This rambling contains pretty major spoilers for Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens. In the statistically unlikely event you haven’t seen the film but want to, this is not the post you’re looking for.
Oh, fair Kylo, how doth my inner fourteen-year-old love thee? Let me count the ways.
Don’t get me wrong. I come from nerdy stock, so I grew up loving the Star Wars series. And I love every new character in The Force Awakens. It sets my heart alight to know that nerd parents could introduce their nerd kids to Star Wars with this film. I could write novels about how much I love that the new heroes of the franchise are two men of color and a woman. Those nerd kids will get to grow up with Rey, Finn, and Poe on their bedsheets and t-shirts, and with Daisy Ridley, John Boyega, and Oscar Isaac as role models.
But if I’m being completely honest with myself, the biggest reason I’ve seen Episode VII twice already and plan to see it many more times isn’t to watch Rey’s general badassery, or to gush at the obviously romantic subplot of Finn and Poe (#stormpilot5ever). It’s to indulge my teenage crush on the beautiful disaster that is Kylo Ren.
And it’s not just the fact that he’s played by the awkwardly handsome Adam Driver. Although that’s certainly part of it. I’ve had a slight crush on him since I first saw him on Girls. For the uninitiated, he plays a character also named Adam (a non-biographical role, as far as I know). Basically he’s your typical art school fuckboy. You fall for him because you suspect that buried underneath layers and layers of male entitlement and relationship phobia and faux complexity inspired by Holden Caulfield is an actually decent human being, and you think you can bring that out of him. Adam’s humanity comes out in the season 2 finale of the show. He runs through the streets of New York City to help Hannah (Lena Dunham’s character) through a panic attack. It’s a great redeeming moment. I’m not ashamed to admit wept during this scene. I wanted so badly to be Hannah, to have someone who loved me enough to run through a city in the summer just to make sure I’m okay.
(TLDR: Adam Driver is a babe, and while Girls is mostly #whitegirlproblems, it still made me cry. But I digress. This is about his character, not his face.)
Though he makes a rather impressive entrance to the film, stepping onto Jakku from his command shuttle to destroy a village and capture Poe Dameron, Kylo spends most of his screen time acting like a bratty teenager. He threatens his crew, destroys expensive technology on his own ship, and generally rages against his inner torments.
He attempts to be evil and intimidating, but no one really buys it. Members of the First Order are definitely nervous around him, but not because he’s a scary Sith lord imbued with power from the dark side of the Force. He doesn’t seem to hold any genuine authority over General Hux or Captain Phasma – they just go on about their business without Kylo’s official permission, for the most part. After all, it’s Hux that gives the Hitler-like speech about the galaxy falling to the First Order in front of the Third Reich-esque arrangement of Storm Troopers, not Ren. So clearly he’s not the one in charge.
He has some pull with the Storm Troopers, but I think they’re mostly just uncomfortable with Kylo’s volatile mood swings. In one of my favorite scenes in the movie, two Storm Troopers overhear Kylo having a temper tantrum in a room offscreen, slicing through some kind of command board with his shaky red light saber (Lightsaber? I never know if it’s meant to be one word or two). They immediately turn around and walk away, not bothering him in much the same way a parent might choose not to knock on their child’s door when they’re fighting with a friend over the phone. Rather than get swept up in whatever drama is unfolding, these Troopers decide to hightail it.
Kylo whines about feeling a “call to the light”, begging hologram Snoke and his dead grandpa Darth to fill his aching soul with evil before he turns into a good person. He threatens his crew, destroys expensive technology on his own ship, and generally rebels against his inner torments, much to the chagrin of everyone he comes in contact with. I don’t think I’m speaking out of turn when I say that Kylo is, or at least makes every attempt to be, an insufferable human being on the verge of spiraling out of control.
But, god, I just love it so much. Kylo Ren is exactly the boy I wanted as a teenager. He’s tall and skinny with dark hair, wears all black, and has a deep voice. He’s broody, moody, and emotionally complicated (read: daddy issues). He probably wasn’t afraid to say “fuck” in front of his parents, even after he learned it was a bad word. We’d bond over our mutual enjoyment of Cyanide & Happiness and lament about our parents not understanding our pain. He might get mad and lash out sometimes, but never at me, because I’m the only one that feels what he’s feeling. We’d ditch school to go to My Chemical Romance concerts and he would cry when they sang “Helena” because, duh, it’s about Gerard’s grandmother dying, and anyway, real men aren’t afraid to cry. We’d dismantle the corporate hierarchy by stealing t-shirts from Hot Topic and put up our middle fingers at preps leaving Abercrombie & Fitch. It would be a perfect messed-up romance. Nevershoutnever would write songs about us.
I’m not treading any new ground with this – people noticed and made fun of Kylo’s angsty teenager-ness almost immediately. The wonderful Twitter account Emo Kylo Ren had me in stitches even before I saw TFA for the first time, and I appreciated it even more after I watched the movie.
But I laughed at those tweets, and at almost every Kylo-centric scene in the film, because I really, really enjoyed the shallow darkness of this character. I fell hard for his tortured soul schtick, and I’m head over heels for the melodramatic way Adam Driver portrays it. Kylo Ren (né Ben Solo) had no real reason to turn to the dark side besides teenage rebellion and fear of being powerless to his own inner torment. His parents and uncle are champions of the light side of the Force, and could have taught him to be a Jedi master, or at least a pretty great smuggler. But he gave in to the dark anyway, and though the light calls him back almost overwhelmingly, he rages against it.
When I saw TFA with my parents, they both seemed a bit underwhelmed with Ren, and with Driver’s portrayal of the character. My dad called him a “whiny brat” and told me he wished they’d picked someone “more evil” to play the part. He’s used to the obvious evilness of Darth Vader in the original trilogy: scary, intimidating, and undoubtedly villainous through and through. Anakin Skywalker’s journey from light to dark is fully fleshed out and complete by the time we see him as Darth Vader. Ani has ceased to exist inside of Vader, or at least he doesn’t let his “light side” feelings have any weight in his actions. He doesn’t feel a need to channel deceased Empire members in order to draw enough strength to stay on the dark side. His rage is calm and collected, reined in and calculated. He doesn’t lash out, he simply acts, and anyone who disagrees goes the way of Alderaan, if you catch my drift. Vader is a faceless villain with few, if any, redeeming qualities. Easy to hate. Easy to fear.
Kylo Ren isn’t really any of those things. His grey (okay, maybe dark grey) character is what we want in our villains today. Kylo constantly battles his urge to be good, and it makes him angry and combative. But his anger isn’t scary enough to put him in charge, so he rages unpredictably and acts impulsively, without much consideration for consequences. There’s no need for him to cause the destruction he causes – I couldn’t really glean from the film what his angle was as a villain or why he bothered with the First Order at all, beyond using them as a means to get to where he wants to get to. He doesn’t really lead them, just lives with them and wears a scary mask. He’s more or less singularly focused on finding and destroying Rey, and by doing that, getting the last piece of the map to Luke Skywalker.
On a deeper level than just loving his wardrobe and general demeanor, I like Kylo Ren because I like complex antiheroes. Think Loki, Walter White, Severus Snape. Petulant man-children who turn to evil because they think they can’t get their way by any other means. Kylo fits this trope to a T. He obviously isn’t “good”, but he isn’t purely evil, either; he feels the pull of the light but chooses the dark side. He’s that dangerous combination of insecure, inexperienced, and determined to get his way. Which, to me, is much more compelling to watch than a clear-cut evil antagonist.
d i s c o m b o b u l a t o r i u m 