In this article, the author addresses how online multimodal literacy practices are both filtered through and use popular culture. Using a combination of textual analysis and interviews with first-year university students, the author illustrates how the intersections of multimodal literacies and popular culture are shaping the ways that identities are constructed and performed in and out of the literacy classroom. He focuses on two ways these intersections take place. First, he examines how the construction and representations of identities in forms of popular culture such as television or film can shape ways of reading identity and differences in the images and videos of students' multimodal texts. He then analyzes how individuals employ new technologies to create multimedia performances of identities online. In particular, he discusses how emotion in popular culture shapes online texts and identity performances.