When Rey is in Jakku, cleaning the objects she has obtained scavenging, she looks up and sees a very old lady, alone, doing the same as her and Rey looks at her for a long time. In my view, the old lady doesn’t remind her of a grandmother she probably can’t remember, I think she is looking at what will become of her if nothing happens in her life to change it. She is looking at her future, what she doesn’t know is that her life is about to change.
When we meet Kylo also in Jakku, in the village the STs attack, he sees San Tekka, looks him from head to toe and says, ‘Look how old you’ve become’. Well, the irony is that San Tekka is also a monkish man without a family who has dedicated his life to a cause.
Both Rey and Ren are looking at their future, looking at what they will become if they don’t meet. But this future is about to change when they meet. This is because he is the belonging she seeks and she is the Light he has been trying to keep away since he fell trapped by Darkness. Yes, they are both virgins because their bond (fate, the Force, whatever we want to call it) will have it no other way, they belong to each other so that they can stop beinglonely, scared and so afraid to leave.
I think this symbolic comparison with the old man and old woman was done on purpose, but if it wasn’t, it works so beautifully as foreshadowing,as a symbol of the potential future that is about to change, that it should have been done by design.
Brilliant.
Brilliant brilliant times four.
The same thing happens with Finn! The stormtrooper that dies in front of him on Jakku represented his future of an early grave (before he did something about it and escaped with his boyfriend).
I agree with you,
whatisthisautumnsorcery, completely. What lead me to this connection was Rey’s expression while looking a that old lady,looking at herself in the future if things didn’t change, and then I remembered Kylo saying that strange sentence to Lor San Tekka:
Look how old you’ve become.
There are so many things he could have said, the sentence seemed incongruous, but it isn’t because it’s meant to establish a connection with that recognition that dawns on Rey on Jakku while looking at the old woman. Some people think she reminded her of her family. I don’t think so, I think she saw herself, what her life was heading towards. As we can’t see Kylo’s face, the only way to establish the parallelism is by showing Kylo looking at a worn out old man and saying those seemingly uncalled for words. The parallelism will be complete when we see Rey looking at the old woman. The gender is meaningful because the two young people are facing the bleak future that awaits them by this point. What will change this future, what will change this lonely, loveless, childless fate, is the fact that they will meet and she will become his Light (the life he never had) and he the belonging (the family) she seeks.
Their lives are intertwined from this point onwards and their paths will stop being parallel to cross at some point. They are bonded by fate, we may call it Force Bond, destiny or any other name.
And we also have Finn, whose decision will change both Ren and Rey’s lives by setting everything in motion. Kylo gets to know Rey while trying to get BB8 and also that girl he has more than probably seen in a a vision (just like she sees him in her Force vision)- Finn is like a catalyst in this story because he is Kylo’s soldier, the person who meets Rey and escapes with her from Jakku, and he is also the person who makes Poe’s escape possible. Finn’s importance for the plot is crucial and his character fascinating in its potential but quite underdeveloped in TFA. I guess they will deal with the repercussions of the life he has led, his orgins and everything such a character may bring forward.
It is so true that he saw his future in that village too. He saw what being a ST entailed, like killing innocent people. More graphically, that scene where a fellow ST, perhaps his friend, dies and leaves a red stain on Finn’s helmet, is showing us and also Finn his potential future, not even reaching a lonely old age like Kylo and Rey may reach, but dying a violent death while still in his youth.
The three of them grew up without a family for different reasons and are trapped in lives they don’t enjoy, they are all trapped and frustrated. Their paths meet at several points in TFA but I think Rey and Ren’s are going to merge because they are going to establish a bond. They’ll never be so lonely after that, this has been foreshadowed in the movie. It will happen.
Finn, on the other hand,will play a role in the story and is already important for both, for her as her first real friend and for him as his foil, showing him the path to feedom he whished he could have taken. However Finn’s path is still unknown, the future and episode VIII will tell where it leads, perhaps he’ll lead a ST rebellion, making him a sort of Spartacus for STs. That would be beautiful and epic, more meaningful than making him another Resistance fighter without giving his old comrades a second thought.
Ink Child Writing 