympathy for him. Holland explains that we care for those in a fictional text because in “Creating or responding to literature, we bring such emotional markings and memories to bear, and, like direct emotional stimulation, they operate outside of conscious intellection, Darwin’s ‘reason’” (92). The emotions we bring to Kylo Ren are that he is the child of our favorite couple. He is the son of Han Solo, our favorite scoundrel, smuggler turned hero, lover of our favorite princess, who we also love and hope for, and we bring those emotional markings to our acquaintance to his son. We want their son to be good, for them, for us so that we don’t have to deal with the pain the fall of their son would bring us.
I find it difficult to accept Kylo Ren as lost to the dark side, someone to label as evil. I am desperate to “solve” why he chose the dark side, that there were forces within his biology that made him susceptible to the dark side. I am even willing to question that which we label as evil, to look at the intentions of people who commit terrible acts to find something that will relieve him from some of the blame. As an audience member, it is hard for me to accept that the son of Han and Leia is responsible, to blame for what has happened to him.
But as a text, that pain of that tragedy brings us pleasure. I am compelled to watch TFA repeatedly. Does the audience take pleasure in the pain of the Skywalker family saga? “We enjoy ugly or threatening things in art because we are seeking---and finding. Both the act of seeking and the act of removing the threat and incorporating painful things into our normal mental functioning yield pleasure (Holland 247). We watch emotionally wrenching films because it affects the reward center of our brains.
“Evolutional psychology provides, I think, an explanation. Dead bodies, “low” animals, rotting food—these all represent potential threats to our survival and reproduction. Our brain insists that we pay attention to them because we may need to do something about them. To trigger those actions, we look at the ugly and painful more intensely than we look at blander sights” (Holland 248).
We are so compelled to watch this emotionally wrenching scene of Kylo Ren killing Han Solo not despite the emotional pain it causes because we need to experience that emotional pain - it sharpens our senses. Witnessing pain is biologically beneficial.
Kylo Ren tries hard to seem like an unsympathetic character. When he murders Lor San Tekka and the villagers at the beginning of the film, interrogates Poe Dameron, threatens Hux, he is a cold, menacing figure. However, when he learns that the droid has escaped the squadron’s attempts to capture it, a bit of his father’s sarcasm comes out. The lieutenant reports to him that the droid “escaped on a stolen freighter.” Kylo Ren replies, “The droid stole a freighter?” It is a similar sarcastic reaction of disbelief comparable to Han Solo’s sarcastic reactions. We begin to see another dimension of this villain.
And soon after when he finds out that the droid was helped by the Finn, the Stormtrooper who freed Poe, he ignites his lightsaber and violently smashes the equipment in front of him. Another dimension revealed through this emotional outburst. We find humor in his tantrum because it is such unstable, childish behavior. These tantrums resulted in a laugh from the audience, and seems to be a pattern of behavior that those who work for the First Order have come to expect (when the Stormtroopers turn around when they see Kylo throwing a tantrum after Rey escapes). Humorous as these tantrums were, it demonstrates his disregard and willingness to destroy anything to express his emotions. He is dangerous because having a temper, albeit mostly something he can control, may also be caused by chemical imbalance over which he may have no control “These findings suggest that greater acute and chronic pain responsiveness associated with trait anger-out may be due in part to impaired ability to elicit endogenous opioid analgesia.” (Breuhl 224) That is a frightening person to be around. Does he have tantrums also because of acute psychological pain? His dimensions are growing.
But when we learn that his father is Han Solo, we can no longer see him as a two dimensional villain. He is the son of our beloved scoundrel. We get our first pangs of sympathy. This is created by the aforementioned scene of him alone in the large room where he communicates with Snoke. When Snoke tells him that his father, Han Solo, has the droid the First Order has been pursing, he replies that Han “means nothing to me.” His voice almost cracks as he can barely get himself to utter these words. Sympathy builds.
Snoke doubts him, “Not even you, Master of the Knights of Ren has ever faced such a test.”
“By the grace of your training, I will not be seduced.” Kylo Ren replies.
“We shall see. We shall see.” Snoke says as his hologram fades away. When the master Kylo Ren is trying so hard to impress doesn’t think he has the strength to face this test of hunting down his father, he feels alone. The only being he feels he can get approval from is doubting him. It could be approval he had failed to get from his father and now seeks it from Snoke. And he is alone. So he stands in that room, the one stream of light a spotlight on him. The camera is watching him from across the room to his right.
The height of the room is 10 times taller than he. The entrance and back wall of the room cannot be seen within the limits of the screen. His figure is dwarfed by the room and its dark cavernous emptiness. He stands in a room for a moment after Snoke disappears in silence. The expression of our reaction might be to dislike him more for knowing he chose the dark side, but then we feel pity because we feel he is misguided. And we want the son of Han and Leia back.
Now we have developed sympathy for a character who has made us aware of our innate sadism. We are reminded of the pleasure he derives from the pain of others, reminding us of our same innate sadism. He enjoys causing Rey’s transparency and enjoying the spectacle of it. He finds pleasure in the power to expose her deepest feelings against her will. Zunshine suggested “if you are a writer and you want your character to remain sympathetic, you don’t put her in a situation in which she begins to enjoy the spectacle of someone else’s transparency, thus coming across as sadistic. (97) Ren enjoys the spectacle of Rey’s transparency as he reads her mind. It’s a transparency he imposes upon her, a result of a violation. We begin to feel sympathy wane because of his sadistic cause and enjoyment of her transparency. The reward centers of his brain must be activated because he knows that if he gets the map it will increase his odds of survival – in the sense that he seems so dependent on approval for life to mean something and in the sense that if Snoke doesn’t feel Ren’s strong enough, he could destroy Ren.
We feel sympathy for Rey as she is made vulnerable. However, Rey reciprocates and through his violation of her, she is able to violate him and see his deepest fear and enjoy the spectacle of his transparency. She risks becoming unsympathetic by taking advantage of his transparency, definitely having the reward center of her brain activated because her violation of his mind is helping her survive. Both are finding involuntary pleasure violating each other in order to survive their respective threats. In addition, the audience is privy to their moments of transparency and find it pleasing in that it’s activating our reward center so much that we are fixated on it and cannot turn away.
© Sheila Wright and Squire of the Knights of Ren, 2017. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Sheila Wright and Squire of the Knights of Ren with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
She projected the notes that her mother had recently transmitted to her into the space around her, casting a pale blue halo of light, the only light in the darkened room, around her. This one commanded her focus:
Source: Manoussakis
What accounts for this pathology is the false positing of the good alongside with the evil, the fact that one takes the good as simply being the opposite of what is evil and furthermore the fact that one places these two opposites side by side - presenting thus oneself with a dilemma.
But no such dilemma between good and evil can be maintained. To posit the good alongside the evil equates the one with the other, as if the good were no different from the evil except insofar as one is good while the evil is evil. It is precisely this mistake that allows for the danger of ethical relativism, that is, of the undoing of ethics, for it does not take long before one starts asking what makes the good good or by whose standards is it good.
With this idea from Manoussakis was her mother’s note:
Foolish, deceptive Jedi. Things cannot be seen in extremes. It is not just black and white. And who defines the dark? Who defines the light? Who are they to decide? Questions I think Anakin may have pondered (and may have been urged by master Jedi to repress), but through a lens of despair, fear of loneliness and losing love, and desperation, it led him to choose the dark side, that led him to think that he had to choose one over the other, when maybe there was no need to choose but just to find balance.
As she set out to transpose those thoughts onto the parchment, she sensed Ben enter the darkened archives and stealth his way into the room with her.
Never looking anywhere but down at her work, she smirked, wondering why he moved so quietly when she knew that he knew that she could sense his presence. Preferring to work in isolation, she wished that she could not sense him, but even if she did not have that ability, soon enough, his clumsy command of his body betrayed his stealth as he knocked into a cart of old data cartridges. His lanky body soon towered over her workspace.
Threads of these thoughts intersected. Woven in ink, onto the parchment, they then wrapped around his curiosity and drew him to the effervescent silvers, reds, violets amongst the sharp, thin black lines. The words whispered and called out to Ben, simultaneously, a then unrealized, siren prose: the Jedi created Vader. With their repression, their ancient, archaic, un-evolved beliefs, their blind belief in a definition of “good” -- just a description but no verifiably authoritative source of its definition -- was imposed on Anakin’s critical thinking. His freedom of thought, restricted. His enlightened thought, of what Jedi could be if they did not blindly follow ancient lore as law but instead developed a more evolved ethic, was dismissed. A refusal to revisit deeply held beliefs was brought to light by Anakin and they refused this call from the one they believed fulfilled their own prophecy. If they weren’t going to listen to who they believed was prophesied to bring balance to the force, then perhaps they did need to be destroyed in hopes that from the ashes a more sensible order could be established. Through this warping of Anakin, they created Vader then worked to demonize him.
He stepped away from the grasp of these words, detaching his gaze from the page. Thoughts that he had wanted to express but hid deep inside were laid out bare in the signifiers drawn on the page, released before him through her hand.
© Sheila Wright and Squire of the Knights of Ren, 2017. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Sheila Wright and Squire of the Knights of Ren with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.