It was Kylo Ren’s fascination with his grandfather Darth Vader that led him to the dark side of the force. Like Vader, he wore a black mask. Though unlike Vader, he didn’t need it to survive. For the stylish young Kylo Ren it was more a pose, almost a fashion statement. And that, according to a review in the Vatican newspaper, is the problem with the depiction of evil in the new Star Wars film: it just isn’t evil enough.
Kylo Ren is no Darth Vader. He’s like a bad tribute act. Moreover, he’s plagued with doubts about his vocation on the dark side – doubts he confesses to Vader’s now mangled mask, kept as a creepy religious relic: “Forgive me. I feel it again … the call from light. Supreme Leader senses it. Show me again, the power of the darkness, and I’ll let nothing stand in our way. Show me, grandfather, and I will finish what you started.”
The problem with Ren’s little paean of praise to Vader’s apparently epic darkness is that it ignores the fact that Vader made a last-minute conversion to the light side of the force. For all his sinister asthmatics, it was Vader who did for the Dark Lord of the Sith, the wizened Emperor Palpatine. In the end, Vader saw the light. His was a deathbed conversion straight out of central casting Victorian piety. So it’s a little odd that the Vatican wants Vader to be the permanent poster boy for evil. And likewise odd that it attacks Ren’s darkness for being so fake – not least because it was Ren who deliberately gutted his own father with a light sabre.
Because what the Vatican should have learned from its own master theologian of the dark side, St Augustine, is that all evil is a fake, an absence, a lack, a hole, an emptiness. Nothingness is its abiding characteristic. The problem with Vader’s evil is that it pretends too much existential gravity, too much substance. Like so many formulaic depictions of evil – and like the Star Wars universe itself – it imagines a Manicheistic cosmos split between the competing forces of good and evil. As a follower of the Persian prophet Mani, this was the religion of Augustine’s youth.
But on converting to Christianity, Augustine broke with a dualistic worldview, believing that because God is the creator of all things, all of creation must be good. Therefore, following the logic, evil has to be non-existent. This remarkable conclusion doesn’t mean that evil stuff doesn’t happen, but rather that evil has an empty heart, its mode of existence is non-existence. For those who don’t like old-fashioned metaphysics, something similar is echoed in both Freud’s idea that the death instinct contains a dangerous will-to-nothingness, and in Hannah Arendt’s depiction of the Nazi Eichmann as banal.
In other words, perhaps fake evil is evil’s true face. Within days of the release of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, a spoof twitter account for Emo Kylo Ren – @KyloR3n – amassed half a million followers by depicting him as an over-privileged, sulky, self-absorbed frat-boy, desperate to be cool, given to absurd flights of delusion, awkward in company.
“I think Kylo Ren is a school shooter,” tweeted comic book writer Gail Simone. The thing about poor old Ren is that he is a bit of a nobody. And that’s precisely what makes him so much more evil than Vader. If only the Vatican film reviewer had listened a bit more in his lessons on the theology of the early church, he would have got that.
