Luke Skywalker & the Dark Side

Yes, spoilers for The Last Jedi. You haven't seen it yet?

Alright, then.

Not that I intend to come around and bash Luke (he's just a person, after all), but isn't he a bit hypocritical here? He looks at Rey with wide, fearful eyes and says in shock, "You went straight to the dark." How scary for him! First Ben and now Rey, too! Poor Luke with all these evil apprentices.

Think about it, though. What was one of the first things that Luke did when he was training with Yoda? He felt cold (which is a sign of the dark side) and he felt called to go into the cave in the tree that festered with the dark side. When Yoda advised him to leave his weapons, Luke ignored him and went and had a vision of violence and darkness. He dreamed he fought Darth Vader and then saw himself in Vader. All very dark. But was Luke overcome by darkness, or did Yoda say, oh, my, you're so deep into the dark side, boy? No, no, no. Luke just had to be aware of the dark side. He went, he saw, he left, he moved on. A couple decades or so later, Luke needed to let Ben and then Rey do the same.

He looks at Rey with such fear. Sure, he has bad memories of Kylo, but doesn't he treat Rey a little unfairly? She was just aware of the darkness under the island in the same way that Luke was aware of the darkness in Dagobah. Rey even went into that dark place and had her own vision--and it wasn't even a very dark vision. She just saw herself, a visual image reflecting the very fact that it is her own choices that shape her identity. For all that Luke pretty much washed his hands of guiding Rey from the dark side (though honestly all he needed to tell her was what the Force was and what what light and dark mean when it comes to the Force), Rey handled herself pretty well.

And Ben? Luke's reaction to Rey makes me wonder how much Luke also overreacted with Ben. No, I'm not saying that he completely made up Ben's infatuation with or weakness toward the dark side. But Luke did make up the fact that Ben was automatically aligned with the dark side. He says now that such "raw power" didn't scare him enough then, but I think the opposite is true. I think Luke was so scared by Ben's potential to be a second Vader that he withdrew himself and he forgot that it was the very connection between individuals, specifically between family members, that brought Anakin back from Vader. Rey says it herself: Luke's mistake was acting like Ben's choice was already made. Did Luke create Kylo Ren? No, everyone makes their own choices--but Luke did label Ben as something dark and evil. And Ben, already conflicted, believed him.

The first ill that Luke did Ben was to pull out a deadly weapon against him. The second ill was to tell him the lie that he was born of the dark side, that he was darkness who could only rise to be darkness. That is the lineage that Ben received. He was already an adult when he learned that Darth Vader was his grandfather (and that his parents and his uncle knew all along)--and then right after his uncle tries to kill him. So he embraces the darkness, the only thing he has left.

But isn't part of it true? We are all born into a certain darkness. In our galaxy, we call it sin. In the Star Wars galaxy, it's the dark side. Everyone has that legacy and that capability. The important thing is to choose the light over the dark. Kylo's still stuck thinking that the darkness is all he deserves. Leia gave up on him. Luke gave up on him. Snoke was just using him. Now even Rey has closed the door on him. So he's left holding the locks on his own chains, ignoring the key because it must just be a phantom vision, it can't be something real.

Ah, Luke, you didn't put the darkness in your apprentice--but you might have forgotten to tell him about the light of hope that extinguishes darkness.

Luke as a Legend

You know that story, right? When Lucasfilm was getting ready to make Episode VII, they all sat in a room and asked the question, Who is Luke Skywalker? That of course ended up leading to a film where we didn't see Luke until the very end, where he had "vanished" and various character were trying to find him again, and where we weren't entirely sure who Luke was anymore because he had obviously been through many things (some of which we know and some of which we don't know) since last we saw him. Luke, in our minds, is the legend of who he was--we don't know exactly who he is anymore.

And naturally, of course, Luke is also the audience/viewer. He is the one who sets out on the adventure and goes on the hero's journey. He is the one who is characterized more by what he does than who he is because his character is intentionally kept simple so that we can all picture being in his place.

Ken Liu's The Legends of Luke Skywalker launches from these two concepts. The book has a loose frame story with six legends that characters in this frame story tell one another. They're all stories about Luke. Sometimes we know that they're about him and other times we're not positive if they really are or not (it all goes with the concept of "who is Luke?). The first story, "The Myth Buster," is an over-the-top example of telephone: you know, when a story changes each time someone tells it so that everything is completely different by the time you get to it. I didn't exactly enjoy this story and I worried that they would all be like it, but then I realized that the book starts with this "untrue" story to establish the concept of legends. Legends aren't facts and they're not supposed to be; they're the truths of how people see the world around them. Legends are vehicles for our viewpoints.

The other five stories are good reads. They establish aspects of Luke's character or set up classic Star Wars themes."Fishing in the Deluge" and "Big Inside" hint at Luke's (post-Episode VI and pre-Episode VII) quest to learn more about the Force and the Jedi (this book is, after all, another part of the "Journey to Star Wars: The Last Jedi" series). And of course the frame story heavily references Canto Bight, which we've all been hearing about as one of the new locations in the film.

This book was made for young readers (I think the store shelved it with 9-12), so it's a quick read. Because it's quick and cool, I really recommend this one. Maybe I'm just partial to all the stories about walking across landscapes, but I thought this book was a lot of fun. It's kind of a shame that it was hiding out there in the children's section (where only people who already know that it's there will go to look for it) instead of out with the rest of the Star Wars things. They also made quite a nice hardcover out of it. The style doesn't completely match the usual, established looks: there is no dust jacket and the spine is red cloth. That makes me wonder if they're planning a companion book to this one (another "legends" book about a different character) or if they just wanted this one to stand out from the others.

Who is Luke Skywalker? He was the hero of the story for the audience of the story to relate to--but now the story doesn't belong to him anymore, so who has he become? He apparently didn't make a smooth transition from hero to mentor--or did he? Was he at fault as a mentor or did his pupil just make his own choice regardless of his teacher's good advice? The question is, on what did Luke base his actions? First he wanted adventure, then to help his friends and then the galaxy and then simply his father. So he is a helper. Now. Can he help Kylo? Can he help Rey? Can he convince them, like he convinced Vader, to choose the best of themselves at whatever cost?