Life, Death, and the Lady Jedi
This post contains spoilers for Rise of Skywalker.
“The dead speak!” are the first three words of the opening crawl of the new Star Wars movie Rise of Skywalker, and in many ways, there’s nothing else you need to know about the film. It’s about two hours long, packed with enough flashy explosions and blinky lighting effects to warrant a photosensitivity warning, a hamfisted retcon for every one of Rian Johnson’s “sins” against countless childhoods, and many, many dead people, who do all manner of things normally reserved for living beings. Caught in the middle is Rey, the first lead Jedi character in the franchise to be played by a woman—a fact that seems to have broken the logic of the entire universe.
Star Wars isn’t science fiction, it’s fantasy. Rise of Skywalker in particular is high fantasy, complete with ancient and powerful magical objects, a completely disposable Force of “knights,” and so much necromancy. Necromancy is bad stuff, friends. The script isn’t so much the framework of the film as it is a book of incantations used to reanimate the dead and puppet their corpses and memories across a wondrous but completely incomprehensible landscape of bright, loud planets. No one is ever really gone because at any moment they can be resurrected by grotesque perversions of technology or actual magic, digitally re-composed as uncanny echoes of their younger selves, or cynically cobbled together from cutting room scraps.
The plot of this film could not be more unimportant, but it begins with Kylo Ren searching for a device that will show him the way to a hidden Sith planet where the Emperor has returned from the dead and is raising a fleet of planet-killing ships to take over the galaxy again. The rebels are gathering intelligence on this plan, aided by a spy who turns out to be General Hux, and eventually, everyone is trying to get to this mysterious planet by way of a bunch of pointless side quests. The climax is an in-atmosphere battle between the Sith Fleet and the Rebel armada rendered at such a huge scale that everything becomes completely meaningless. The final confrontation between Rey and the Emperor plays out at the same time, ending when she is damsel-in-distressed by a newly redeemed Ben Solo before he unceremoniously dies. And in the midst of all of this death and un-death, the first woman Jedi protagonist learns how to use her connection to the Force to knit together the torn flesh of gigantic cave-dwelling serpents and gigantic tortured Supreme Leaders.
Perhaps the point of having a woman play the main character in the biggest pop culture franchise of all time is that the filmmakers shouldn’t need to overthink the consequences, but maybe the problem is that they didn’t. Even though Star Wars isn’t science fiction, it’s still imbued with tropes about women and nature and technology that come right out of the history of science in our own galaxy. Among the controversial turns taken by The Last Jedi was the way the audience is re-taught the true nature of the Force as something disconnected from the totemic technologies that signify its use or misuse. Luke Skywalker tosses his lightsaber away, and Kylo Ren smashes his mask to pieces. The Force as nature itself is the medium through which characters are connected and their abilities directed. In Rise of Skywalker, however, J.J. Abrams stubbornly re-enchants these objects and even adds some more, like the Sith wayfinder and Leia’s lightsaber.
In Rey’s vision of herself as a Sith, she wields the most elaborate light weapon we’ve yet seen, because like Kylo Ren’s laser crossguard and Darth Maul’s double-ended saber, these complex technologies are hallmarks of the dark side. But when Rey completes her own lightsaber at the end of the film, the blade is a sunny-gold color, contrasting the artificially cold blues and greens of the famous Jedi of the past to become a symbol of her more pure connection to the nature of the Force. Unlike Luke and Anakin, she keeps both of her arms and isn’t forced to endure the humiliation of becoming a cyborg, something the films have always portrayed as an ableist taint of death and decay. And because there have never been any women Jedi protagonists or women Sith antagonists in the films before, all of the gendered connotations of these aesthetic choices fall on Rey’s character.
Rey emerges at the end of the trilogy as a familiar female trope that is purified by her connection to nature and rejecting the technological symbols of the masculine past of the Jedi as she conveniently buries their totemic technologies in the sand on Tatooine. The Last Jedi sets this up for Rey’s character in a way that actually liberates the Force from its canonical connection to bloodlines and its problematic eugenic undertones. But the big reveal in Rise of Skywalker—that Rey is actually a Palpatine—means that any positive feminine qualities associated with her use of the Force aren’t the result of her individuality. If the people who can wield the Force as Sith or Jedi can only do so by dint of their parentage, Rey shouldn’t have access to any special connection to its nature. Her ability to heal as opposed to Kylo Ren’s ability to raise the dead, the color of her lightsaber as opposed to the others, and the way she rejects the enchantment of Sith and Jedi technologies become soft feminine tropes instead of expressions of her individual nature. The Last Jedi eliminated the genetic determinism of the Force that animates these gendered tropes, and Rise of Skywalker just wrote them back in.
In The Last Jedi, Luke tells Rey that the Force isn’t a power that the Jedi have; it’s the energy that connects all living things. It can’t belong to one select group of people because it is nature itself. But in Rise of Skywalker, it is the undead Emperor who gets to have the final word on what the Force is and how it manifests for Rey. She and Kylo Ren form a dyad in the Force, “a power like life itself.” Is the Force about life or un-death? About nature or technology? Finding a place for a woman character within these central questions should have either been the story of this trilogy or not a question at all. This fundamental disagreement about the nature of the animating metaphysics of the entire universe is why these three films will never make sense as a complete story. It’s also why Rey’s character is ultimately incoherent, caught between two mismatched, grinding points of view that doesn’t leave room for Rey From Nowhere—only for the Lady Jedi.
Image Credit: The Skellig Michael by Jerzy Strzelecki, 2007 | CC BY-SA 3.0
