On Validating Sulli’s Pain

In the two-part special Persona: Sulli, the late singer discusses in harrowing detail the trauma she experienced in the public eye.

Netflix

Early on in the documentary Dear Jin-ri, Sulli lets out a small shriek. “Argh,” she moans, doing little to hide her disgust, “K-Pop idols are the worst.” Encouraged by the film’s director Yoon-sulk Jung, she was preparing to talk about her time in the K-Pop industry as a member of the second generation girl group f(x). But this time of her life was not something she liked to revisit. In fact, speaking about her career as an idol seemed to conjure a distant horror story that she had only begun to process.  

Sulli was in the middle of filming Persona: Sulli, a two-part special that is both an art house film and a documentary, when she killed herself in October 2019. Her death was devastating, but not entirely shocking. Sulli had faced years of bullying for her outspoken feminist views, and she was open about her suffering. A month later, when Gu Hara, a close friend of Sulli’s and a member of KARA, killed herself, a reckoning was brought to the industry. Both womens’ deaths were entirely preventable, and laid bare the misogyny that many South Korean women face. No one, Sulli makes clear in this documentary, gave a damn that she was in pain.

Sulli’s death left the film’s release in flux until this month, when Netflix announced that both the documentary, titled Dear Jin-ri, and a short film Sulli starred in as part of the project, titled Clean Island, would premiere on the 13th. I was skeptical about both. Just how in-depth would Sulli detail her life and issues? But Dear Jin-ri, which clocks in at nearly 2 hours, and Clean Island, which follows a girl escaping a slaughterhouse for a fresh start, are both harrowing, illuminating watches. They are important films to witness because they validate Sulli’s struggles.

Clean Island, the special’s opener, is a brightly shot arthouse film directed by Hwang Soo-ah and Kim Ji-hye with a screenplay by Kim Ji-hye that tracks a woman escaping living in a slaughterhouse. At an immigrant checkpoint for Clean Island, she must confess her sins to be scrubbed clean for entry. “Are you listening?”, she asks the immigration officers and us, the viewers. Conceptually, the slaughterhouse, with its gore and pigs, reflects the industry Sulli herself had just escaped from. To detail her sins, Sulli’s character must reckon with her choices that led her here. She must decide whether she deserves hell for being difficult and for the gore she had to endure. “Am I clean?”, she asks after she confesses, her eyes wide and brimming with tears. 

But the trauma follows, like a creature stalking her in the dead of night. For Sulli, her beauty is the sticking point. It was a curse, she’d begun to feel, to look like this. It gave adults a reason to believe she had no thoughts of her own. Shut up, stand still, look pretty, she was told repeatedly. 

Often on Dear Jin-ri, Sulli seems to be grappling with a deprogramming from what she was taught for years as an idol. One Reddit user compared her to a cult survivor, which is perceptive. She lived inside a bubble as an idol and that bubble soon began to suffocate her. 

Before she became known for her politics, Sulli’s looks were what made her famous. “I think I was always bound by this idea of being pretty,” she admits early in the documentary. “Whenever people called me pretty, I was curious why people said it.”  I’m most struck by her smile, which in the early years held a childhood innocence but in “Persona”, it looks tempered with her suffering.

Sulli’s voice was refreshingly deep. There’s a hoarseness to it, which for some reason, endeared me to her. Her birth name, Choi Jin-ri, which she preferred to be called by, came from the Bible. “It means the truth,” she once told a journalist. Maybe this proved to be foreshadowing: Sulli put up a tough exterior to prevent herself from revealing too much about herself. But Jin-ri could never lie. She knew people thought she was useless beyond her looks, which she deeply resented. 

“They don’t see us as humans,” she says incredulously about the K-Pop industry. “When I started out in the entertainment business there was one thing people wouldn’t stop telling me which I thought was absurd.” She looks stricken as she recalls what was drilled into her from a young age, “You are a product. You need to be the finest, top quality product to the public.” 

Even when the words weren’t explicitly said to her, Sulli recalls, she still felt like a shiny, pretty product; only worth value if she was as beautiful as people claimed. This kind of programming has harsh side-effects: There was the constant terror that she might lose her product value. Sulli never recalled being able to make a single decision for herself. No one, she says, asked her for her opinion. 

“I didn’t know how to speak up. When I did speak up about my difficulties, the system wasn’t going to change,” she says with deep pauses in between words, as if she is considering for the first time how traumatizing this experience was. “Nobody told me, ‘Make your own choice. It’s up to you. What do you think? How are you these days “

“We were basically puppets,” she continues with a bitter laugh. “Who cares if you’re exhausted?” 

The way Sulli learned to cope was through controlling her pain. “I just kept blaming myself. That’s the only thing I could control,” she explains at one point, in one of the film’s most shocking admissions. “When I was giving myself pain, that was the only thing I could control. I could put myself down to control something.” 

Sulli never specified what sort of pain she sought out, and Jung never presses her for details. But by inflicting pain on herself, she could have a small piece of autonomy over her body. 

Still from Clean Island; Netflix

Watching Dear Jin-ri I was most surprised to witness Sulli’s rage. You would be mistaken for thinking that she was simply cloaked in depression, unable to advocate for herself. In reality, she was righteously angry and contentious about the industry that had taken nearly every part of her. 

Though Sulli had left K-Pop four years prior, the lessons she learned from that period stuck to her like moths to a flame. She felt bitter and upset that no one, still, would listen to her. Her pleas that she wasn’t crazy, that she was only expressing herself, were met with a cruel ridicule that ranged from shots at her appearance to her intelligence. 

In one of the film’s most fascinating clips, Sulli and Yeeun of the Wonder Girls discussed why they are feminists. During a tense exchange with a male host on the variety show Night of Hate Comments, Yeeun asked, “Do you believe men and women deserve equal rights?” When he confirmed he does, Yeeun shot back, “Then you’re a feminist.” 

Sulli’s feminism was controversial in her lifetime, particularly because the word is viewed so negatively in South Korea, a country where many men view feminists as misandrists. But Sulli saw feminism as crucial for women like her who are silenced. “Even when I don’t agree with women I root for them for being empowered enough to speak up,” she explains when Jung asks her about the term. “We need more women to speak up.” 

But as Sulli spoke up, she often saw her words become twisted while her body, that shiny product, became more objectified. Nothing, she felt, was ever her own. 

How do we view a figure like Sulli when so much of her life was traumatic? It’s tempting to view every answer in the documentary as foreshadowing of her death, particularly when she admits that she doesn’t expect to reach 30 years old. She was exhausted, tired of explaining herself and speaking up to a public that didn’t want to hear from her. 

If fame had taught her anything, it’s that her voice didn’t matter. Her pain was useless. Her beauty was her power, and that, too, was subjective. Sulli confessed that she felt like a freak, a roadside attraction that was cursed by her beauty and outspokenness. “What if someone told you that you’re not weird?” Jung asks Sulli at one point. She laughs bitterly. That would be a lie, she seems to say. 

She admitted that she blamed herself. It was her responsibility to do better and to be there for her group, who she called a “sisterhood” that she loved. But who could validate her pain? Who could emphasize with her? She was a trailblazer who was isolated and shunned.

“Did you ever think that it wasn’t your fault?” Jung gently asks Sulli in one of the film’s most devastating moments.

“No,” she responds firmly after a long pause. “It was never an option for me.” 

Then, the tears that she had long held back begin to fall like a chorus of anguish and fury. “This was a mistake,” she says later with a self-conscious laugh. She had exposed herself.

In an industry where perfection is rewarded, Sulli had committed the ultimate sin. She had told the truth.