Squid Game, the Death Lottery and the Pandemic

So, when my students started asking, "Have you seen Squid Game yet?" I had the same reaction I did to their obsession with You. Thanks, but no thanks. I don't need to see some dude stalk and kill women. As far as I could tell, Squid Game was another version of that kind of thing - a needlessly violent poor choice of entertainment. But after weeks and weeks of chatter, I decided to give it a try when I saw the number of Squid Game costumes at Halloween and reading that it now surpasses Bridgerton (which is right in my wheelhouse) as the most successful television series on Netflix. So, I watched it. And now for the first time in like - well, seven years - I felt I needed to put some blogging out into the world. 

 ***There will be (blood) spoilers. If you don’t want them, don't read further*** 

The premise of Squid Game is sort of like The Hunger Games, but with a few key differences. In The Hunger Games, you got picked to play basically out of bad luck. It sucks to be you - you did nothing wrong, but there are coaches, engineers and audience "helpers" that are able to give you some advantages here and there. In Squid Game, there are some questionable, yet plausible, issues related to consent and social contracts as to you "choosing" to play in the games. In essence, every character in Squid Game is in some kind of financial crisis *of their own making* (supposedly), and the premise is that winning the game would change their lives financially. 

So, here's where I've been so tripped up by the narrative - what seems to have resonated with most US American viewers is the supposed critique of capitalism and financial systemic inequality, particularly given Korea's history. I just don't see the critique of capitalism as strongly as others - how is it a critique of capitalism when you are basically substituting the financial purchase of a lottery ticket with a signature of your life? Your life apparently still has capital value that they are willing to take and then translate literally into cash money when you die. They literally show the money falling into the pig after you die. That's what you were worth. Basically, Squid Game is a Death Lottery where the audience is gonna laugh at you like WipeOut when you die because you deserved it for being the dumbass that signed up. 

Like entering the lottery, the odds of winning in each game are rigged. At one point in the fifth game, a character we've been introduced to as a math teacher is standing calculating his risk chances of crossing a bridge of glass - pick the right pane, make it safely, pick the wrong one, crash through it and fall to your death. He does some figures in his head and comes up with some astronomical number and knows he has basically no chance of surviving (this person did the math). 

Those hosting the game describe it as the "last fair chance" people have of making their own way in the world without systemic advantages. But there are advantages - some contestants cheat, and they get ahead - sure they punish one, but they never caught the others. Some are betrayed by human emotion - trusting people at the wrong moment. And the fact that the narrative says these advantages don't exist because they've leveled inequality is just flat out wrong unless you only see inequality as financial - not racial, gendered, social, emotional, legal, etc. It's far more intersectional than that - I mean, anyone that watches Sang-woo betray Ali and doesn't get that missed the entire point (To be fair, I don't speak Korean - I do speak Japanese though, and, thus, the honorifics, though different, did translate for me, which made the Sang-woo/Ali betrayal all the more devastating). The fact that Gi-hun talks about maybe there being some advantages to having women on their teams, only to have every game NOT have an advantage for women just goes to show that women who signed up were in a shittier position to win. 

So, a lot of the "down with capitalism" critique for me really read like a shoji screen for let's make this as dramatically gory and bloody as possible without really challenging anything about the issues we say we're challenging. What did resonate more strongly for me rather than this larger capitalism argument was the visual representation of despair at being unable to control and alter one's life circumstances - that the illusion of choice is not only seductive by deadly. I mean, if this image doesn't capture that, I don't know what does:

I was struck by how many of the storylines featured either 1) addiction as the downfall of these people economically (the protagonist is a gambling addict, the antagonist clearly addicted to gambling in a different form, the lady nobody likes is apparently also addicted to nicotine -- I mean, if I had a choice to smuggle one in thing through my vagina after seeing this place the first time, I don't think five cigarettes would have been my first choice) or 2) social isolation as the main culprit (the girl escaping North Korea, the Pakistani man left disabled by poor labor laws, the big bad guy has several references to drugs and other crime syndicates). It's this aspect of the series that I think resonates quite strongly with pandemic life - whether you are in a "post" or a "still ongoing" place in your ideology. No matter what choice you have in front of you, neither one is good. No one in a position of power is actually going to help you or explain your choices in a manner that allows you to feel like you have actual agency over the outcome. People with more who could help are willing to hoard and keep what they have for themselves. 

So, from that lens, the end of the series where the bet is on whether or not there is any good left in humanity holds some appeal. Perhaps the most powerful moment of coming full-circle is from our opening scenes of horseracing, to when Gi-hun declares that these are people, not horses - maybe that's what it feels like at the moment to live in contemporary society. A lot of us feel like the horses - we're either working and/or being experimented on - and ultimately those with the wealth to solve a number of problems simply won't. Honestly, the subplot of organ harvesting had all of its own issues especially when you read it through the lens of addiction or social failing - the idea that these people don't have a *right* to their bodies any more - that they would be more appropriately used by someone else - was jarring given our legal discussions around vaccines, women's bodies, etc. And after watching the number of people literally eat each other like zombies in the game holding cell and compare that to if this random person stops in the cold to help someone, it's like the same thing? Not exactly. But some parts of it felt a little too real - and maybe that's where the appeal comes from.