Slipping Away from Myself at the KPop Demon Hunters Sing-Along

Photograph courtesy of the author.

I recall that the young man I was last month had forgotten who he was. Despite his general preoccupation with his own thoughts and feelings as well as his acute self-consciousness about being where he was, the young man had, at some point during the KPop Demon Hunters sing-along event, slipped away from himself. It was an easy thing to do. The theater, after all, was dark. And then there was all that light and sound. It was difficult to tell where it was coming from. Words and songs in English and Korean came from the screen, and they came from everyone around the young man, and they came from the young man himself. In the lovely confusion, the young man lost track of his identity. He was a movie character, and he was also a superfan evacuated of individuality by the sheer force of his love for the movie character of himself. When the lights came back on, the young man knew it was time to retrieve his identity, so he looked down at his outfit of identity markers. Oh duh. I was wearing my blue NewJeans shirt in a kind of deliberately unironic way, which, I reasoned insightfully, seemed to be an expression of my unique personal taste and highly sophisticated yet wholly unpretentious aesthetic intuition. And as the young man I then was, I recall thinking I must be, therefore, myself. I was happy about that, but also sad. Evidently a person can be two things at once.

KPop Demon Hunters begs to differ. If you’re not yourself, I learned at an 8:30 P.M. sing-along in suburban Southern California, everyone will die. This message has resonated with a huge percentage of the global population, and in just three months the film has been streamed for over 540 million hours, according to Netflix’s trustworthy self-reported data. Of course, the current popularity of KPop Demon Hunters is, in the most basic sense of the word, a phenomenon: something you can see. And surely you have seen it. The real-world performances, the dance trends, the covers, the cosplay, the two days of worldwide theatrical sing-along showings of the film with karaoke-style subtitles, which were, at least in my theater, completely useless—we already knew every line and lyric by heart.

The situation is this. Demons are trying to take over the world. For centuries up until now, humans have been protected by successive trios of Korean girls, who, by the power of stan culture, maintain a magical barrier called the Honmoon, which separates the demon and human realms. Today, the K-pop girl group HUNTR/X is one hit single away from rendering this barrier permanently impenetrable and thus defeating evil for good. Unfortunately, the demons have come up with the genius idea of assembling a sexy demon boy band and stealing HUNTR/X’s fans. Also unfortunately, Rumi, the main vocalist of HUNTR/X, has not been completely true to herself. Like the half-Australian NewJeans member Danielle, Rumi is not totally Korean. She’s actually half demon, and harboring this secret has made it impossible for her to authentically express herself through song and dance. “Now I’m shining,” she sings, “like I’m born to—” On the final note, our secretly biracial heroine’s voice falters and breaks.

Eventually, Rumi learns that to make good art and/or ease the vague ceaseless pain caused by the intrinsic structural contradictions of human consciousness, you just need to be authentic. Being authentic means there is no Honmoon between who you are and who you appear to be. Thus, the film tells us, you should be yourself. This is kind of like the BTS of advice, which is to say you have probably heard it before. If you are a Shakespeare character named Laertes, for example, your dad Polonius may have famously told you, “To thine own self be true.” Similarly, if you are, like myself, an ethnically ambiguous filmmaker in California, someone who interviewed you for a stupid grant or whatever may have told you, “I’d love to hear more about your personal connection to this story.”

But that night, in the Regal Alhambra Renaissance theater—a multiplex chain location that has nothing to do with regality, thirteenth-century Islamic architecture, or the Renaissance—we weren’t so sure about the value of authenticity. We were, after all, wearing costumes. Nearly every object and article of clothing that appears in KPop Demon Hunters can be purchased from the Netflix Shop, and we in the audience were brandishing our merchandise: Mira’s polar bear sweater, Zoey’s bucket hat, Rumi’s choo-choo pajama pants. And we were—probably due to the cinematic “apparatus” and the specific sociocultural context in which it was flickering that evening—experiencing a bit of spatial, ideological, and metaphysical confusion. When the demons appeared onscreen to perform their deceitful, inauthentic pop song for us, we screamed and sang along.

Still, perhaps KPop Demon Hunters is on track to become the most popular film ever made because its director, Maggie Kang, was careful to ensure the authenticity of her work. Kang told The New York Times that, at Sony Pictures Imageworks, “we had a whole Korean committee watching out for authenticity.” Ironically, the idea of a multinational conglomerate assembling a special team to supervise the aesthetic and cultural minutiae of one of its products is, like, very authentic to K-pop. More broadly, however, it doesn’t really make sense to apply the logic of authenticity to an animated K-pop movie. Though it is relatively obvious that K-pop is a novel form with its own rituals and unique language, it’s also obvious that the fundamental operation of K-pop is that of imitation. In my favorite song by Meovv (a real girl group that also exists in the diegesis of KPop Demon Hunters) there are lines like “Hear dat bass drum, / wons and yens and dollars / comma, comma, comma.” Clearly, these lyrics are artificial and mimetic, rather than an accurate reflection of the way teenage girls in South Korea actually speak—except, of course, when they are singing and dancing along to a Meovv song. This type of inverted, self-generating vision of authenticity is, I think, what makes K-pop so great: it stylizes, distorts, and imitates reality in ways that compel reality to imitate it in turn.

French theorists, like K-pop idols, know that we establish our identities via a kind of fucked-up process during which we think we are things we are not, such as images and other people. Identification is “the transformation that takes place in the subject when he assumes an image,” says Lacan. “Now you speak French, / talkin’ ’bout ‘we,’ ” sing Meovv. This understanding of identity as the result of an imagined otherness is more or less incompatible with the notion that an artwork, person, or anime-ish demon hunter ought to be authentic. Luckily, KPop Demon Hunters is, like identity itself, a contradiction. Its directive to embrace your one true self is contradicted by the social, participatory experience of watching it, which reminds us that all identity is choreographed, lip-synced, and made-up.

My identity position, for example, was made up like five years ago by teenagers on TikTok. As I exited the sing-along sipping the last of my girlfriend’s Dubai chocolate “It’s Boba Time” drink, I declared that, like me, Rumi is “Wasian.” I am drawn to this dumb Zoomer term because it can describe a person who is white and Asian as well as a white person who is overly obsessed with Asian culture, and I like the idea that identity can be about taking pleasure in your idea of someone else’s fantasy about you, rather than your experience of your own boring life. Being a person in this way is fun and scary and full of slippages, like singing a song you only kind of know at karaoke.

In the immense concrete parking structure outside the theater, the song I was singing was “Golden” by HUNTR/X. “I’m done hiding, / now I’m shining …” As my voice echoed away from and back to me, I realized Rumi’s climactic line is secretly agrammatical, for she says that she is, at last, “like I’m born to be.” Normally, we speak of being born in the past tense—”I was born to be,” not “I am born to be”—but when you’re cosplaying a character or cosplaying yourself, perhaps it’s more authentic to say that the moment you became the person you are was, and will always be, right now.

 

Julian Castronovo is a filmmaker and writer. His film Debut, or, Objects of the Field of Debris as Currently Catalogued will be released by MEMORY in October 2025.