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Squid Game Is, Unfortunately, the Perfect Show for Our Current Dystopia

The Korean survivor-game series skewers capitalism, chance, and base human instinct in a brutalizing modern parable. Naturally, it’s on track to be Netflix’s biggest hit in history.
‘Squid Game Is Unfortunately the Perfect Show for Our Current Dystopia
Courtesy of Netflix. 
This post contains spoilers for Squid Game.

There are, of course, subtler visual metaphors to be made about capitalism than to suspend a shining, golden ball of cash above a crowd of game participants, casting every face aglow as each considers whether they’re willing to watch their competitors get gunned down in order to win. But this is the scene, arriving a few minutes into episode two of Netflix’s Squid Game, that will almost certainly remain indelible as a cultural reference point for our time, as the South Korean drama continues its trajectory toward worldwide phenomenon. Just this week, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos estimated that the show was on track to be the platform’s biggest hit ever, making the success of previous international shows like Money Heist and Lupin pale in comparison. A shimmering sphere of money, it turns out, needs no translation.

The premise of Squid Game is one western audiences recognize from familiar dystopian thrillers like Snowpiercer and Hunger Games in which class struggle is literalized via a series of trials devised for the downtrodden by the elites. Somewhere off the coast of South Korea, hundreds of people who find themselves on the brink of financial ruin for various reasons have been recruited to play a series of children’s games in order to compete for $45.6 billion won (about $40 million dollars, to save you a google). To lose (or disobey) means getting eliminated, i.e., shot dead on the spot. It’s a television series about opportunity in the same way that Breaking Bad was about legacy, or Mad Men was a meditation on ambition: It’s a vivid, violent show that wrings a supposed societal value inside out to expose the unspoken clauses—and tacit horrors—lining its premise.

Unlike more familiar survival-game scenarios, though, the contests involved in Squid Game are not necessarily trials of physical endurance, or match-ups against the natural elements. They’re literal children’s games that leave players crouched on the ground, licking candy or furiously trading marbles under gunpoint. Against garish backdrops that resemble preschool classrooms, they’re outfitted in infantilizing P.E. uniforms, given numbers instead of names, and placed under constant surveillance by an armed guard. There’s no use for war strategy or even a little show-off archery here: The tasks at hand—and the threat of death—are supposed to be arbitrary. What could be more fair? And that, perhaps, is what is most chilling about Squid Game as a capitalist parable.

The indignity of getting by is the point, and so is the expectation that players be grateful to even have a shot in the first place. “We are not trying to hurt you or collect your debts,” assures one of the masked staffers tasked with enforcing the rules of the game. “Let me remind you that we’re simply here to give you a chance.” That these administrators (who fall into three ranks: manager, soldier, and worker) are themselves numbered, surveilled, and mostly forbidden to speak as they shuffle from the job to solitary holding cells at night—at the direction of an upbeat, disembodied voice congratulating them on a good day’s work—compellingly wrinkles the show’s ideas about complicity. Who really has a choice here, anyway?

To its credit, Squid Game commits to more than just the game schtick. The series takes seriously the cycle of opportunity and debt by having its main characters wrestle with complicated questions of obligation. Inside the games, players constantly negotiate what they feel they owe to each other as potential allies and enemies, consorts and co-conspirators, and especially strangers who perform random acts of kindness for no reason at all.

Meanwhile, their primary motivations for competing at all stem from their obligations “outside.” Protagonist Seong Gi-hun (played with wide-eyed vehemence by Lee Jung-jae), is a compulsive gambler whose internal compass remains intact mostly out of shame for neglecting his aging mother and 10-year-old daughter. Kang Sae-byeok (played by top Korean model HoYeon Jung) is your typical stony badass-ette whose older-sister responsibilities provide dueling undercurrents of rage and resourcefulness. Cho Sang-woo (Park Hae-soo), the hometown hero turned white-collar criminal, is willing to sell the shoes off his mother’s feet in order to save his own skin; Hwang Jun-ho (Wi Ha-joon), the cop, begins investigating the entire ordeal to find his missing brother. Only Oh Il Nam (Oh Yeong-su), an aging man who says he’s got nothing left to lose, wants to participate in the games for a shot at something more than financial redemption; he’s apparently the lone player who can afford to be concerned with something as trivial as Olympian-esque glory.

The success of Squid Game, in my watching anyway, is a testament to both the strength of Netflix’s home-screen suggestions and the rather pleasing benefits of the absolute attention required for a subtitled viewing experience. Also crucial: a plotline centered around games resembling viral challenges that then translate seamlessly into memeification, particularly on TikTok, where much of the buzz for the show has grown among a young audience already used to making nihilist jokes about school shootings and societal collapse.

And as far as sociopolitical statements go, you also couldn’t engineer a better strike to the millennial and Gen Z nerves than a show where characters have to perform useless tasks in order to marginally improve their luck of the draw, and where the value of their lives is meted out in tangible bundles of cash (and organs). When we finally meet the mysterious “VIPs,” it becomes clear that the true purpose of these games was always to entertain a few mega-rich men, whose running commentary on the “performances” is so inane it’s almost hilarious. At a time when billionaires are dick-measuring in space and tech platforms attempt to “leverage playdates” as a growth strategy, we are already deadened to the governing power of rich people’s whims.

Perhaps that’s why Squid Game’s conclusion feels ultimately lacking. The finale tries to make vague pronouncements toward some kind of sustained reason to believe—in the inherent good of people, in the potential ability of one man to dismantle an entire system. It pales in comparison to the strength of earlier scenes spent examining the warped consequences of hope, especially one in which Gi-hun is observing a televised horse race. We watch, from the perspective of the screen (or the horse race itself, you could say), a manic cycle of emotions unfold across his face: despair, terror, disbelief, then ecstasy. The 4 million won he won seem like a real cause for celebration, until we discover the amount will hardly make a dent in Gi-hun’s outstanding debts. No wonder, then, that he and the other characters would go on to make the decision—twice—to play the deadly games for a real chance. As the old man, Oh Il Nam, remarks with a casual lilt of resignation, “Out there, the torture is worse.”

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