Spoilers ahead
There are more subtle visual analogies for capitalism than suspending a gleaming, golden ball of cash over a crowd of game participants, casting every face aglow as everyone evaluates whether they’re ready to watch their competitors get gunned down in order to win.
But it is this scene, which appears a few minutes into episode two of Netflix’s Squid Game, that will almost surely become indelible as a cultural reference point for our time, as the South Korean drama’s ascent toward global phenomenon continues. Just last week, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos predicted that the show would be the platform’s biggest blockbuster ever, dwarfing the popularity of past international productions such as Money Heist and Lupin. A gleaming sphere of money, it turns out, does not require translation.
The premise of Squid Game is recognisable to western audiences from dystopian thrillers such as Snowpiercer and The Hunger Games, in which class struggle is literalized through a series of trials planned by the elites for the oppressed.
Hundreds of people on the verge of financial disaster for various causes have been recruited to play a series of children’s games in order to compete for $45.6 billion won (approximately $40 million dollars, to save you a google search). Losing (or disobeying) entails being eliminated, i.e. being shot dead on the spot. It’s a television drama about the opportunity in the same way that Breaking Bad was about legacy and Mad Men was about ambition: it’s a colourful, violent show that wrings a putative societal value inside out to expose the hidden clauses—and latent horrors—lining its premise.
Unlike more typical survival-game scenarios, the contests in Squid Game are not always tests of physical endurance or battles against nature. They’re real children’s games that have players hunched on the ground, sucking candies or trading marbles furiously under gunpoint.
They are dressed in infantilizing P.E. outfits, given numbers instead of names, and placed under continual observation by an armed guard against garish backdrops that resemble preschool classrooms. There’s no place for war planning or even showy archery here: The duties at hand, as well as the fear of death, are meant to be random. What could be more equitable? That is possibly the most terrifying aspect of Squid Game as a capitalist parable.
The humiliation of getting by is the goal, as is the expectation that players be grateful just to have a shot in the first place. “We are not attempting to harm you or collect your debts,” one of the masked officials entrusted with administering the rules of the game assures. “I’d like to remind you that we’re only here to offer you a chance.”
The fact that these administrators (divided 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—compels the show’s ideas about complicity to wrinkle. Who, after all, has a choice in this situation?
Squid Game, to its credit, commits to more than just the game gimmick. By having its major characters deal with intricate concerns of commitment, the series takes the cycle of opportunity and debt seriously. Inside the games, players are continually negotiating what they believe they owe to one another as possible allies and adversaries, consorts and co-conspirators, and especially strangers who offer random acts of generosity for no reason at all.
Meanwhile, their greatest motives for competing derive from “outside” duties. Seong Gi-hun (played with wide-eyed vehemence by Lee Jung-jae) is a compulsive gambler whose internal compass stays intact primarily due to shame for ignoring his aged mother and 10-year-old daughter. Kang Sae-byeok (played by top Korean model HoYeon Jung) is your standard stone badass-ette, with older-sister responsibilities that generate opposing undercurrents of wrath and resourcefulness. Cho Sang-woo (Park Hae-soo), the hometown hero turned white-collar criminal, is willing to sell his mother’s shoes to save his own skin; Hwang Jun-ho (Wi Ha-joon), the cop, begins researching the entire process in order to discover his missing brother. Only Oh Il Nam (Oh Yeong-su), an aged man who claims to have nothing left to lose, wants to compete in the games for a chance at something more than financial salvation; he appears to be the only player who can afford to be concerned with something as insignificant as Olympian-esque glory.
Squid Game’s popularity, in my opinion, demonstrates both the effectiveness of Netflix’s home-screen suggestions and the very pleasing rewards of the complete focus necessary for a subtitled viewing experience. A plotline built on games imitating viral challenges that subsequently convert smoothly into memeification, particularly on TikTok, where most of the show’s buzz has grown among a youthful audience already habituated to making nihilistic jokes about school shootings and social collapse, is also critical.
In terms of social statements, you couldn’t design a stronger hit to the millennial and Gen Z nerves than a show in which individuals are forced to complete pointless things in order to increase their luck of the draw, and where the value of their life is measured in monetary packages (and organs).
When we finally meet the mystery “VIPs,” it becomes evident that the underlying goal of these activities was always to delight a few mega-rich guys, whose ongoing commentary on the “performances” is so inane that it’s almost comical. We are already immune to the controlling power of rich people’s whims at a time when billionaires are dick-measuring in space and internet platforms aim to “leverage playdates” as a business strategy.
Perhaps this is why the ending of Squid Game feels a little flat. The ending tries to make vague declarations toward some kind of sustained cause to believe—in the intrinsic goodness of humans, in the potential ability of one man to demolish an entire system. It pales in comparison to earlier passages spent studying the twisted effects of hope, particularly one in which Gi-hun is watching a horse race on television.
From the perspective of the television (or, you could say, the horse race itself), we see a frantic cycle of emotions play out over his face: despair, panic, incredulity, and then the elation. The 4 million won he received appears to be cause for celebration until we learn that it will hardly make a dent in Gi-existing hun’s bills.
It’s no surprise, however, that he and the other characters would decide—twice—to play the deadly games for a real chance. “Out there, the torture is worse,” says the old guy, Oh Il Nam, with a careless sigh of resignation.
Watch the trailer below: