#internalized despair

On Rey’s Humanity in Star Wars: The Force Awakens

This post contains some mild spoilers for Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Mostly it contains me arguing that Rey is in fact written as a human being with recognizable frailties. It is not a review, it is not a thoroughly-linked engagement with everyone who has written about this huge mass consumer product in the last week; it’s a cold take, I hope, just trying to piece together something that seems important to me. 

She has been on her own a long time, and has learned the required skills to fend for herself. Because of her loneliness and her skills it is unwelcome, even a violation, when a well-meaning, potential ally grabs her hand without permission in the middle of a fight. “Why do you keep taking my hand?” she exclaims, infuriated. Only after he has accepted her hand when he really needed it—knocked back, winded—does their trust begin to build.

She is offered a job, a job she really would love and thrive in—a job that would be a deliverance from the drudgery in which she is currently constrained to work for survival. She turns it down. Cuts off the conversation. Family obligations, even the mere vapors of family obligations, make it impossible to launch into the unknown.

She holds her own in a contest of strength and skill against a man her age. The rival, a man, offers to explain her emerging power to her. “You need a teacher,” he says. Earlier the same man strapped her to a chair and tried to take things from her without her permission. Impassive, serpentine, he promised the blank and simplest sort of violence: “You realize I can take anything I want.” Mansplaining’s two faces.

As with other heightened worlds in fantasy and science fiction, in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, text and sub-text often merge. A fight for dignity is often really a fight; a comrade in arms is often really a comrade in arms; the pull of good and evil forces elemental to the universe are actually the Force. The internal and external threats that shape Rey’s narrative—the paralyzing family obligations keeping her off the Millennium Falcon’s crew, the unwittingly triggering allyship of the good-hearted, clumsy Storm-Trooper Finn, the luridly cruel mansplainer Kylo Ren—are existential threats to her possible futures. They are threats to her autonomy, her sociality, her delight and capacity for responsiveness; threats to her dignified inclusion in a community of equals. These threats she faces are real, the realest kind of threats. 

We see how isolation and fear do their work on her moral capacities. She at one point has a chance to trade the freedom of a new, especially vulnerable companion—the droid BB-8—for a little more stability. She catches her breath. She almost scoops up the ransom in her arms and leaves the little creature behind. That is what surviving can do to you. But compassion stops her. Compassion is the harder choice, and it is hers; and it is what leads her into the path of and adventure that has been awaiting her all the time, to the aged rogue Han Solo and his co-pilot the Wookie Chewbacca; to Finn, whose own compassion broke his heart and put him and Rey on the same trajectory. 

We see how abandonment and trauma threaten her capacities for community. Her strength makes her a better fighter, a better colleague; it makes everyone around her better, because it spreads the struggle out to the very edge of everyone’s contiguous competencies. But it also has its origins in an abandonment that makes actual friendship, actual earned allyship, dubious to her, surprising. This abandonment is a deep trauma that threatens to undo any new family of choice, to undermine the capacity for trust and loyalty. When she is later captured, she escapes on her own; she is delighted but shocked to discover her friends have returned to find her. She can scarcely believe that she has so quickly acquired a family.

The Force Awakens has problems, but the notion that Rey has no actual struggle to overcome is not one of them, because her struggles are pretty obviously the struggle that lots of little girls have. 

I say “lots” to resist being too generic here, because it is true that whether and when little girls struggle with actualizing their power will have a lot to do with context--power to what, over whom, in what community, with what color skin, etc., etc. Especially if little girls have the freedom to consume mass media on a regular basis and become discerning consumers of it, they may have lots of occasions and encouragement to exercise power. Like anyone who does exercise power they may do so badly, and against others more vulnerable than them. So just asserting Rey is a good role model for girls, or something else equally bland, is not very helpful, because it ignores the living texture and power differences and everything weird about individual girls, boys, and sexes betwixt and between.

But it is worth saying that many girls, and for many of various sexes whose expressions of gender do not match a fixed trajectory, asserting oneself and asking for help will be a big challenge. Even ones who are lucky enough to find themselves in a part of the galaxy where equal dignity is a real, if fragile, possibility, where the allies are really allies, where there is an active Resistance, the struggle will be real. For so many little girls it will be their struggle to become themselves in a world that for the most part despises their self-knowledge. It will be their struggle to play after they turn nine. It will be their struggle to keep raising their hands in science courses. It will be their struggle to read all the kinds of books they want to read and are curious about. It will be their struggle to write all the kinds of books they want to write and are curious about. 

So as a critical person, as a fan, and as a cis/hetero man, I’m writing tonight on Christmas vacation while my nieces sleep upstairs to sound a note of caution about any overheated critique of Rey’s self-actualization that does not take our galaxy into account. I write as someone probably as clumsy as first-act Finn in my allyship, but I suggest to you that it may be Rey is especially for the ones whose struggle is against collapsing into themselves, collapsing into the dumb expectations of the world, collapsing into the loneliness, the isolation of survival without help. The theme of Rey seen from the horizon of our galaxy is a struggle against internalized despair; the despair itself constituted by the isolation, co-optation, and deprivation that are the hallmarks of successfully implemented patriarchy. A hero who overcomes that sort of temptation to despair is a gift to little girls, I think, and to little boys too, for all kinds of reasons.