The Last Jedi is frequently maligned for its treatment of Luke Skywalker, the hero of the previous Star Wars trilogy. But The Last Jedi isn’t just about Luke Skywalker or even the canon of Star Wars. Far more than other Star Wars films, The Last Jedi is metacritical about the role of Star Wars and the nostalgia and sentiment towards it. Luke Skywalker’s treatment in The Last Jedi exists within the film’s treatment of this issue.
The film’s perspective on the legacy of objects is most easily seen with sisters Rose and Paige Tico’s matching moon medallions. In the opening battle of the film, Paige clutches her medallion as she sacrifices herself to drop bombs on the First Order dreadnought. Finn meets Rose as she cries with her own medallion, establishing a further sentimental value to the medallion object because of its connection to her now dead sister. Later, the medallion object’s sentimental value to Rose clashes with its exchange value when DJ appears to demand the medallion as payment for his codebreaking services. Rose quickly gives up the medallion, valuing the slim chance of saving the Resistance over her own sentiment. DJ’s demand for the medallion’s exchange value is switched into use value when aboard The Supremacy he cracks the door using the medallion as a conductor and gives it back to Rose. Rose then uses the medallion for sentimental value once more in the final battle against the First Order, keeping it on the dashboard of her mining vehicle as she flies towards the enemy, to remind herself of her sister. The sentimental value that she was willing to sacrifice to pay DJ for his services is still valuable to her when DJ returns it to him, reaffirming the sentimental value of objects, but simultaneously placing it secondary to its use value. During this final fight, Finn attempts to sacrifice himself to destroy the First Order’s laser cannon. Rose rams his ship to stop him, and when questioned why by Finn gives a quote that seems to serve as the film’s thesis on healthy relationships with objects: “That’s how we’re gonna win. Not fighting what we hate, saving what we love.”
If Rose’s is the healthy perspective on objects, Kylo Ren’s is presented as the unhealthy. He smashes the helmet that he wore through the majority of The Force Awakens against an elevator early in this movie after Snoke mocks him for being “a child in a mask”. The mask had no use value: its value was in creating an identity, and once Snoke points that out, destroying the mask is the only way to preserve his identity. He and Rey talk through their force bond about her abandonment by her parents and her search for parental figures in Han Solo and Luke Skywalker, and he commands her to “Let the past die. Kill it if you have to. It’s the only way to become what you’re meant to be.” Kylo demands total rejection of the sentimental structures of the past. Killing Snoke to save Rey is his way of killing the past and trying to create something new: he’s no longer caught up in himself as the grandson of Vader or the son of Han and Snoke’s constant reminders of both. While Kylo’s perspective is certainly criticized for the purity it demands, it’s framed positively in a moment as he says to Rey, who has junk trader parents that abandoned her for drinking money, “You come from nothing, you’re nothing, but not to me.” Rey doesn’t have the legacy that Kylo has, but in the fresh world that he offers to her where Snoke and Luke and the Resistance are all dead, they are equals.
Rey refuses to let her friends in the Resistance die to create this world, and she pulls the Skywalker lightsaber towards her. In The Force Awakens, there’s a similar scene where Rey pulls this lightsaber out of the snow as Kylo struggles to do the same (echoing another similar scene where Luke pulls this lightsaber out of the snow in The Empire Strikes Back), with some implication that being the heir to Luke Skywalker was what allowed her to do this. Here, neither are heirs to Luke Skywalker but the lightsaber object represents his legacy. There’s use value present to the saber as well: Rey had just thrown Kylo the saber so he could kill the last guard, and now she is unarmed, and needs the saber to defend herself. They both pull with precisely equal strength and the decade-old and cultural significant lightsaber, both in the Star Wars world and our own world, is split in two.
Luke Skywalker himself is similarly framed as a cultural object struggling to deal with his use value and sentimental value. At the start of the film, his perspective is almost identical to the Kylo perspective: Luke wants to let the Jedi Order end with him because of its past failures, especially his own decisions that led Kylo to the dark side. He mocks the unreasonability of “facing down the entire First Order with a laser sword”: he’s one person and can’t possibly change the tide of a war, even if the culture has made him into a legend capable of doing that. His perspective changes in the burning of the jedi texts scene: he resolves to burn the “sacred Jedi texts” and thus the Jedi legacy. He changes his mind at the last second, still clinging to sentimental value, and then Yoda’s ghost calls down lightning to burn it for him. Luke is upset about the loss of the Jedi knowledge, but Yoda explains to him “Wisdom they hail, but that library contains nothing that the girl Rey does not already possess.” The structure of the Jedi is valued for its ideals and the use value of those ideals, not the specific books that catalog the origins of those ideas. (And Rey had already taken the sacred Jedi texts anyway.)
Armed with this new perspective on the legacy of the Jedi, Luke is no longer burdened with his own failures. He comes to Crait to hold off the First Order, his perspective has totally changed: he uses the cultural value of himself as a legend to intimidate Kylo to save the remnants of the Resistance. He faces down the entire First Order with a laser sword. Kylo Ren asks Luke “Did you come back to say you forgive me? To save my soul?” and Luke simply answers “no”. He still regrets the choices he made that led to Kylo becoming evil, but he can’t change them now and his value now isn’t oriented on dealing with that past.
Luke’s distraction works as Rey helps the Resistance escape, and they escape in the Millenium Falcon, itself a cultural object with simultaneous use value, and a cultural value in the Star Wars world strengthened by its cultural presence in our own world. As Rey flies the Millenium Falcon down to Crait to save the Resistance, Kylo Ren orders the Tie Fighters to abandon the pursuit of the Resistance to chase after the Falcon: Kylo’s desire to destroy the symbols of the past distracts him from the real threat.
Luke’s sacrifice as an aging Jedi also works as a cultural apotheosis with narrative value to the Resistance’s future, as seen in the final scene of the film. The enslaved children who helped Finn and Rose find horses to escape on Canto Bight have recreated Luke Skywalker’s stand down against the First Order using household objects: one of them holds the Luke figure and says “Luke Skywalker, Jedi Master” towards the horde of toy First Order enemies. Their master comes in and they are forced to stop. One goes out to sweep the stables and sees a shooting star, possibly the Millenium Falcon zooming through hyperspace. He flashes the Resistance symbol on the ring that Rose gave him. Luke’s sacrifice and the object of the ring have given him sentimental connection to the cause of the Resistance, and he’s now idealistic and supportive of their cause. This moment is made more relevant again by the cultural relevance of the Star Wars original trilogy in our own world: we understand kids playing with Star Wars toys and imagining the legacy of Luke Skywalker.
Most criticism of Luke Skywalker’s in The Last Jedi focuses on the early Luke and his refusal to fight, and ignores his change in the middle of the film, as well as the value placed on his original trilogy legacy that the film supposedly tarnishes. He ends the film as the apotheosized Jedi the critics desired him to be, but it’s a cultural apotheosis, not a physical one. Luke reaffirms the value of the past and what it means towards the future when he titledrops “I am not the Last Jedi” to Kylo Ren during their confrontation, a confrontation that Luke knows he will die in: Rey will preserve the legacy of the Jedi, but Luke will not be a part of that. The Last Jedi is instructive on how to read itself, and how to deal with what is handed down to us.
