BEN WISEMAN
At the beginning of the second episode of the dystopian fantasy series Squid Game, the nameless villain loads the bodies of hundreds of contestants shot dead for failure into an incinerator. But one of the bodies was still convulsing. Its fingers crawled out of the gap between the lid and the box.
Then the lid was nailed. Either way, the man was cremated.
That's not the most disturbing scene in the nine episodes of The Squid Game. The series, which began airing on Netflix last month, has apparently become the platform's highest-rated premiere ever. Do you have teenagers or young people in your life? Ask them about Squid Games. They may have seen it. They probably loved it. It scared me.
As a bloody Korean work, Squid Games has some clever embellishments and flashes of inspiration, yet it's not so much a masterpiece of clever storytelling as a bloody version of a familiar formula, an extremely violent Hunger Games with a darker worldview.
The plot goes like this: A group of financially desperate South Koreans agree to be imprisoned in a remote, bizarre arena to participate in an adult version of a children's game where the losers are killed. Knowing what was at stake, they chose to continue to "play" because they were promised that if they won, they would receive huge prize money that could change the future, and they also lived inhuman lives off the field.
In fact, the episode in Squid Games called Hell isn't about a game where you have to be shot if you take a wrong step, it's about life outside the arena. It is about a society that should be rich, where the gap between the rich and the poor, between the rich and the poor, between the fortunate and the unfortunate, is widening. Fall on the wrong side and you're done.
Such a sight that attracts so many viewers, especially young ones, suggests a chillingly bleak perspective — about capitalism, about "freedom," about individual agency — and it should stop us. In the shocking and horrific first episode, when contestants begin to be killed in droves, an unidentified mastermind pours a cocktail to the sound of music and savors the slaughter in front of him, reminiscent of a generation of American children growing up in school shootings. God was a killer, lying drunkenly in his gilded lair, without a trace of mercy.
Perhaps the audience of "The Squid Game" simply enjoyed its bold, cartoonish thrills: its visual and spiritual beauty was equivalent to putting quentin Tarantino's scariest clip into one of the Episodes of Teletubbies. In the process of slowly understanding who died, who survived, and who was behind it, there was an inherent suspense. I've asked young people I know, and they've said, "I'm blind," "I'm drawn to this crazy setting," and "Very few shows have such amazing elements."
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Yet they do not reject the constant bloodshed and exaggerated cruelty of the characters to each other, illustrating the weirdness and unsettling nature of modern emotions. "We entertain in extreme ways," told one 23-year-old student who watched Squid Games in two days.
Then, in an indiscriminate way, this great sensation became an even bigger phenomenon—a fad—detached from its actual content. Times television critic Mike Hale wisely noted that Squid Games "has the potential to be Meeme." The Times also published an article by Vanessa Friedman about how sportswear became a "hot spot" because Squid Game contestants wore them (as a prison uniform, a reminder). The Times also published an article written by Christina Morales about the history of dalgona candy, a lethal prop in a knockout game in the show. There is a link to the production method written by Genevieve Ko.
A week and a half from Halloween, we're bound to be bombarded with Squid Games costumes. The Wall Street Journal commented on this.
In a way, the reason why "Squid Game" is so sensational is precisely because of its sensation, its initial popularity has attracted attention, thus driving further popularity, because people want to participate, and the cunning tentacles of curiosity are getting deeper and deeper into people's consciousness, which attracts higher popularity.
But its commentary on class, greed, and barbarism is too relevant to the core of the play and cannot be accidental. As Mike writes, such commentaries may be "a superficial cut to the point, just to justify the relentless killing." But it's there, on the surface or not, and it's all there with this massacre. Thousands of viewers were captivated by them.
At least to some extent, for many, if not all, people, this way of portraying life as a lottery game of sadism and poverty as a room of desperate torture resonates, which means it has value. It is a bullet that strikes the soul.
Frank Bruni is a professor of public policy at Duke University and the author of the forthcoming book The Beauty of Dusk.