Dystopia Never Looked So Familiar
Review: Squid Game. Written and directed by Hwang Dong-hyuk. Distributed by Netflix.Spoiler warning
The Netflix-produced Squid Game is the latest Korean cultural product to capture the world's attention, and is now the most watched series of all time on the platform. Its popularity is no surprise; the intense emotions of the show paired with the inescapable urge to put yourself in the character's shoes leads to fervent binge watching. Viewers then discuss the show with anyone who will listen while making anyone who hasn't seen it feel as if they need to watch it immediately.
The series is a compelling entry in the “death games” genre, joining the likes of Battle Royale, As The Gods Will, as well as older films such as Running Man and Rollerball. The plot is simple enough: cash-strapped, desperate, and indebted people compete to win ￦45 billion (nearly $40 million) by playing children's games on a secluded island. The catch being that when a player is eliminated from a game, they are killed on the spot. The element that most sets it apart from its genre counterparts is the way Squid Game approaches storytelling.
Most death game stories try to build an elaborate world (as seen in The Hunger Games Trilogy), the games operating as just one aspect of a fictionalized society, or they spend their time focusing on the florid traps of the game. Squid Game has fairly minimal world building; the games that the contestants play are easily understood, there isn't much trickery going on or over-fascination with the mechanics of torture such as you find in the Saw franchise. Squid Game instead is a deeply character-led film, showing a wide range of attitudes and approaches to life in complex and nuanced portrayals of people in desperate situations. Any player that lives long enough to be developed is shown to have conflicting desires and motivations, striving for something that is beyond their reach.
This attention to the multifaceted character development, along with with its clear critique of capitalism, is what makes it so moving and what connects it to other recent Korean cinema that has gained global acclaim. As @BrainOrigami (Schizotopia.net) noted on Twitter “It’s one of those funny historical ironies that South Korea puts out more high profile anticapitalist propaganda than North Korea ever could'', citing Squid Game along with Snowpiercer, Okja and the oscar winning Parasite (I would add Train to Busan to this list as well). Despite the authoritarian hell of North Korea directly above them, South Korean filmmakers are refusing to accept the present and future of capitalism, continuing to speak to a global problem of inequality and worsening conditions of daily life for the vast majority while a few live in absolute luxury.
I am reminded of Bong Joon-Ho’s shock at Parasite gaining so much popularity, stating that he was making a deeply Korean film and did not expect so much of the world to relate to the story. The world did relate to the story though, just as it is with Squid Game. The key to this is both the universality of capital's domination of the planet as well as the approach to story. Even with all the clear portrayals of class inequality, these films never feel like out and out propaganda. They feel like a human reaction to an inhuman world.
This inhuman world is represented in Squid Game through the deindividualization of the players being reduced to mere numbers, the ant colony-like actions of the guards, the constructed worlds where the games take place, and of course the masks worn by the guards, Front Man, and the wealthy elites known as VIPs who gamble on the outcome of the players. Many commentators including The Wall Street Journal and Ben Shapiro have referred to the program as dystopian, which I find perplexing. The series is rich with symbolism but even at the height of its symbolism it remains attached to this very real inhuman world we already live in.
Despite its moments of pop surrealism — the giant size playground that makes the adult players look the size of children, the colorful M.C. Escher staircases they must descend to enter each new game, and the painted walls of the arena offering a flat representation of the outside that the majority of players will never see again — the show never reaches the fantastical. We wouldn't consider the more imaginative gangster or revenge films to take place in a dystopia because we recognize that while they might be stylized and grandiose, they take place in the hell of our world. If Squid Game is dystopian, it is only against the future of the past, some future that was once imagined but never came to be.
By that measure, the world that we live in is already dystopian -- or as the second episode of the show tells us directly, the world we live in (with its class disparity, brutal displays of power, and never ending capitalist competition) is hell. Faced with the prospect of living in capitalist hell or the hell of the Squid Game, the majority of players choose to return to the games. They know the consequence of death that likely awaits them but at least they have a slim chance at winning, something that has long been eliminated from their life under capitalism.
If participation in the games sounds absurd to you, imagine yourself in the very first game that acts as their invitation to the larger competition. If you win you get $85 and if you lose you owe $85. If you cannot pay the money you will get slapped in the face. Now consider that in the United States the federal minimum wage is $7.25/hr; an 8 hour day leaves you with $58 before any deductions. How many minimum wage workers do you think would be willing to accept these terms? At the so-called "living wage" of $15/hr, a full work day brings you to $120 before any deductions. This isn't much more than the slap, and it is not as if the work we are performing doesn't do mass amounts of damage to our bodies and minds. Wage labor for many people is already a slap in the face.
Along this same misunderstanding of what constitutes a dystopia enters a certain left critique of Squid Game under the charges of recuperation, or the even worse accusation of being an example of capitalist realism. As detailed by Mike Watson in his latest book The Memeing of Mark Fisher, there is a trend amongst the online left to misapply Mark Fisher’s concept of capitalist realism in a way that dulls the claws of Fisher’s critique, making it impossible to tear an opening in the ideological veil so that we may see beyond our present moment and develop the mechanisms and desire to move through capitalism into the communist horizon.
Calling Squid Game capitalist realism because it shows us horrors of capitalism misses a crucial element of Fisher’s thought, the future. Squid Game isn't capitalist realism because it isn't trying to imagine another world and failing; it isn't a story of the future but of the present. It isn't trying to make us feel glad we don't live in its world or stop it from coming about (such as The Handmaid's Tale). It is trying to make you realize that you already live in that world.
As for the other strong critique coming from the left, that of recuperation or fake anti-capitalism, yes there is plenty of recuperation to be noted but not from the show itself. Recuperation is the process by which radical or subversive ideas are absorbed back into the system in which they are meant to critique, leaving the criticism neutral at best or often serving the very thing it claims to be against. Recuperation does not mean simply that something is popular or hosted on a large platform. We should be happy to have critiques of capitalism gaining so much attention in popular media. It matters not because the ideas are wholly original but because they are being felt and understood by such a large group of people around the world. As Slavoj Zizek has noted, “Even if everyone knows an unpleasant fact, saying it in public changes everything.” This is the paradox of public space — it matters not only what is known, but what is acknowledged to be known. People know the system’s reliance on debt is a major problem, unless that problem is named and acknowledged it cannot be addressed.
The problem of recuperation around Squid Game doesn't arise through the enunciation, but what has happened after that enunciation. This has taken many forms from the multiple articles along the lines of “financial lessons from Squid Game'' published by places like New York Life Magazine or LinkedIn. Lists like these take the show's critique and invert it into life lessons that demonize the players and justify the position they have found themselves in. The perhaps even more pernicious form of this comes from companies incorporating aesthetic elements of the show into advertisements or promotional material. The worst example of this I have seen is from the car company Hyundai which reworked the Honeycomb/Dalgona game they play into an ad. Hyundai tweeted “Will you join the game? Which one would you choose? 😜🦑” along with a picture replacing the shapes of triangle, circle, star and umbrella with outlines of cars. The darkness here is not only a tense game where many players died being turned into an opportunity to sell cars; it is impossible to see this and not think of the main character who we eventually learn used to work for a car manufacturing plant and participated in a strike (real life events the show draws upon). This strike led him to not only miss the birth of his daughter and strained his marriage which ended in divorce, but also had him witness the death of several of his friends and coworkers by the hands of the police that broke up the strike. All of this culminates in the PTSD he is still living with to this day and starts his employment trouble and debt that led him to play the deadly games.
The truest and most pestilent form yet of recuperation is in direct reproduction of a sanitized version of the game through various content producers. “Squid Game in real life” videos have been popping up all over YouTube and TikTok, playing the games shown during the show sans death but also often omitting any of the overall story and message of the show. Content repackaging like this changes the nature of the games being played. At first glance it's easy to say this takes the critique out of the games and returns them to their childhood origins of being for fun however it does not return them to fun but rather to entertainment. Without the critical edge that Squid Game truly does have, its aesthetics and memetic potential are allowed not only to be brought back into the system it aims to denounce but to mimic and strengthen that system.
Though the anticapitalist contextualization has been removed when turned into another contest fueled by sponsors and ad revenue, it is still people desperately competing for a cash prize. The large YouTuber Mr. Beast, who already produces contest videos with astronomical budgets and prizes, has vowed to reproduce the contest with 456 contestants. He even took to selling merch that acts as a sort of lottery ticket to participate in his recreation. So we are left with the real life Squid Game still having economically desperate people compete against each other for money — this is a real life that we can't sanitize out of Squid Game. Recent events in South Korea have also highlighted this in a way that recognizes the radical potentialities of the show.
On October 20th, 2021 half a million people across 13 cities in South Korea walked off their jobs to participate in a one day general strike, with some protestors photographed wearing costumes from the show. Adopting these costumes and connecting the real life strikes with Squid Game isn't just adopting a pop culture reference; the protestors see their life reflected in Squid Game and are making that fact known. It is bringing Squid Game into the real world in a way that acknowledges the real world already in Squid Game. As mentioned before, one of the main character’s participation in a strike serves as a key part of their backstory. These strikes in South Korea are protesting rising rents by demanding a massive increase in public housing. They're fighting against the increase of irregular labor, or against the gig economy that takes advantage of lax regulations and provides very little in the way of benefits or worker’s rights. The fact that Squid Game is so popular across the globe, that these protestors can see and build upon its critique of capitalism, could lead to a much larger movement allowing the workers of the world to see the connections they have with one another.
South Korean strikers dressed as Squid Game characters.
Cities across the world are becoming increasingly expensive to live in while work norms and expectations shift to the post-Fordist precarity of the gig economy. We should easily be able to find solidarity with one another- that is, if we can break from the mindset that keeps us in constant competition and pits us against each other as if we are not on the same team. The company owners, or shareholders, or Front Men as it were, are not our coaches. The game masters are our enemy, at least the face of our abstract enemy- the system of capitalism itself. The name for this realization brought to fruition is class consciousness, first realizing we are on the same team and then acting with that knowledge. Our goal is not to win the game, but to play a different game.
This brings us to the somewhat contested end of the show, where we learn about the origins of the game and are left with the possibility for a sequel. The game's winner, or perhaps we should say survivor, lives a year completely devastated by his experience and role in the life or death scenario. He has spent none of his money, does not follow his previous dreams or desires, does not attempt to accomplish his previous goals even with his newfound means. This changes when he gets another card which functions as an invitation to meet the host behind Squid Game. When he meets the host, he is told the story of why the games exist.
The very rich and the very poor are connected, so says the host, by having a life that is boring and unfulfilling. The very poor do not have the means to pursue that which they wish, while the very rich are unable to find satisfaction once nothing is out of their ability to purchase. He goes on to explain that he started the competition to alleviate this boredom, so that he and other wealthy elites of the world could have a more fulfilling form of entertainment and opportunity for gambling. The competitors in the Squid Game are nothing more than racing horses, the host tells the survivor. The underlying deep belief that the wealthy share is that they deserve their wealth, that they earned it. They see themselves as winners of the game. This is what stops them, ideologically, from taking on the challenge of rampant poverty. To take on this challenge, were they to have the desire, would of course force them to confront the material fact of exploitation that is behind the creation and concentration of wealth from which they benefit.
In the final scene our survivor is about to pursue a new life, with renewed ambition to achieve his past desires and now with the money to do so. Before he can do this though, he looks across the subway station and sees a man being slapped by a man in a suit. He runs to find the stranger, who is now in his former position of having a very bruised face and holding an invitation card. He takes the card from the man and yells at him, “No! You don't!” He ultimately gives into the urge to give the number on the card a call. He tells the person on the other side who he is, tells him that it wasn't a dream (as he was recommended to think of his experience) and he can’t forgive them. The survivor gives up on fixing the personal struggles in life he had before the game; his only focus now is to stop the game.
He has adopted a revolutionary subjectivity as he tells the voice on the other end of the phone, “I am not a horse, I am a person.” He hangs up and turns around to face the camera before walking towards the screen as it fades to black. If we are to take this proclamation seriously, it has to be extended. We can't settle for not being the race horses of the wealthy, we must also insist that we are not the work horses of the wealthy. If we want to transform the world into a system that allows for the flourishing of all human life and the realization of freedom, then we must, as the old IWW song says, dump the bosses off our backs and grab hold of the reins that capital now holds. We have nothing to lose except our saddles.
Adam Ray Adkins is a mixed media visual artist, poet, and meme maker. He is a co-host of The Acid Left, documenting and nurturing the rise of post-capitalist desire. Adam lives in St. Petersburg, Florida with his wife and birds.