“How could you call yourselves human?” pleads a blood-drenched competitor. “You really want to continue with this insanity?” Cheeky question, Squid Game. At this point, five hours in, I paused the Korean import about poor people who agree to battle each other to the death on a remote island for money and just reveled in its shamelessness. Don’t blame me, smirks writer and director Hwang Dong-hyuk. You all are choosing to watch this! You can turn it off at any time and read a book or whatever. But you’re not going to, are you?
Like Parasite, the 2019 Bong Joon-ho Oscar winner to which it is inevitably compared, Squid Game is an ideal delivery system for fashionable bad feelings. Its foreign language and setting remove its social critique from a polarized American context and show how far the ravages of capitalism reach. A Korean filmmaker can’t be accused of disloyalty to a society to which he doesn’t belong, an advantage also enjoyed by Danish director Lars von Trier, an earlier generation’s teller of allegedly hard “truths” that large numbers of Americans already wanted to hear. Netflix’s relationship to the U.S. consuming public is a more complicated story: Squid Game never aired on Korean television, and the Los Gatos, California, streaming service is the show’s sole distributor. They know what their audience wants, disturbingly enough. One in four people in the country has watched some of Squid Game, according to a Morning Consult poll.
Squid Game is the gripping tale of 456 poor and desperate people who allow themselves to be taken to an island where they consent to play a series of games for a multimillion-dollar cash prize. The players don’t merely die when they lose — that would be tasteless enough. Hwang’s camera lingers indecently on the losers’ splattered brains and uncoiling viscera. Later, their bodies are fed into an incinerator in an unintended commentary on how badly the once-solemn iconography of the Holocaust has been cheapened and campified. About halfway through, the players make the fortuitous discovery that they can “eliminate” their opponents merely by killing them in between rounds. Some of the players are good people, some are cheaters and thugs, and some are merely annoying. The games are managed by legions of masked automatons in nifty jumpsuits. In a comedically unshocking reveal, it turns out they’re all working at the behest of English-speaking rich people.
The common reading of Squid Game and Parasite is that both works are satires on the depravities of capitalism. The market makes bloodsuckers of us all, and the world is one big Squid Game, isn’t it? Maybe it’s worse. “You’ve ruined the most crucial element of this place: Equality,” the masked Squid Games commissioner says to a rule-breaking henchman. “These people suffered from inequality and discrimination out in the world, and we offer them one last chance to fight on equal footing and win.”
There’s a certain solipsism to the crudely Marxist interpretation of both Parasite and Squid Game, as if an artist from a much different country and culture can only be speaking about our system, our anxieties, and our sins. But what worthy themes are there for art in 2021 besides our own awfulness? Flatter the right audience’s sense of self-righteous self-loathing, and great things are possible for you. Your nine-part streaming miniseries doesn’t even need to be very good. Its misanthropy can be conveyed with almost patronizing bluntness. During a tug-of-war game to the death, we’re treated to a long slow-motion shot of the agonized faces of people who know they’re moments away from oblivion. I guess the idea is that capitalist society is a kill-or-be-killed struggle where the strong prey on the weak.
But what if it’s not? And what if there’s more to life than capitalism maybe being bad? If you think there’s an intrinsic value to being alive that transcends the indignities of any oppressive system, then the actions of these characters have little moral weight, their suffering veers into the pornographic, and your nitpicking will never end. “At least here I have hope,” one character says to justify continued participation in the game. “But out there?” Well, I thought, it sucks you think that. Then I suddenly recalled the title character’s search for God in the ruins of medieval Vladimir after the violent climactic battle scene in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev, a sublime vision of the quest for hope in an “out there” that was much more depraved than anything in a modern capitalist democracy.
We’re far from Tarkovsky here. Squid Game instead takes its cues from a lesser communist-adjacent visionary: This is television in the mold of Bertold Brecht, a pageant of hyper-aestheticized signification meant to lead viewers to the correct opinions. There are characters, kind of, but they exist to be placed in predicaments of maximal excruciation, with the dramatic knife-twists so cheaply manipulative as to be artless.
The competitors all represent different groups of subaltern Koreans: Our hero, Seong Gi-hun, is a former autoworker and a stand-in for the millions who fell out of the middle class after the Asian financial crisis. But as in Parasite, the show depicts the poor as greedy and amoral, treating them with almost gleeful disrespect. The players in Squid Game have chosen to be there and are willing to be erased from existence in a quest for filthy lucre. Hwang continually treats these characters as the subjects of an especially twisted series of thought experiments and then disposes of them as if they aren’t even human.
If there’s anything to redeem Squid Game, it’s the possibility that the show is really about the dystopia of a childless world. There are really only two children in this show: One is North Korean and the other emigrates to America. The deadly contests are all variations on games played in childhood — they even recreate a child’s perception of time being suspended while they’re at play, one elderly character observes. Capitalism perpetuates the playground’s state of nature while exterminating or co-opting its sense of wonder, the show seems to say. But Squid Game is so orgiastically violent as to obscure whether it thinks the will to kill and to dominate others with such conspicuous cruelty comes from “capitalism” or from the depths of the human soul.
Squid Game does connect inhumanity to the absence of children, though. One of the lethal games takes place on a playground where the equipment is nightmarishly large, and there’s a deadly round of marbles played in the streets off a fake Seoul tenement. We get a lot of death speeches in Squid Game, but only the final one is memorable: “When we were kids, we would play just like this, and our moms would call us in for dinner,” a character declares amid geysers of his own blood. “But no one calls us anymore.” With no one calling and with no one to answer, we’re left in a world without morals and reason, a brutal parody of childhood with none of its possibility or hope.
Squid Game ends the same way as Rashomon. In Akira Kurosawa’s classic, which is eight hours shorter than Squid Game, we get a demoralizing survey of dishonesty, rapine, and theft, a picture complicated through the rescue of a crying baby. For many critics, this mawkish and explicitly Christian ending mars one of cinema’s great masterpieces, though to me, the closing of Rashomon is a lesson in the artistic necessity of motioning toward human goodness. In Squid Game, a child is saved in a similar yet even less narratively graceful U-turn. We’ve witnessed an unceasing parade of the worst things ever depicted on a television screen. They’ve happened in an environment that evokes childhood, and thus its disappearance. But here, at the very end, is a real child to maybe make it all worthwhile, the one and only thing that can reconcile all these horrors, or that can justify these awful things we’ve watched.
I don’t think the ordeal is worth it. But I have a suspicion people aren’t watching Squid Game in search of edification anyway. The show’s runaway popularity suggests that cruelty is deeply titillating and that its pleasures are distinct from those of violence. The players and even their overseers are treated with gratuitous nastiness, and the slick and even cool-looking architecture of dehumanization inflicted on the game’s participants has a novelty that no on-screen kill can match. While most people still have an allergy to violence, the entire COVID period unveiled a popular inner longing for petty tyranny. It turns out a lot of people are exhilarated by brutal rituals of coerced rule-following. But we already knew that, didn’t we?
Armin Rosen is a New York-based reporter-at-large for Tablet.
