#ben sollee

New gigposter for our pal Ben Sollee!

Land (2021)

Directed by Robin Wright

“Chocolate Jesus”

Original by Tom Waits

I keep reading here and there and many fans are disappointed because Rey is a “nobody”. But, what they are missing is that Rey is much more than a nobody, and fits perfectly in the storyline of the Star Wars saga. The answer comes from Snoke, who says something along these lines : 

“Darkness rises and light to meet it. I had warned by apprentice that the more the grew in darkness, the more the Light would compensate it”. 

So what Snoke is really saying is that Kylo, who is 10 years older than Rey more or less, was growing in darkness under Snoke’s influence (we know he manipulated him from birth) and what happens is that the Force needed to restore balance. And it grew and grew. Snoke thought it was Luke. But no. It was the Force itself that created his counterpart : Rey. She’s a nobody. She has no legacy. But her destiny lies with Kylo’s fate : she is the one who will balance his darkness, because the Force needs to compensate it. So, they really are the “two sides of the same protagonist”, the protagonist being The Force.  

“The force awakens” in both of them in episode 7, leading to the interrogation scene, where they tap into each other’s minds, opening the strange Force Bond connection. Snoke might have encouraged that Bond, but he didn’t know about Rey when Kylo interrogates her and they basically go into each others minds. Snoke is manipulating them into thinking that, but it started before, and most of all, at the end of TLJ we see the Bond is still there. 

So where are their intertwined destinies? 

For me, you can resume it this way : neither can die while the other survives.      They both need each other because they are each others’ complement. The ying and the yang, Light and Darkness. 

And the only way that they will finally understand each other is accepting the other within themselves. Rey wants Ben to turn to the light. Kylo wants Rey to join him - but he never says the darkside - even if it is implied. The eternal push-and-pull. The only way for these two to meet is to accept and welcome the other side within themselves, because both have Light and Darkness, ending in a sort of Grey middle ground, where the Force is balanced between the two. 

So the balance is not to eradicate the dark side, like the Jedi thought. It is to balance both sides within their soul. 

It also means that they will chase after another, until the moment they understand what the heck is happening. And understand that neither of them can die, because this would result in a unbalancing of the Force. Maybe Rey will find all these answers when she reads the old Jedi books.