We Need to Talk About Kylo: ‘The Force Awakens’ And The Reign Of Scary Kid Villains

NOTE: If indeed it is possible that there are humans on planet Earth who have yet to see Star Wars: The Force Awakens, this article will absolutely spoil crucial plot details. So you should go see it! It’s what all the cool and also not-cool kids are doing.

Even in the trailers, before we learn anything about the identity of new Star Wars: The Force Awakens bad guy Kylo Ren, we know that he is, at his core, a child. Someone’s child. Not in terms of age, or even necessarily lineage. But when we see him speaking to the busted up mask of the late Darth Vader, pledging to finish the work that Vader started, Kylo (played by Adam Driver) has been positioned as the apprentice. The latest in a loooong line of Star Wars apprentices, from Obi-Wan to Anakin to Luke Skywalker. Which is why it’s a surprise, but not especially jarring, when the reveal happens at a midpoint in The Force Awakens: Kylo Ren isn’t just some Vader fanboy. His real name is Ben Solo, and he’s the son of Han Solo and Leia Organa. And something has obviously gone terribly wrong.

We’re told that Kylo went to train as a Jedi with his uncle Luke, that something went wrong and Luke was unable to keep Kylo from the pull to the dark side. We don’t know how it went down, only that Supreme Leader Snoke was the one who drew Kylo to the other side, and Han and Leia are torn up with guilt and fear over what’s happened. Han and Leia in particular reminded me of the 2010 Tilda Swinton film We Need to Talk About Kevin —which, we should mention, is new on Netflix this month— where Ezra Miller plays her super-creepy kid who eventually commits an atrocity, leaving his mother wracked with guilt.

The idea of the child villain isn’t new or unique to 2015. There have been Bad Seeds and Good Sons and entire villages of the damned, wicked children lying in wait in all sorts of movies for as long as we’ve had movies. And as far back as Frankenstein, as Oedipus, as Cain, creations have gone bad, sons have killed fathers, resurrected toddlers have attacked their parents with scalpels. But it’s definitely striking to see the Star Wars universe reboot itself with this focus on bad sons, since for six movies it was about bad fathers.

Okay, for argument’s sake, we could say that the first Star Wars wasn’t explicitly about bad dads (though Luke speaking about his deceased father at least puts this film’s version of Anakin in the absentee column), but from Empire Strikes Back all the way through George Lucas’ maligned prequels, these are explicitly movies about the sins of the father and how they end up casting a shadow over not only his children but also the entire galaxy. Now, for the first time in six movies, Star Wars gets a new villain, and it’s striking that he’s not a father but a son.

This trend is a departure for the Star Wars universe, but it may well be a sign of the times. Before The Force Awakens barnstormed the box-office charts on its way to total all-time domination, the moneymaking story of the year was the massive success of Jurassic World. That movie was also a rebooting of a classic blockbuster. In the original Jurassic Park, the clash of humans versus dinosaurs is explicitly laid out in evolutionary terms. “This isn’t some species that was obliterated by deforestation, or the building of a dam,” says Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum). “Dinosaurs had their shot, and nature selected them for extinction.” It is, in fact, the horror of what came before us — our evolutionary fathers and mothers — that we’re running from. Jurassic World, in its attempts to contemporize, makes a key shift. Sure, the other dinosaurs are menacing our main characters too, but it’s the Indominus Rex, a brand new species created by the park, that’s the marquee villain. It is our own creation, and our carelessness about its upbringing, that is now chasing us through the park. Talk about your children turning out bad.

And what’s the third highest-grossing movie of the year? Avengers: Age of Ultron, in which the artificial intelligence that Tony Stark birthed into the world becomes too powerful, rebels against its creator, and immediately sets out to destroy humanity.

These are the stories we’re flocking to see in droves. These are the stories that our biggest franchises are telling. It’s awfully tempting to draw a line from this to a kind of social anxiety writ large. Looking at a world where we (our leaders, our species, ourselves) have destroyed the environment, decimated the economy, refused to curb gun violence, what have you … why wouldn’t our greatest fear be that our children will turn on us?

Kylo Ren is second only to Rey (Daisy Ridley) in terms of most compelling new Star Wars characters, and the sense of newness and excitement for where this story is going is most heightened when the two of them are on screen together (and it makes the speculation about their connection to one another all the more tantalizing). What makes Kylo in particular so fascinating is his explicit ambivalence about his villainy. He confesses (to the busted-up Vader helmet he keeps as a kind of oracle to his grandfather) that he can feel the pull of the light turning him away from the Dark Side. This is something we’ve actually never seen before in Star Wars: a character experiencing angst over not being evil enough. It makes you wonder whether, as much as this trilogy is going to be about Rey’s hero’s journey, we’re also going to be traveling down a dark-mirror path with Kylo. Perhaps the bad son can be redeemed.