There are two holes

Origin

The line belongs to Yeom Seok-jin, played by Lee Jung-jae, in Assassination, the 2015 Choi Dong-hoon film released on 22 July that year. It passed ten million admissions on 15 August, twenty-five days after release, and finished with roughly 12.7 million.

The scene comes after liberation, with Yeom on trial for collaboration with the Japanese and defending himself. He insists everything he did was for the country; the prosecutor, the judge and the gallery all scoff. He then strips off his shirt to reveal the gunshot scars on his body and says, "There are six Japanese bullets lodged in my body." Pointing at one scar, he adds, "This is where I was shot in Gyeongseong in 1912, during the attempt on Governor-General Terauchi. There are two holes."

How the scene works

The line lands because the man saying it is a liar. Yeom sold out his own comrades. And yet the wounds are real. Rather than inventing facts, he selects and arranges true ones to make himself look like a patriot.

"There are two holes" is the crux of that technique: a bullet passed through, so there is an entry and an exit — a concrete, checkable physical fact. One hole count is more persuasive than any abstract profession of loyalty. The gallery in the film wavers for a moment, and the scene is widely read as the point where the audience, too, nearly falls for him.

Spread

Lee Jung-jae's delivery did much of the work in making the line quotable. The clipped, deliberate period-drama cadence was easy to imitate, and the ending of "there are two holes" in particular was distinctive enough that the fragment began to be quoted on its own.

YouTubers then quoted it often enough to fix it as a meme, and it moved on to TikTok and Instagram, where large numbers of short videos recreated or reworked the scene. It resurfaced not right after the film's release but much later, through short-form platforms.

Usage

On seeing any object with two holes — the literal pun
Mimicking overwrought self-justification — the usage closest to the original
When someone leans on a trivial fact as evidence — shorthand for arguing via specific numbers
As impression material — playing at period-drama diction