Yet another Netflix viral sensation has landed - I'm talking of course about the Korean psychological-thriller series Squid Game. With funding and creative freedom from Netflix, Squid Game pushes the boundaries of the “Battle Royale” genre, with a steady-handed maturity at handling its core themes even if it doesn’t surprise its viewers with sheer novelty. Yes we have seen other outrageous and gratuitously violent “hunger games” onscreen before, and yes the metaphor of nihilistic cruelty that arises when “survival of the fittest” is taken to the extreme is at this point played-out. Yes we get it, if you deprive people of enough physical, social and emotional security, they regress to operating only with the heuristics of self-preservation at all costs, or so we are constantly reminded, whether or not it is actually true.
For the uninitiated, let me set the stage. A mysterious organisation selectively identifies individuals who are in desperate financial straits, and invites them to participate in a game - not a whole lot more information provided to them initially - with the chance of winning a handsome pot of cash at the end. For many, the temptation to escape their current fate is so great that they seize this opportunity. The participants - 456 of them to be exact - are then drugged and shipped to an uninhabited island with an extensive campus built at seemingly great cost for one purpose only: subjecting the players to a series of mortal challenges based on the rules of innocuous traditional children's games. If the participants win, they get to move on to the next round. If they lose, they are brutally shot down on the spot by one of the many militaristic game facilitators. 456 players enter but only one winner will remain standing at the end, with a grand prize of 45.6 billion won - 0.1 billion won for each player that entered the game. You can see which twisted paths this tale is going down already.
What makes Squid Game stand out within the genre, even compared to the fairly straightforward critiques of capitalism like in The Hunger Games, is its willingness to show how the real world is just as brutal as the game world, just not in obvious ways. Unlike in the other media listed earlier, the participants of Squid Game freely choose to participate in the games of their own accord. Early in the series, a seeming rule of democratic participation is enforced in the game. If a majority of players democratically vote to end the games, they are freed to return to their original lives. After the first game is played, having watched close to half of the participants being gunned down in front of them, the remaining players in a state of shock realise they may have signed up for something more intense than what they initially assumed, and a majority votes to leave. True to their word, the game organisers return all players to where they were picked up.
This is where the illusion of choice reveals itself. As the players thank their lucky stars that they are still alive, they are rapidly and rudely reminded of their dire situation in the real world. While it remains unspoken, isn't the simple binary logic presented by capitalism simply to compete or starve? Starvation in other words is death, just an excruciatingly slow one. Competition on the other hand implies participating in a neverending interconnected escalating set of distractions, interactions and obligations, with no clear rules to master and plenty of ways to experience setbacks, misfortunes and failures. Failures usually have punitive consequences, often severe, sometimes permanent. As one player puts it, the game world at the very least has simple rules that, if followed and mastered, points to a clear path of success. No doubt, the game world is brutal and bloody, but only because the violence of failure isn't sanitized with political correctness and quietly shuffled out of public view into liminal spaces like rundown slums, closed-off courtrooms or locked-down prisons like it is in the real world. But make no mistake, the real world is just as deadly; no one escapes alive, and most will die unhappy, terrified even, one bad day away from destitution. Both the game world and the real world are brutal then, but the game world is actually preferable, because it is at least fair. Not surprisingly, most players return shortly to the game world.
Let’s talk about fairness. There is a very problematic idea clearly encased in the central logic that governs Squid Game. It’s this idea of tough love formulated in financial logic: nobody gets money for nothing, and if you need a lot of money, then you should be willing to do a lot of things. And if you are willing and able to perform those actions, however terrible their consequences, then you deserve fair payment and what you earn is rightfully yours, regardless of the amount. There is no room for moral reasoning, no need for ethical analysis, no space for philosophical reflection. There is no brotherly compassion, no sympathetic charity, no sense of familial sharing… instead, all human relations are reduced to transactional interactions and nothing more. Who decides which actions are worth how much? How do we deal with the moral dubiousness of fair payment for unethical actions? Who dictates that “no way to get something for doing nothing” - a most uncharitable framing if you ask me - is some fixed law of the universe, as unchangeable as the laws of motion or thermodynamics?
What if I told you that this logic isn’t just fictional but plays out over and over again in real-world economic policy? This dangerous thoughtform influences everything from national unemployment benefits, macroeconomic austerity measures and even the small-text caveats that govern international aid. And what if I told you this ideology is influenced by beliefs older than capitalism itself (see Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism)?
The second thing that stood out to me was the scene which depicts how players are recruited to the game. At their lowest point, typically when they are alone, potential players are approached by a well-dressed man with a briefcase. He asks the prospective player, rather abruptly, whether they would be interested in a game - yet another children's game where each player tries to flip a card on the ground by hitting it hard enough with another card. The wager is, each time the player wins, they get 10000 won. Each time they lose, they should pay the well-dressed man the same amount, OR the debt can be forgiven if the player submits to being slapped (hard!) by the well-dressed man. The game is unsurprisingly harder than it looks, and prospective players keep getting slapped until their cheeks are flushed red on the verge of bruising.
In a symbolic foreshadowing of the twisted revelations at the end, the protagonist we follow in the series finally wins his round after a spate of humiliating slaps. He jumps for joy and with an instinctive sense of fairness, he raises his hand to slap the well-dressed man, only to be stopped cold by a firm resisting hand, and a 10,000 won note in the other. Oh right, the prize for winning was 10,000 won - a veritable fortune for someone near financial ruin - remember? The penalty for losing on the other hand was violence, humiliation, pain.
But that’s just one-sided; these rules do not apply to the rich. They get to make the rules, they don’t have to live under them. If ever so rarely they come under the crosshairs of justice, then they bargain away the penalty with their wealth as much as possible, such that the punishment for white collar crime seldom results in any form of life-changing restraint. Somehow it never feels fair does it? This is how we put a price on human dignity. What a brilliant allegory for how capitalism engenders exploitation at its core.
Speaking of exploitation, the third thing that struck me was the motivation of the game facilitators. On the one hand, they are all armed with weapons and charged with keeping players in line, keeping the games operational and when required, ending the life of failed players with headshots from point-blank range without even a second thought. On the other, the facilitators themselves have a strict hierarchy where juniors are not allowed to speak unless spoken to by seniors, and seem to be there only because of extenuating circumstances rather than by their own free will.
The facilitators remain masked throughout, and are led by a Front Man who is revealed to be a former winner of a Squid Game himself! So I have to wonder, what possible twists of logic and fate could possibly explain how a former player, exposed to the danger and carnage, could accept a role as the master of ceremonies for more of the same? This is not answered in this first season of Squid Game at least, but I suspect the answer will not be very pleasant anyway.
Moreover, I'm always fascinated by the monopoly of force as a kind of prisoner's dilemma scenario. On the one hand, powerful rulers and their soldiers are almost always in the minority, and thus require weaponry to defend themselves from the masses. On the other hand, the more soldiers the rulers arm and the more discontented the population, the more retaliatory force the rulers could expect if ever a coup/rebellion becomes likely. In most cases, soldiers are in as precarious a socio-economic position as the masses, yet do not realise that they have more in common with the rebels than the rulers. As the authors discuss in The Dictator's Handbook, the keys to power lie in rulers opportunistically seducing or gaslighting their (financial) backers, their soldiers and/or their people. (Here's a great summary video of this topic. And here's Part 2.)
By sheer numbers alone, the people have the ultimate power to demand the changes they want. But thanks to the phenomenon of false consciousness - which to this day I think is one of Marx's keenest insights - the rulers manage to divide, conquer and consolidate their power. And in between all this, the addition of weapons as a token of brutality and as an accelerator of death-delivery, keeps the asymmetric uneasy power imbalance steady until the next geopolitical schism.
Conceptual spoiler alert: this following reveal will probably not affect the enjoyment of your viewing experience. So what was the foreshadowing alluding to? This is the fourth thing that stood out to me. The sheer level of logistics and sophistication put into the design of the Squid Game campus begs the question: who's paying for all this? As it turns out, a group of sadistic rich men looking for ever-edgier forms of entertainment are the ones funding the games. The prize money then is the totality of their wagers on individual players winning, slowly collecting in the glowing pot hanging above the players' beds when their chosen player dies. It is strongly implied that the prize amount, while astronomical for just about anyone in the real world, is insignificant for these men. It is also implied that the Squid Game we follow in the series is just one of many annual competitions, with other concurrent events held in other parts of the world as well. These men are so sated by the many pleasures their riches give them access to that they have reached the point of boredom, and are willing to spend real money to watch real people suffer and die in desperation. If you think along the lines of shows like Survivor, Fear Factor, Ninja Warrior etc, it is easy to see how an existential form of reality TV could enter the collective consciousness without even trying too hard. All that’s missing for real-life hunger games is a growing ratio of economic inequality.
This is not human drama on display, rich with meaning, perspective or poignancy. This is the forced reduction of human beings into automatons with the binary logic of capitalism as their operating system: compete or starve. All nuance is snuffed out, empathy signed away as the price of entry, and the full potential of a human discarded in exchange for a mere number as an identity - implying that every single player is fungible, expendable and ultimately individually insignificant in the eyes of the watchers. The simplicity of each game's rules betrays a black-and-white thinking about success and failure, the existential brutality of the games is just entertainment to the rich cabal, and the payout is the price they deem is fair compensation for the inconvenience caused by their indulgences. This despicable calculus harks back to the Roman predilection for watching gladiators engaged in bloodsport, or plotlines seen in media like The Hounds of Zaroff or The Running Man. Unsurprisingly, these psychopaths remain masked and leave mostly unharmed at the end.
This surfaces for me a sick irony that I've noticed only recently. I do not sympathize with the sadistic rich cabal, nor do I condone their actions. But it is becoming increasingly clear to me that even millionaires and billionaires are seemingly "not free" in the game of capitalism, even though all traditional wisdom suggests that becoming rich is the path of financial freedom, individual sovereignty and an immunity to collective duties and responsibilities. It appears as if the only thing the ultra-rich are free to do is to consume more. So, as we see in the show, with all their wealth and influence and access to resources, the ultra-rich don’t seem to have any interest or even an incentive to use that power to kickstart social programs to systematically feed the hungry, educate the young, heal the sick, you know, solve the grand problems of the era… no, instead, their only conclusion is to invent another pointless rat maze as a condensate of the world logic we already live under.
Any ascription of guilt might suggest they have more agency than they actually do. Say the millionaires/billionaires all paid their taxes, would that automatically and immediately change the status quo of inequality, for example?
Would the influx of money into government budgets be used for broad expansive social programs, or simply piling the military with more missile power to secure imperial supply chains and protect the assets of the rich, thus making them richer?
Or should the ultra-rich simply donate everything to <<insert NGO here>>? Which one, and why? Oh the sad naive irony of expecting misanthropes who opportunistically exploit other humans, to engage in philanthropic pursuits for the betterment of other humans…
If the rich hadn't bumped their company's bottomline, or god forbid hurt the bottomline, wouldn't they have been replaced by someone else willing to do the same things, or worse? So then we'd just be vilifying different names, not actually structurally changing anything in the underlying system that causes these cancerous symptoms to arise.
Therefore, in a cut-throat system with few/no rules, it seems to me that there will inevitably be a class of psychopaths playing every advantage to stay on top. The moment any one of them slip up, even if it is a rare moment of empathy, they risk being replaced by the next psychopath without even that shred of humanity. (It’s a Sith Sith world out there.) In this sense, the hateful lonely zero-sum real-world Squid Game, is inevitably a reflection of the internal world these powerful psychopaths inhabit, and it is the only world that makes sense to them, admitting no other possibility.
The fifth and final thing I'd like to point out about Squid Game isn't even in the show itself. I'm speaking about the inception and reception for this show. If the Twitter grapevine is to be believed, the original script for Squid Game was rejected for being too depressing, and was refined over the better part of a decade before getting the production funding and support to assume its current form as a Netflix headliner. In fact, the creator, Hwang Dong-hyuk, once had to sell off his laptop to cover some bills. Squid Game is already searingly dark, so one has to wonder how incredibly black the original script might have been.
As for its reception, obviously Squid Game is having a moment. But a sick pattern has become entrenched in our world, which is that anti-capitalist works are becoming commoditised to generate capitalist profits. Like how Che Guevara's visage has suffered the final disgrace of being printed on mass-produced T-shirts, or how the Guy Fawkes mask popularised by V for Vendetta's titular anarchist rebel was trademarked by a commercial group thus earning royalties from every sale of the mask by bourgeoise youth cosplaying as radicals.
I mean, come on, look at this trainwreck of a headline.
This to me, is perhaps the most loathsome quality of capitalism. Like an ur-ideology, it is able to morph and stick to any idea and commoditize it, including its own blistering critique. It's one thing to sit through a roast, taking the jab with good humour. It's quite another to make your own roast an annual holiday and sell merch inspired by the sickest burns, laughing soullessly all the way to the bank. This is in my view the truest expression of the devil archetype: a despicable character that not only accepts but revels in their base notoriety. Ugh.
So yeah, that’s my review I think. I found Squid Game to be a dark reflection of life under late-stage capitalism. While not the most original entry in its genre, I sincerely hope that its viral popularity combined with its explicit critique of capitalism does fan the flames of activism for the radical changes we urgently need at this moment in our history.