Let me start by saying how amazing it is to see, on big budget mainstream HBO show, a thoughtful, complex portrayal of Korean women in Korean as well as English. Ten years ago this would not have happened. And that may be small, but it’s worth celebrating, especially because it isn’t drawn from the book. Ji-Ah and her story are original to the show, a risk they took on in order to explore the nature of American racism as it exists in the larger global context. Thank you, Lovecraft Country.
“Meet me in Daegu” doesn’t stop there, of course. This episode is about monstrousness, and it does an excellent job of asking what (and who) we mean when we apply that label.
But really, this episode is about the absolute star quality of Lovecraft Country’s acting. Watching Jonathan Majors is a revelation. The emotional range he has while changing a bed is Emma-Thompson-in-Love, Actually levels of mastery, the kind of emotional depth that can carry a whole work on the merit of a single scene.
Fortunately, he doesn’t have to. Jamie Chung is a magnificent match for him in every scene, and this is really her episode. Seeing Ji-Ah’s story from her own perspective didn’t make me miss the main cast less so much as it made me wish Chung had been part of it earlier. Her ability to infuse big, splashy scenes with subtlety matches her equal and opposite ability to make even the subtlest gestures feel enormous with emotion.
Her big musical number at the opening certainly sets us up to understand that she’s nearly overflowing with feeling, but the men she tries to date don’t really care. There’s a casually brutal speed-dating scene in which only the men have scorecards for the speed dating, which, of course they do. The cruelty of reducing the women to bingo numbers makes it much easier to stomach what comes next: a sexual encounter that seems to be all about a man’s pleasure, but is actually a far more complicated act.
Complicated—and bloody. Eugh. The tentacles—furry tentacles—are unnerving. (They’re also a creation of the show, not a feature of the tradition. Kumiho have multiple tails, but they’re actually tails.) It’s a clever way to bring in the Lovecraftian element and certainly an effective visual for the larger effect, which is Ji-Ah devouring the men’s souls.
Earlier, when her mother Soon-Hee demanded that she bring a man home, I definitely made the sexist assumption that it was either in the sense of finding a husband or finding a john. Nope. It was about finding a victim. Ji-Ah was incarnated in a human body in order to exact revenge on men, and if she’s sufficiently prolific, she’ll be rewarded with the internal essence of humanity—namely, the memories of the girl whose body she wears. (This kind of possession isn’t typical of kumiho stories, FYI, nor is the body count: usually, kumiho who refrain from eating people for a certain amount of time are granted humanity.) Ji-Ah wants to absorb enough men’s souls to accomplish this, but mostly for the sake of pleasing her mother.
Ji-Ah is ambivalent about the revenge killings for their own sakes, and for her own. Because she devours souls, she experiences her victims’ feelings and deeds vicariously. This means that as we watch her, she’s contending with 99 lives’ worth of shame, evil, and hatred. And that’s saying nothing of being a woman in the middle of a war zone, sexually harassed and threatened, subject to racist violence. And as she watches as the tanks roll by, men on loudspeakers scream at her “do not be afraid!” (Yeah, that’s up there with “calm down” as one of the Top Five Sayings that Have the Opposite Effect.) “Why do you want me to be part of this?” she wonders to her mother, debating the merits of simply remaining a kumiho. Humanity to her is far more monstrous than anything she does or is.
Her only positive human influence in Young-Ja, an example of the compassion and flexibility humans are capable of. It’s a meaningful connection for Ji-Ah but a brief one: Young-Ja is implicated in a communist plot in one of the most wrenching scenes thus far. The absolute disregard for human life is something American viewers usually only see in movies about Nazis. And Nazis are always the perpetrators—not American soldiers.
With the approval of his superiors and literally wearing an American flag, Atticus kills a woman on her knees because she might be a communist. Because he was ordered to. And then he tortures another, and Ji-Ah sees it all.
And then they fall in love.
This is a very, very fine line the show is treading, and it’s to the credit of the writers and the absolute stellar performances of Chung and Majors that it doesn’t veer into naivety or exploitation. The whole way through it manages to be a thoughtful and deliberate exploration of individual humanity written against the a backdrop of brutality.
Both characters, after all, are curious about whether they can be more than what they’ve done or how they appear to others. “Why fight for a country that doesn’t want you?” Ji-Ah wonders. Atticus answers that enlisting was a form of escape. “I guess I just got to a point where [books] couldn’t take me far enough away.”
Through Ji-Ah, the show condemns escapism when it’s an excuse for moral abdication. Art isn’t there to help you escape your failings; they’re there to help you connect with them, and with other people across barriers that otherwise seem insurmountable. When Ji-Ah and Atticus sit down in front of a Judy Garland movie, the word “technicolor” flashes onscreen, a nice nod to the progress we see and to the irony of what we only see now: Chung and Majors would never have shared a screen with Garland. Technicolor didn’t actually extend the spectrum beyond White.
But the romance itself is also a form of escapism for both of them. Atticus wants to forget the war; Ji-Ah wants to escape what she knows. Neither is sustainable. This is how you write tension. Two characters whose goals are mutually exclusive. Asymmetric knowledge. Nothing but drama can ensue. And I don’t just mean the drama of violence. I mean the real meat of monstrousness: the indelible deeds that change a person’s nature as well as the world. “We’ve done monstrous things,” Ji-Ah says, “but we’re not monsters.”
Atticus is willing to believe her when it’s all a metaphor for forgiving himself. But when it comes to Ji-Ah’s nature, well… This is Atticus’s first experience with the supernatural, and it’s a violent, invasive one. It’s reasonable to forgive him for running away; it’s questionable whether we can forgive him for not coming back. Ji-Ah clearly bears the weight of Atticus’s sins, but when the roles are reversed, and Atticus is asked to accept Ji-Ah’s nature and, by extension, her murders, he instead rejects her.
We’re supposed to have sympathy for this character. But can we root for him, joy in his triumphs and mourn his pain? Are we supposed to be invested in his new love, knowing how he acted in his previous relationship?
Yes. That’s exactly the point. The episode doesn’t flinch from his sins. It doesn’t let his trauma or his capacity for goodness mitigate or erase the evil he has done. Instead, it trusts us with the larger context, which is to say, the complexity of a human being. Atticus has indeed done monstrous things, as has Ji-Ah. Yet they assert, against every possible authority, their right to exist, accept and give love, and keep trying. Lovecraft Country doesn’t let people or evil remain a simple concept or category. This is a fearless episode on the writers’ and showrunners’ part, and it turns a real mirror on the audience with regard to their sympathies. American audiences want to root for the “good guy,” but is there a “good guy” here? Is that even possible in a world in which racism and imperialism circumscribe everyone’s actions?
Next week: Hippolyta’s episode!
