This Is What It Sounds Like

My voice without the lies, this is what it sounds like

Fearless and undefined, this is what it sounds like

Truth after all this time, our voices all combined

When darkness meets the light, this is what it sounds like.

-HUNTR/X

Allow me to introduce you, if I may, to a world where one K-Pop band, HUNTR/X, reigns supreme over the music billboard charts, to the delight of their devoted fans. All of this you may know, for this is actually the world in which you are already living, where their hit single, “Golden,” has spent the better part of the summer months in the No. 1 spot. However, what you may not know, if you have not taken the time to watch their debut feature film, is that the stars of HUNTR/X are uniquely empowered — via a great commission, passed down through generations — to use their musical gifts (along with some martial arts) to keep the forces of darkness at bay. That’s right: the strength of their song maintains a spiritual barrier between our world and a realm of ravenous demons who long to devour the souls of the unwitting human race. If you can accept that premise, and I really think that you should, then I can show you the striking resemblance between our two worlds: the reason why K-Pop Demon Hunters is so wildly successful (ascending also as the most-watched Netflix film in history, at 325 million views worldwide), aside from the excellent musical numbers and creative storytelling, is because the spiritual battleground that serves as the setting of this musical masterpiece is so closely akin to our own. Our sin and our shame, the demonic deception we all face, the desperate hope that we cling to as we search for salvation — all of these strike a deep chord within our hearts. And as we embrace the sound of the human condition, we are offered a glimpse of final victory: when darkness breaks beneath the brightness of the light, when the truth will set us free.

Rumi’s got a secret. The lead singer of HUNTR/X is hiding something from Mira and Zoey (the other two members of the band, and also her best friends). The trio have dedicated their lives to destroying the demons that haunt our world: demons that can take on human form, indistinguishable from the rest of us, except for certain markings – ‘patterns’ – on their skin. To her shame, Rumi has them too.  As soon as we know she’s been concealing her patterns, we are immediately drawn to her. We know what it is to be embarrassed about our own flaws that we’d rather keep hidden from the rest of the world: defects that might damage our relationships, undermine our work, or tarnish our carefully cultivated image if they were to be discovered. We are not alone in this: “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” And when we try to bury those sins, nothing good can come of it – only a kind of spiritual death. Reflecting on her time running away from the truth in “This is What it Sounds Like,” Rumi observes that the pressure of hidden sin and shame will lead us into cowardice and deceit. And she experiences the proverbial fallout of being caught in a lie, with devastating relational consequences.

As to what the descent into spiritual death might look like, K-Pop Demon Hunters provides a unique perspective on the spiritual realm. First and most importantly, all the demons we’re introduced to – save one – are not purely spiritual creatures from eternity. They were once men, corrupted and condemned to serve Gwi-Ma, lord of the underworld. Secondly, the demons are not all alike, and their experience of the afterlife seems to be divided into leveled orders of magnitude. Most of the demons that slip through the cracks in the spiritual barrier have distinguishing individual (albeit cartoonish) features, e.g. different vibrant colors, teeth protruding from stupid, grotesque mouths, etc. At the lowest level, there are nightmarish, faceless hordes that clamber over one another in a frantic scramble of attack, without any particular agency. They’re unleashed en masse as beasts more than they are acting on any kind of hellish orders from their villainous overlords. However, in the highest order, a select few have held onto a semblance of their humanity (not to mention their good looks – AHEM – Jinu), and perhaps appear even capable of some sort of redemption. 

Rumi’s patterns are an accident of her birth rather than earned through devilish behavior, but they certainly seem exacerbated by anxiety over her persistent deception. They spread from her core and ultimately break her voice for a time, a condition she can only begin to remedy by facing the truth about who she is. The patterns spread further and glow brighter when she responds to her circumstances defensively or in anger. This creeping, spreading effect of demonic patterns echoes one of C.S. Lewis’ most famous theological conceptions: our souls are constantly in re-formation, moving toward either a heavenly or a hellish destiny:

“Every time you make a choice, you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing either into a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature: either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow-creatures, and with itself. To be the one kind of creature is heaven: that is, it is joy and peace and knowledge and power. To be the other means madness, horror, idiocy, rage, impotence, and eternal loneliness. Each of us at each moment is progressing to the one state or the other.”

Envisioning a kind of purgatory in which most souls are cowed into performing the bidding of the devil, it is easy to see how the lower orders of the demonic realm are in various states of becoming more and more hellish creatures, to the extent that they slowly lose all personality, all sense of self. Eventually, they cease to become collaborators and devolve into mere instruments of the devil’s purposes.

Returning to the highest – most human-like – order of demons, K-Pop Demon Hunters presents something that will feel very familiar to close observers of the imaginative works of C.S. Lewis. Jinu makes a bargain with Gwi-Ma that he and his demon boy band, the Saja Boys, can hijack the power of K-Pop and use it for evil. In return, Gwi-Ma promises to erase the shameful memories of his sins that afflict his soul. However, Jinu’s devilish plans go awry from the moment he crosses the spiritual threshold. His forays into the beautiful world of living souls above are reminiscent of C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce, where fleeting glimpses of real pleasures that remain tantalizingly just out of reach are painfully difficult to bear. In The Great Divorce, visitors from the “Grey Town” (a.k.a. the doorstep of Hell) take a bus ride to the foothills of Heaven, where they encounter a variety of heavenly souls determined to make a final effort to save them from damnation. Most people reject their last chance to change course, preferring the misery they know to the perceived humility and transformation that a different life would require. But there is a chance, however infinitesimally small, that one of them, standing on the borders of the heavenly realm, might escape and permanently change the trajectory of their soul. Jinu is fully self-absorbed in his quest to end his eternal suffering… until he meets Rumi, whose struggle with her own patterns give him hope that he might be able to change his destiny.

That brings us to Gwi-Ma, demon king. His principal characteristics are his sheer size and his insatiable hunger for human souls. In this he shares the defining attribute of the devil, described by the apostle Peter as a prowling, roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour. Jinu, pleading with Gwi-Ma to give him more time for his scheming Saja Boys band to succeed in subverting HUNTR/X’s plans, establishes a demonic dynamic that very clearly echoes C.S. Lewis’ relationship between Wormwood and Screwtape in The Screwtape Letters. Increasingly exasperated with Wormwood’s failures to lead his human ‘patient’ astray, Screwtape writes: 

My dear Wormwood, 

I sometimes wonder whether you think you have been sent into the world for your own amusement… you will soon find that the justice of Hell is purely realistic, and concerned only with results. Bring us back food, or be food yourself… 

Your increasingly and ravenously affectionate uncle,

               SCREWTAPE 

Likewise, Gwi-Ma’s patience is thin, his suspicion is thick, and his existence is defined by his emptiness. God gives life, and life abundantly, to his creatures, out of the fullness of his love. Conversely, the essence of evil is defined by craving and mercilessness: “death and destruction are never satisfied.” The demonic theme of consumption is thinly veiled throughout the Saja Boys’ performances, from the seemingly innocent declaration in “Soda Pop” that they’ve “gotta drink every drop” of the ones that they adore, to the more foreboding false promise of freedom in “Your Idol,” that “I will make you free when you’re all a part of me.”

Rumi’s great hope for redemption is that HUNTR/X will be able to manifest a “Golden Honmoon,” a permanent seal between our world and the demon world, somehow severing the connection between her patterns and their evil source. And her poignant duet with Jinu, “Free,” offers us a glimpse of the desperate hope for freedom that we all long for when we’re caught in sin and shame: “We can’t fix it if we never face it / What if we find a way to escape it? / We could be free, free.” There’s a kind of wishful optimism here as Rumi doesn’t know for sure if this plan will work, nor does Jinu have any assurance that he could realize his fledgling dream of unchaining his soul from Gwi-Ma’s hold. But the core components of Christian redemption are all present here: there must be accountability for our actions (i.e. a confession of sin), a kindness that leads us to repentance (represented in their mutual understanding and compassion for one another), and a real departure from the burden of our troubled history. The apostle John writes: “If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.” God promises to separate us from our sins “as far as the east is from the west.” In Christ, we have faith that we can truly “let the past be the past ‘til it’s weightless.”

After a sinister betrayal dashes Rumi’s hopes that a “Golden” HUNTR/X performance will be her salvation, we discover that people are not merely under attack from external spiritual forces. As the veil between the demonic realm and our own becomes ever more porous, all of the people are plagued by deceit, doubt, and distrust, transformed into a host of despondent drones as they stumble heedlessly into the trap laid for them by the Saja Boys. As the throng forms in streets, shuffling toward their doom, we hear a multitude of despairing voices emanating from inside people’s heads, full of insecurity and devoid of all hope. It is against such withering psychological warfare that the apostle Paul exhorts us to “put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand.” But, as the Saja Boys proclaim in their commanding performance of “Your Idol”: “No one is coming to save you” — they have no Holy Spirit to strengthen them, their Honmoon has disintegrated, and the devil himself has arrived to reap a harvest of human souls.

Like Lewis’ fiction, the movie’s resounding artistic accomplishment is not a theologically accurate depiction of the unseen. Rather, they both excel in their revelation of the human condition through their contemplation of the supernatural. But there is one element conspicuously absent from the K-Pop Demon Hunters: a Savior. Ironically, Screwtape observes: “It is funny how mortals always picture us putting things into their minds: in reality our best work is done by keeping things out.” Jinu’s great act of self-sacrifice is very noble and moving, but he can only forestall the all-consuming power of Gwi-Ma. There is no God, no heavenly host of angels of light to contest the powers of darkness. The mystical union of the affection of HUNTR/X’s fans usurps the presence of the divine in this narrative, though there is a very real sense in which the prayers of the saints, offered up in a chorus (as portrayed in “What it Sounds Like”), could effect a kind of spiritual protection.

The glory of “What it Sounds Like” is a people being liberated by light from darkness, suddenly seeing “all the beauty in the broken glass”: how Rumi, Mira and Zoey have joined with a power that is greater than themselves, one that has taken all of their fractured fragments and forged them into something wonderful, something powerful, something that can work together to overcome spiritual darkness, something that can liberate others who are still in bondage as well. This is the message of Christ, fulfilling the words of the prophet Isaiah:

“What it Sounds Like” is also an embodiment of one of the most powerful passages in Paul’s letter to the Romans, that God works in all things for the good of those who love him. We are all broken. And yet, as we are individually rescued from darkness, we are collectively shining a brilliant light that bears witness to the goodness of our Creator. Our Adversary would love nothing more than to keep us cowering in doubt, deceiving one another to hide our sins, our heads twisted and our hearts divided. But as the apostle John reminds us, “even if our hearts condemn us, God is greater than our hearts, and he knows all things.” James promises us that if we submit ourselves to God, then we can “resist the devil, and he will flee from you.” Together, we may produce a song so powerful that our Enemy can only try to hide as the walls he has built between us come crashing down upon him.

I hope that you are one of the millions whose imagination has been captivated by K-Pop Demon Hunters. I hope your heart cries out in unison with Rumi and Jinu’s beautiful, hope-filled lament: “What if we heal what’s broken?” For we all long for a future of freedom from the heavy burdens we bear. I hope you will turn to God in the midst of your spiritual struggle, singing with the Psalmist, “How long, Oh Lord?” And I hope that you will trust in his unfailing love, that your heart will rejoice in his salvation. I pray that you will sing to the Lord, for he has been good to you.