One of the worst things you can do on the internet is have an opinion about Star Wars, which is why I’m usually content to nod in approval when Star Wars is good (rarely) and shake my head when it is not (all the time). Am I going to divulge which Star War is which? Absolutely not. But even though there are dwindling reasons to look forward to new Star Wars, I don’t quite have it in me to quit the stuff yet.
As this holiday season marks ten years since Star Wars: The Force Awakens arrived in theaters, I have done a terrible thing, and formed an opinion about Star Wars; one which, like a reckless Padawan, I am going to share with you now on Jeff Bezos’ internet: I am tired of the way everyone quotes Kylo Ren.
You know the line; it’s one of the very few from the sequel trilogy to enter the fan lexicon, after maybe “Chewie, we’re home” and “They fly now?” Kylo Ren delivers it to Rey in The Last Jedi, some time after the pair discover that they can communicate via the Force in a way that feels, increasingly, like they’re in the room with each other.
“Let the past die,” Kylo says. “Kill it, if you have to.”
First things first: Banger line. Well done, writer-director Rian Johnson. People wouldn’t quote it all the time if this wasn’t the case. It’s a ruthless philosophy of self-actualization: the world wants you to be the next version of what came before. Screw that. As articulated by Kylo, there’s also a wonderful cadence, a real arc to the line: It starts as a trite sentiment, but then twists the knife, pivoting hard from sage and passive to brutal and active. Kill it, if you have to. Great mantra for a Star Wars villain. And here my troubles begin: people tend to talk as if this is the thesis of The Last Jedi, and not, you know, something a villain believes.
I don’t want to thoughtlessly resurrect a server’s worth of heated forum discussions here, so let me attempt to thread a million needles at once. I think an interesting thing happens when people bring up this quote, one that happens all the time in conversations about Star Wars but happens in a very pronounced way when it comes to this Kylo Ren line.
It’s simple: No one wants to talk about any single Star Wars movie or show anymore.
Everything is a referendum on Star Wars as a franchise, a brand, an intellectual property stewarded by a corporate brain trust. I don’t even think this is something that’s always done in bad faith. James Whitbrook, one of the kind souls who edits Kotaku sister site Gizmodo, wrote a consideration of the quote in 2018 that demonstrates the many ways it can be applied—in the same article, Whitbrook uses it it to examine the movie, the trilogy it appears in, the Skywalker Saga at large, and Disney’s handling of the Star Wars brand all at once.
This, to me, is far too big a burden to place on any one quote, especially when it’s not a bombshell of the “I’m your father” variety (Adam Driver’s tossed-off delivery of “nobody” during The Last Jedi‘s climax has more heft, but that’s a whole other debate we will not be having here). It’s also a sorry state of affairs for anyone with even a passing interest in Star Wars, this inclination to turn every discussion about a discrete Star Wars show or movie into a Vatican Council over what it means for the franchise in gestalt. Star Wars fandom was this way long before the MCU ever existed—fans of pre-internet pop culture really had to keep all this stuff in their heads, or share it in fanzines, where opinions were really sorted out—but now all of Hollywood has been Marvel-pilled, everything has a wiki, and your average poster talks like a shareholder by default.
Of course, the Sequel Trilogy courts this kind of thinking, with The Force Awakens directly mirroring A New Hope, and The Last Jedi pointedly riffing on The Empire Strikes Back. (I’m not sure that The Rise of Skywalker is so cleanly mapping itself to Return of the Jedi, but that movie is A Weird One.) George Lucas’ notes for a new set of movies were politely declined by Disney’s brain trust in favor of something “for the fans.” The whole thing is very openly a mercenary affair, and extremely not about letting the past die.
In fact, that’s what makes the line—and the film it appears in—a far less radical affair than many consider it to be. Everyone who wants the past to die in The Last Jedi is wrong. This is Luke’s whole deal in The Last Jedi: He wants to die in self-imposed exile (stupid), refuses to help Rey (bad), and tries to burn the Jedi texts (not the point!). Finn has rejected his past as a stormtrooper, but does not yet see himself as part of any history—and therefore any future.
His final exchange with Captain Phasma is all about this—she taunts him with his complicity in Empire, and the idea that it’s the only thing that gave him meaning, telling him that he’ll always be “scum.” But he’s spent the whole movie growing from being a Resistance fighter out of loyalty to his friend, Rey, to actually believing in a cause, like Rose Tico. He calls himself Rebel scum, placing himself in a new historical context, one which he can finally build his identity around.
Which is what makes the fact that Kylo Ren says “let the past die” so delicious. He’s saying this to Rey, in a moment where they’re both having their own dark night of the soul, unsure about their respective paths. Rey is disappointed in Luke and doesn’t know whether she believes in the Jedi’s path. Kylo, as his manipulative new mentor Supreme Leader Snoke notes at the start of the film, is shattered from his act of patricide in the prior film. Kylo, in this moment, is trying to convince himself that he did the right thing, that it made him a bigger, badder Sith worthy of succeeding Darth Vader. He can’t do it though, so he spends the whole film trying to convince Rey that he’s right instead, begging her to join him after their brief truce in the throne room with a truly loathsome, pathetic “please.”
The Last Jedi is overwhelmingly concerned with the past, and how we ought to regard it. The next thing Kylo says after “Kill it, if you have to” is “That’s the only way to become what we’re meant to be.” It bears repeating: Every character that experiences growth in this movie becomes what they’re meant to be by coming to terms with the past, and then moving forward. Luke has a noncorporeal standoff with Kylo Ren because that is the sort of thing a mythic hero would do—and the sort of legend about himself he started the film with contempt for. But in his time with Rey, and grappling with his failure training Kylo Ren, he comes to recognize the hubris of a saga all about Luke Skywalker, the Jedi hero. Instead, he must become Luke Skywalker, the inspiration, as Obi-Wan once did for him. Stop gazing at the setting suns himself, and let a new generation seize the horizon.
Oh look, I did the thing I was just complaining about. Slipping from analyzing a movie to analyzing a franchise.
It is, in fact, a little silly that Star Wars holds the place in our culture that it does. That I can rattle off scenes in a piece like this while doing very little to set them up, safe in the assumption that most will know what I’m talking about. That I can armchair quarterback its management, and that those who read my analysis will also feel informed enough to deem it sharp or ruinous. The ouroboros of these movies’ considerations of their own fictional history and of fans constantly arguing over that history is all just a distraction from the kind of conversations you could be having if you just, like Yoda noted, paid attention to what’s in front of your own damn nose.
A clever thing about The Last Jedi, in retrospect, is how its scene in which Yoda shows up to teach Luke One Last Lesson effectively mirrors how the movie was received. Luke, having a little tantrum after Rey leaves, goes to burn down the ancient tree holding the sacred Jedi texts, ready to prove he meant it when he said it was time for the Jedi to end. Yoda calls his bluff, to Luke’s horror, conjuring a bolt of lightning and burning the tree down himself.
Yoda, of course, knows that the texts are not there. Rey has them on the Falcon, something the viewer does not see until the film’s final moments. But he needs Luke to think they’re gone, so Young Skywalker can, for once, soberly think about the folly of his time on that island, and the selfishness of his desire to bury the past. Luke made the mistake many teachers make, which is to consider his failure shameful, and not something worth passing on, to teach those who come after. “We are what they grow beyond,” the little green alien warbles, in a line I wish was quoted as often as Kylo’s.
Kylo Ren’s philosophy in The Last Jedi is an adolescent one, angry at the world and his family, arrogant in the belief that he’s first to chafe against history. You can kill the past, but that is also a refusal to learn from it, and a guarantee you will repeat its worst moments. It’s far better to make peace with it.
The Last Jedi very much functioned like that lightning bolt that seemed to burn down everything fans held dear about Star Wars. But it’s all just the sly trick of a clever storyteller, seeming to imperil the thing you love while constantly, quietly affirming what’s been there all along, and what will continue to be there after the movie is over, and the next one comes. The movie is here, like all of Star Wars, like any bit of corporate-controlled IP storytelling that resonates with you, to take what you need from and move on. None of it is precious, or worth anything, unless it gives you something to share with someone else.
And yeah, that includes The Rise of Skywalker, I guess. Yoda, once again, said it best: Not everyone read all the Jedi texts. Page turners, they were not.
