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by Samantha Peetz more Autocinephiles
Squid Game is a South Korean 9-episode long Netflix original series created by Hwang Dong-hyuk. Dong-hyuk wrote the script in 2009 and it was not until 2019 that Netflix showed interest in Dong-hyuk’s script. The series would finally be released on September 17, 2021, about a full year into the covid-19 pandemic impacting the general U.S population. The show exists within the killing-game subgenre (think works such as Dangan Ronpa, Battle Royale, Cube, etc.) depicting financially destitute South Koreans electing to play children’s games for the chance to win an immense amount of wealth, hoping to clear their various debts and change their life for the better. The punishment for being eliminated in a game or breaking certain rules is death, though the game overseers likewise don’t condemn players murdering each other in and outside of said games. The games are held on a private island, rigidly orchestrated by mysterious hyper-wealthy elites. As the pool of players shrinks, the pool of cash grows for the one single winner of the series of games. It is as this player pool shrinks that various V.I.P masked hyper-wealthy come to the island to wine, dine, watch and bet on the various players live, considering this the most entertaining sport, likening the experience to betting on race-horses. The show is acutely aware of the wealth disparity between classes in South Korea and attempts to weave a critique of capitalism, class, labor, and the hyper-wealthy. Yet ultimately, Squid Game is a product first and foremost.
It feels silly to give a quick background on Squid Game as it is by and large a household name now. I remember my mother, who has a media appetite mainly consisting of police procedurals, Hamilton, and General HospitalNo offense to my mother, she is highly intelligent and to her credit she does indulge me in my pretentious movie picks far more often than I likely deserve. Love you mom ❤ asking me if I had seen Squid Game yet, and my embarrassment when telling her that I had not. It feels pastiche, quaint, and a little bit embarrassing to be writing a piece about the show in 2022, and even more so to be a first-time viewer of Squid Game in 2022. The dust has long since settled, the show itself has become a bit of a meme, and we’ve moved on to bigger and better things. My only defense as to why I’m getting to the show so late is that in light of facing evictionFull disclosure, I currently have stable housing and have so far been able to prevent the eviction from appearing on my legal or credit history. At the time of writing this however, my situation was genuinely and sincerely dire and the eviction was absolutely looming over me. from my apartment, it felt incredibly cathartic to come to my friend’s apartment after a long night of packing all my belongings into boxes, lay down on their couch, open my laptop, and watch something that felt about as hopeless and fatalistic as I did.
And likewise, it feels really silly and possibly disingenuous to call the show a “product”. Just about every piece of film or television is inevitably a product. Film production is massively expensive and requires funding oftentimes from third parties, and thus the end goal of film and television is often focused on making the investment back and then some. When I accuse Squid Game of being a product, I mean not to imply that it functions differently from any other commercial television series, but that the show has become commodified and sold as a product first, critique of capitalism second. I alluded to this before but Squid Game as a product is particularly clear in the way it was received culturally. The show became a bit of a meme, similar to the cringe-core ironic aesthetics of say, Among Us where in which recognizing or naming said media product, is itself a joke.
Even more insidious has been the literal commodification of Squid Game as a recognizable piece of television. For the past year, it has become routine to see cheap boot-leg knock-off Squid Game merchandise being sold in shopping malls. This isn’t particularly new. Shopping malls have long since had kiosks full of cheap knock-off merchandise of popular media texts. Nary is there a mall untouched by unlicensed Dragon Ball Z posters, Mickey Mouse t-shirts, and “Straight Outta [local-metropolitan-area]” shirts. With a show as morbidly violent and anti-capitalist as Squid Game attempts to be, however, there is a cognitive dissonance to buying, selling, or even just seeing products like these.
The V.I.P characters are incredibly one-dimensional and are ultimately an unfulfilling plot thread that amounts to very little other than a less-than-tasteful gay panic scene. However, it feels pretty obvious that they serve as a critique and reflection upon the show’s audience. It raises (admittedly tired) questions often asked by violent media (examples being Hotline Miami, Funny Games, Inglourious Basterds) wherein we are asked why do we enjoy watching these scenes of death and violence? Are we not likewise somehow complicit or participating as audience members in the violence committed by fictional antagonists we are attempting to disavow? The characters are all given the option to quit the games and return to their miserable lives in South Korea, unharmed, but ultimately they feel reaffirmed in their desperation and again join back into the private games. By the time the V.I.P’s are introduced, the audience has to be aware of class struggle, wealth disparity, and how cruel and uncaring the world is towards poor people. The show simply would not work if they were not in agreement with these arguments that were already made, proved, and proved again by the former episodes. And so when the V.I.P’s are selecting characters from the remaining main cast that they wish to bet on, and theorize what will happen in the games as they watch, the show is essentially asking us why we are complicit in our viewership of a violent competition such as this? We are already aware of how cruel these games are, we have witnessed likable characters humiliate themselves and be betrayed by their supposed allies, the surviving main cast. We continue watching, however, and internally are theorizing about which main character will win the games, because deep down we all are complicit in and roused by the supposed meritocratic, rat-race competition that is capitalism. We love a good horse race and can disavow and try to ignore our questions of ethics, morals, and capital long enough to sit around and wait to see which horse wins it.
This is its own kind of trope in horror-adjacent media as I said prior, and it’s not even done very effectively or subtly here. The VIPs, like all of the workers actually running the games, are masked. By having their faces obfuscated, they can stand in for anybody, including us. The game’s overseer is revealed to be a sibling of a main character. The coordinators, viewers, and cogs in the machine of capitalism are our siblings, our landlords, and ourselves. They are both anonymous and familiar. The V.I.P’s should be particularly familiar to American audiences, as they are the only American characters in the show, electing to speak exclusively in English when the rest of the show’s dialogue is in Korean.
Yet in response, American viewers have either been totally unaffected, uninterested by, or utterly immune to something that I’d argue beats you over the head with its watered-down version of anti-capitalism. Beyond commodifying it as a hot new meme, capitalizing on its immediately recognizable aesthetics, in the case of youtube content creator, Mr. Beast, the American audience has gone as far as using Squid Game as a literal blueprint.
Mr. Beast’s youtube career is marked by doing various challenges where he gets strangers or friends to participate in simple games, in the hopes to win a great sum of money or a specific object of value, such as the enthralling and disillusioning video entitled, “Last To Take Hand Off Lamborghini, Keeps It”.
On November 24th 2021 Mr. Beast would upload a 25 minute long video entitled, “$456000 Squid Game In Real Life!”. The video shows Mr. Beast doing a real-world enactment of Squid Game’s premise, where he rented out a space and created his own non-lethal versions of the sets and games depicted on the show. He found 456 strangers willing to participate in the games and did end up giving away the huge cash prize. The video has nearly 240 million views as of the time of writing and is one of his most successful videos. Despite being notable for how successful the video was for Mr. Beast, in terms of form and narrative, it isn’t very unique or different from any of his other videos. Mr. Beast’s schtick is wealth and simplistic games being played so that he may give away a portion of his massive wealth to some lucky subscriber. Mr. Beast’s charity exists only so long as a camera is rolling, and the viewers are watching. Mr. Beast is the influencer-economy’s answer to the American cinema of excess.
This is all incredibly disillusioning. It is nauseating to see a text as frankly simple and two-dimensional as Squid Game turned into a massively popular commodity overnight. I’ve only grown more jaded after seeing in real-time as a wealthy American YouTuber recognizes this hot new fad as marketable, and takes the show’s premise which is meant to be an over-the-top allegory for the violence of capitalism, and make it real, and to be wildly successful as a result of it. It genuinely seems as though we are in such a late stage of capitalism, that the only way we can engage with a text, even one that is overtly anti-capitalistic, is to commodify it and turn it into a product we can sell to each other. And to the credit of those who played an active role in commodifying, the show itself is guilty of this.
The first season was initially planned to be only eight episodes long, but its original final episode was supposedly too long, carried too many plot threads, and was then split up into episodes 8 and 9. There have been rumors about Netlifx having a role in ordering a second season, midway through production. I don’t know to what degree, if any, Netflix had on the writing of the show, in particular the 8th and 9th episodes. I won’t ever know that. I do know, however, that the 9th episode has been a point of contention for myself and anyone I’ve spoken to about the show.
The final episode depicts the show’s protagonist, Gi-Hun winning the games, becoming the sole survivor out of the other 456 participants. Returning safely to his home, he finds that his mother has died alone in her home. A year passes, and he is still living on the good favors of others, refusing to spend any of the 45.6 billion won. This all feels fine and consistent with the tone and plot thus far. The world outside of the games, our world, had always been presented as needlessly cruel, depressing, unfair, and cold. Gi-Hun knows firsthand that every single won in his bank account represents the blood, sinew, and souls of the other 455 participants. There is inherent violence to any possible transaction or purchase he could make with that money. He would have to disavow his pacifist values in order to do anything with that money.
Where things take an immediate turn, is when Gi-Hun steps into a barbershop, sees an image depicting a trendy youth and decides to get his unruly outgrown hair cut and dyed a bright tomato red. In every subsequent scene in the episode, it looks as though he is wearing a terrible wig, and it utterly removes all the possible emotional impact of the scenes he is in. It looks so clearly fake, so artificial, synthetic.
This bizarre artistic decision is made in tandem with the horrible plot twist that one of the few likable characters isn’t actually deceased, but was actually the main overseer of the games! He reveals that he’s been alive this whole time and that he’s ultra-wealthy and truly believes in the meritocracy ideology of the games! Not only does this not raise any stakes or add anything to the plot, it retroactively subtracts all emotional weight from this character’s previous death scene. One of the few sincere and moving scenes is ruined, and for the sake of an ingenuine plot reveal, all in the name of setting up a season 2 of a story that should be concluded.
Squid Game itself becomes a product and a commodity before it even crosses the finish line. Before the text can close on the first season, it chooses to become promotional material for a season 2 that was never fully intended or conceived beyond Dong-Hyuk’s foresight that it was a possibility ten years ago. For as disillusioned I am by how the masses have received and by extension, commodified Squid Game, a loosely anti-capitalist text, I can only fault them so much for succumbing to the same ills as the text itself. And in its own perverse way, either intentionally or not doesn’t that prove the show’s own point? That capitalism causes us to take all the beautiful, sincere, and human elements of our world, and turn them into products to be bought, viewed, bet on, and sold. I still think that Squid Game’s depth of critique and nuance is utterly lacking. I think a lot of the pieces of the show frankly don’t work, and that the overall quality is pretty subpar. But yet I can’t deny the fact that something so reductive, possibly even regressive, did scratch an itch I was feeling, and that seemingly everyone was feeling in 2021, and that maybe it is because of those fallibilities and reductive aspects, and the easy-to commodify aesthetics that it was able to scratch that itch. I know I’m not any less susceptible to a shiny product as anyone else, try as I might to think otherwise. And I know my art and my writing isn’t any less susceptible to becoming those things either. I suppose all I feel is a disquieting sense of fear and anxiety that we’re already at a point in which the only way we can engage with art is to view it as a product and commodity to reproduce and consume.
transcribe 