Crait and Symbolism: blood, wounds, salt, foxes, the mother and the nest.
The imagery at the end of TLJ is obviously a study in scarlet and white, something so iconic that they even used it for all the official posters for the movie.
Besides the striking visual quality of the color pattern, it does not take much imagination to figure out that these red streaks on a pristine white surface come to represent a bleeding of sorts. I read some critiques that were pointing out that this was visually representing the bleeding of the Rebellion, on the verge of utter extinction, and sending its last fighters and pilots to martyrdom. There is nothing wrong with this reading, it is after all the most obvious. The last rebels standing are indeed laying out their lives for the cause, ready to sacrifice themselves.
But when it comes to blood, you are always dealing with ambivalent meanings, for blood means pain and death but it also means birth, life, and creation. So this bleeding of the Resistance is also truly, as Luke blatantly expresses, the rebirth of the Resistance. Besides the obvious “Luke said it” (the Rebellion is reborn today), two elements emphasize rebirth: the womb imagery that is prominent in the scene AND the vulptex. It is hard to miss the womb imagery: the entrance of the cave, the necessity to go through the inside of the cave before finally emerging into the light, but it is important to note that the ones who show the way out to the handful of rebels are the foxes.
As symbols, foxes usually stand in everyone’s mind for cleverness, but it is not their only function. They are considered as messengers, and more specifically they are psychopomp figures, which means that they are supposed to lead the souls of the dead through their journey to an afterlife or another life. And in TLJ, they conveniently do just that. By following the foxes, the bleeding and desperate Rebellion finds the way out of what was supposed to be their grave onto another life, so literally the tomb becomes a womb: they are reborn. These little foxes are not just there to look pretty (which they do, they are exquisite), they are there to highlight the concept of rebirth. And it doesn’t harm to know that foxes usually embody good parenting. So before anyone starts arguing that I am reading too much into that let’s pause and wonder why they had to be foxes then. Of the million other possibilities they had they went with this particular symbol, coincidence? I think not.
Of course Rey is there at the end of the tunnel, and she actively plays a part in this rebirth by letting the rebels out. She is the midwife and she is the mother, her warm, soft, welcoming face being what the rebels first see coming out.When Finn rushes to her to hug her, he is not just a friend rushing to the friend he has not seen in a while, he is also the child rushing to his mother’s embrace and comfort.
And what does she do next? She packs everyone in the MF, a place that Han Solo called a “home” in TFA, and has visually become a home and nest to the porgs, proving again that there is sometimes more to these little weird creatures that people the screen. Rey, “the girl” from TFA, longing for a family of her own, is playing mum. And it is fitting that it happens right after Leia, the symbolic queen mother of the ST, is seen stepping aside at the end of the movie. She has given up on being a mother when she tells Luke that her son is lost forever, and she is symbolically giving up on her role as leader/mum of the Rebellion by asking the Rebels to stop looking at her for guidance and to follow Poe.
Rey as the new figurative mother is actually carefully crafted throughout the whole movie. TLJ is heavily packed with yonic symbols and symbols of female sexuality which makes Rey’s time on the island an initiation of womanhood and her function as a mother, from letting herself fall into dangerously attractive slippery caves to the very awkward milking scene.
Rey confronts elements of womanhood and female sexuality that she finds repulsive or scary, before embracing it in the end in her new function of symbolic mum. So it is not incidental that this initiation is constantly bringing her forth in contact with Kylo/Ben. Just like she is first scared and grossed out by elements of womanhood, she is first repulsed by him, trying to kill him, verbally insulting him. But she is eventually accepting him, and learning more about him, and obviously accepting her attraction to him, just as she is accepting her inner self and womanhood.
At the end of TLJ, she may be embracing her new role as symbolic mum for the Rebellion, but the last moments show you something is amiss. She seems sad and curiously lonely for someone who has successfully brought all of her fledglings back into the safety of the nest. And what do we get to see? A look she has on Finn being sweet and tender with Rose, and another look on what she preciously cradles between her hands and on her lap: her lightsaber, and not just her lightsaber, but Kylo’s legacy lightsaber, the one from his family, that broke when they were unable to stay together.
So something is missing in her life. She is playing mum to the Resistance but the longing has not been filled. There is between her hands the ghost of what she really wanted. She left one of the fledgling behind, the one that would have allowed her not just to play mum but becoming a mum.
So back to Kylo and the visuals of red and white. It is easy to also read the surface of Crait as a metaphor for his soul. Red is HIS color after all, the color of his saber, the color fitting his bouts of wrath, his moments of violence.
This is a planet with its salty crust, that seems barren, exposed, laid bare, with speeders scarring the surface like so many wounds, just like his face and body have been covered with scars and gashes. If you think about it, it actually echoes the ending of TFA: Kylo’s blood on the snow, the glow of his lightsaber in the snowstorm, the blaring light of the explosion as contrasting with the snowy forest. The imagery was just more subtle and subdued but it was present. One of the girls from Star Wars Connections also highlighted the parallel between the planet and Kylo himself, the sun and the son fused in the same imagery, Snoke exploiting both the power of the sun (Starkiller base) and the son (Kylo Ren) as massive weapons of destruction. The planet’s explosion at the end of TFA echoes Kylo’s meltdown in a way, his splitting “to the bone”. So at the end of TLJ, we have yet another planet that can stand for Kylo himself: the litteral bleeding at the end of TFA has become a symbolic bleeding of massive proportion at the end of TLJ, because he has probably been cut deeper than he was at the end of TFA. This is not a flesh wound, this is his very core. And if you look at Rey flying her way through the tunnels deep inside the cave of Crait to finally emerge in an explosion at the surface of the planet, this is pretty much her working her ways through the arteries of Kylo’s heart and making him bleed when she ran away from him. She has pierced through his heart.
This planet which is visually just a massive open wound is covered with salt, so it emphasizes that the wound is probably hurting like hell. To add to Kylo’s injury, he has to confront his uncle, which is literally rubbing more salt into the wound. @sw-daydreamer did a very nice post on this confrontation and the idea of pain and salt. The moment when Kylo first steps in in front of Luke you can see how raw his pain is, not just through his sarcasms and body language or facial expressions, but visually on the ground with a giant wound on the ground. It looks as if they are standing in a pool of blood. It represents both the state of their strained relations (bad blood between them) and the state of Kylo’s emotions (he’s a mess!). Luke’s function here is not just to figuratively rub his wound with salt but on the contrary to help with the healing process. Salt is supposed to have purifying powers, it is also used to exorcise evil. And if you look carefully later at their confrontation, the massive wound on the ground has disappeared, covered with salt again.
It does not mean this has worked for now, but I think this is a good sign that the healing process has started, that the confrontation may help Kylo eventually.
Can he be reborn then? It is not just the Rebellion being reborn. Luke’s death is a rebirth in itself. When Rey says that he cut himself from the Force before, and she can’t see him, it means that in a way, he was pretty much dead before, the ghost of himself. But when he dies, he not only revives his legend but he also becomes one with the Force. He may be dead in real life but he is reborn again, as it is attested by the last image of him through a yonic opening.
Kylo’s move at the end is to go to the cave, which was the place where his mother was, so in a way he goes back to mother, except that he is not looking for his mother, it is Rey he finds there, through their Force bond. So Rey as healer and symbolic mother and provider for the reborn Rebellion is also what he needs for his own rebirth. Except that this is a tale about becoming an adult and a man (remember he was called “a child in a mask” at the very beginning). So it means not looking for a mother but a mother for his children (again, remember the speech on the seed of the Jedi, gee, Snoke was the best, see how much info he packed in that scene!).
Salt is also interesting that way, because it is often associated with sexuality. Aphrodite, goddess of love, was born out of salty foam. And since Plutarch and Aristotles, salt has always been believed to have something to do with sexual maturity, desire, copulation, and also gestation, something that is backed up by some scientific studies. So, heavy with the sexual imagery, the romantic imagery of the heart being pierced, and the need to look for some replacement for the mother, everything points again to Kylo finding a possible rebirth through his relationship with Rey. In a reverse Anidala touch, the visual of Kylo entering the cave followed by the storm troopers is reminiscent of Anakin entering the Jedi temple in ROTS in his first steps as Lord Vader.
What grandpa does there is emptying the nest, by killing the young Padawans. Kylo, in TLJ, finds an already empty nest, because the mother has already rescued the “children”, something Padme was unable to do. Instead of storming the nest, Kylo shows through his whole attitude his deep longing to be with Rey and become part of the nest. The contrast with their faces after the deed speaks volumes. Not even after killing his own father did Kylo ever get the evil Sith eyes. br />
I think this is again a very nice touch in the way the saga unfolds, and possibly precious clues about what might come next in episode ix.
