What happens when nobody wins? (Netflix)
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Contains mild spoilers
The pivot point of Squid Game, the captivating South Korean miniseries that has become Netflix’s most popular series at launch, is its second episode. By now the premise has been vividly established: 456 financially desperate people have been transported to a private island to compete in a series of homicidally souped-up children’s games to win a jackpot of 45.6 billion won (£29 million). The winner takes all; the losers die.
It’s not hard to track the DNA of this death-game concept through The Hunger Games and Purge franchises, the 2000 Japanese smash Battle Royale, and the 1970s Stephen King novellas The Running Man and The Long Walk, all the way back to Richard Connell’s 1924 short story The Most Dangerous Game. Usually, though, such contests are conducted by the state in a near-future dystopia. While the island resembles the micro-dystopia seen in the Sixties TV show The Prisoner — with which Squid Game shares a playground colour scheme, tone of sinister courtesy and replacement of names with numbers — the world it inhabits is present-day South Korea.
Another traditional premise that showrunner Hwang Dong-hyuk rejects is the idea that there is no escape. According to the rules, contestants are free to abandon the game and return to society if a simple majority votes to do so, which is what happens in episode two. Game over? Of course not. The show then explains how the characters’ everyday lives are so brutally, intolerably restricted that even near-certain death seems like the better option. During the vote, one character says: “Will it be any different if we leave? Life out there is hell anyway, damn it.” Another agrees: “I’d rather stay here and die trying than die out there like a dog.” Ultimately, 93% of the contestants choose to rejoin the game. The episode is called “Hell”.
These scenes of lives under hideous financial pressure are not a world away from the work of Bong Joon-ho, whose 2019 film Parasite, the most successful South Korean movie ever, won four Academy Awards. Whether he’s working in a realist mode (Mother), science fiction (Snowpiercer) or a hybrid of the two (Okja, The Host), Bong is obsessed with inequality and injustice, although his conclusions, especially when it comes to solidarity among the have-nots, are diverse and contradictory. He is not alone: Lee Chang-dong’s 2018 arthouse hit Burning also depicts the human cost of economic desperation.
Squid Game may not have the thematic complexity of Parasite but both are thrilling class-war allegories with mass appeal. (It has received the ultimate phenomenon-confirming accolade of a ridiculous moral panic about schoolchildren mimicking games which are, minus the fatalities, simply old-fashioned children’s games.) But even though inequality has recently become a common undercurrent in Hollywood movies, from Nomadland to Joker to Us, there’s no equivalently popular explicit satire in the US, which raises two questions: Why are these stories coming out of South Korea? And why are they sweeping the world?
“Korea, on the surface, seems like a very rich and glamorous country now, with K-pop, high-speed internet and IT technology,” Bong told the Guardian last year, “but the relative wealth between rich and poor is widening. The younger generation, in particular, feels a lot of despair.”
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SubscribeInteresting article. I’d heard of Squid Game but now I’ll be sure to check it out when it appears in our local library collection.
Since the early 2000s Korean cinema has blossomed. I’m not sure why but they really hit their stride. For anyone interested in darker stories and horror I recommend all the movies by director Na Hong-jin, especially The Wailing which is one of the best, and longest, horror movies I’ve seen.
It also helps that, so far, Korean cinema hasn’t been infected by US-style progressive ideology. US movies are increasingly little more than dreary sermons.
I live in South Africa. Even decades ago, we felt that the majority of series coming from the US had a little lesson for us all at the end. Seinfeld came along and saved the day.
“No lessons, no hugs”. I think they actually had that poste up on the writers’ room wall…
Much of the BBC and ITV output in the UK is relentlessly didactic, morality plays for the modern age. Programmes, as you suggest (and in the spirit of today’s redefinition of language) should now be referred to as ‘sermons.’
I’m not entirely convinced by this argument that the reason for squid Game’s global success is down to its contemporary resonance.
It seems part of a recent trend to over intellectualise and derive meaning from even the most frivolous forms of entertainment – James Bond and Marvel movies being the latest examples.
That isn’t to say Squid Game is mindless entertainment; far from it. It’s a cleverly constructed, engaging, emotionally satisfying piece of fiction that works on multiple levels.
But it’s also possible that the show’s worldwide popularity is much more easily explainable: it’s bl**dy good fun.
It’s very well-made and compelling viewing.
The characters’ back-stories are somewhat class-warrior stereotypes but the lead actors give them depth, humour and humanity.
“…morality is a fatal luxury in this game.”
When this is the subtext, nothing good ever happens. I would add that when morality is relative, good things never happen either. Tragically, this is where we are headed in the West until the revival takes place.
After watching episode 2 last night. I did indeed have a dream about the playground games of my childhood: what’s the time Mr Wolf, British Bulldog and the like. I certainly have an uncomfortable feeling in my gut watching this series, but whether that is ‘han’ or the product of the last 18+ months of lies, deceit, propaganda and coercion on the part of our government, I am unsure. Excellent essay though.
“Alice in Borderland” on NF is a Japanese series with a similar premise. I’m surprised it’s gone under the radar, given Squid Game’s success.