Text/Depth Gossip
During the National Day holiday, the most popular movie in China is "Chosin Lake". Speaking of TV dramas, it is estimated that many people have watched the Korean drama "Squid Game", which has swept the list of countries around the world and become popular.
The heroine's ins was originally hundreds of thousands of fans, and after the drama began broadcasting, it soared by more than 16 million in more than half a month. The Netflix owner says it could become the hottest web series in Netflix's history.
If you haven't seen any of these videos, it's recommended to check them out.
"The Squid Game" was directed by Hwang Dong-hyuk, who directed "The Melting Pot," which he said was meant to make a fable about contemporary capitalist society. In some extreme form, it is necessary to compete for survival.
I have to say that Koreans just play tricks. Films of this genre were first developed in Japan.
The japanese made it, I personally think the best look and the most well-known is the 2000 movie "Battle Royale". Directed by Shinji Fukasaku, starring Takeshi Kitano, Ryuya Fujiwara, and Yaki Maeda.
The background of its creation is that Japan's socio-economic development has been stagnant for many years, young people cannot complete the class transition through struggle, and the up-and-down flow channel is blocked. The story depicted in the film is that in response to youth violence and resistance, the state selects a junior high school class every year and sends students to a desolate island where they cannibalize. In the process of fighting, the students fully displayed all aspects of human nature.
Subsequent Japan also has well-known film and television dramas such as "Gambling Apocalypse" and "Alice in the Land of The Dying", which are basically this routine.
South Korea made a little different this time, using a Japanese shell, and what they put in was chaebols, capital, power, class and religion.
The story is not complicated.
It is a group portrait play, a group of people at the bottom of society, who are pulled into a huge gambling game, let them bet their lives, win and get huge wealth, and give their lives when they lose.
What kind of person would willingly gamble with his life? Poor people, poor to the point of having nothing.
Spread out the group portraits of many game participants, all of which are the same.
The male protagonist was a worker in the automobile factory, working diligently and earnestly, but the factory went bankrupt, and he could not get the termination payment, so he joined forces with other workers to organize a rebellion. As a result, the capitalist colluded with power, and he saw his colleagues killed by the police. Since then, his career has failed one after another, his wife has left with her daughter, and there is only one old mother left by his side, who is in debt. The only hope left in life, betting on horses. He lost all of his mother's pension and carried a loan shark.
The remaining protagonists are very different from his encounters.
Male Number Two is also the son of a low-level civilian in South Korea, and is the male protagonist's hair is small. Reading about the Department of Economics and Management of Seoul National University in South Korea's best and top "SKY" (equivalent to the Department of Economics and Management of Peking University in our country), the old mother set up a stall to do small business, she thought that her son had jumped the dragon gate with carp, but it was not. Male No. 2 still can't change his fate, did the securities industry, because he embezzled customers' money for investment, owed a bunch of debts (about 30 million yuan), lived on the verge of collapse, and was bent on suicide.
There are several left: There are Pakistanis who have been pit by their bosses in Korea; there are "defectors" who have been forced by life to be thieves; there are those who have just given birth to a child and have not yet had time to name them; there are female murderers, the deceased is the father of a priest, suspected of being molested by her father several times, and her father has abused her family and killed her mother, and she killed her father.
It is such a group of people who have no hope for life, and they are gathered together to participate in the game of fighting with their lives. The game is divided into 6 rounds, and the organizers have gathered a total of 456 people, including the above protagonists.
The details of the game are also realistic. The core logic of the story is the inner volume of the zero-sum game "man eats man". Each person represents 100 million won, and for every 1 person who dies, the ultimate prize pool for the entire game will increase by 100 million won (about 540,000 yuan). The winner at the end of the game receives the full prize money.
Unlike "Gambling Apocalypse", "Alice in the Land of the Dying", "Battle Royale", "The Hunger Games" and other similar works, "Squid Games" uses an extreme contrast: let the most complex adult men and women play the most innocent children's games.
The first level is, "One Two Three, Wooden Man", the second level is Lime Candy, the third level is tug-of-war, the fourth level is playing marbles, the fifth level is jumping glass, and the sixth level is squid game.
Of course, it doesn't matter what the game is, what matters is a screening mechanism, a screening mechanism for how the people at the bottom become winners. Then in the process of these people playing the game, use various details to outline the group portrait of the characters.
The important branch line in the play is the Korean policeman, more like an NPC, a functional character, composed of the organization behind him going deep behind the system and unfolding behind it.
In addition to the people at the bottom who participate in the game, it is not difficult to see that it is more like a simplified version of the various classes of Korean society: there are two layers above the bottom people, the managers at the middle level, and the big players at the top.
Middle managers, that is, introduce the rules of the game, killing, maintaining order, etc. at the game site. Instead of revealing their true colors, they wore three shapes, round, triangular, and square, respectively, laborers, soldiers with guns, and small leaders.
On the surface, middle managers will have a set of strict rules, such as not allowing active speech, preventing collusion, etc., but there will still be corruption, smuggling, and organ trafficking among them. The attitude of the big players to them is to turn a blind eye, they do not care about profit, as long as they do not break the rules of the entire game, the rules will be eliminated.
The big players on the upper floor reveal that they are somewhat naked. The bottom layer is the real face of the person, the middle layer is the tool graphic face shows the person, and the upper layer is the animal face to show the person, in order to show its animal nature.
The bottom people kill each other to survive the game, the upper class people will watch the whole process, the first half is to watch the live broadcast, the second half is to watch the live.
In order to highlight the habits of the big players at the top, there is also a special scene in it, and the young men and women who have been completely objectified stand like objects in the room where the big players are located. These are all played by young models and Internet celebrities invited by the creators from all over the world.
It featured five big players, four of whom were white-skinned Europeans and Americans, a Chinese dressed in Zhongshan suits, and two of Du Fu's poems: "Good rain knows the season, when spring happens." The implication is that the anxieties of island countries that often appear in South Korean films and television, they consider themselves victims of the great power game, and the five big players allude to the "five constants".
The logical shell and class model of the story are quite complete. After all, there are countless Japanese battle royale series and Korean class realistic movies to base the foundation.
In the end, a Korean class parable of a capitalist society is presented: after limited resources and stagnant economic growth, the people at the bottom are infinitely involved in the cannibalism, the middle people participate in the organization, and the upper people watch the drama and bet, like an ancient Roman colosseum. The proletarians at the bottom have the strongest willingness to change their lives, because society has the lowest tolerance rate for them, the cost of their mistakes is almost zero, gambling, robbery and other behaviors are only their outlets, if they are put into a closed space and given a clear rule of profit, they will bleed and kill each other.
Unfortunately, it ended up just stopping at presentation and just asking questions.
The last few episodes all collapsed, because the male protagonist won, he was the only winner, and the other low-level men and women who participated in the game all died, either to die after failing the game level, or to kill each other, they almost did not question, resist and fight upwards, only mutual harm.
Even in the movie, there is a heavy fatalism buried: the heroine Jiang Xiao loved to play with knives before he died, and as a result, he was stabbed in the neck by the knife and died; the male second Shangyou prepared to commit suicide before participating in the game, and died of suicide; the little Zhang Dexiu jumped off the bridge when he fled for his life, and died of jumping off the bridge; the Pakistani Ali was cheated of money before he died, and died of being deceived marbles...
The only exception is the male protagonist, in addition to his luck, there is another important reason why he survived is that he has a good heart and kindness. He sympathizes with another "low-level person" in the game, a rare old man with cancer. This Korean uncle, whose real identity is one of the operators of the whole game, let the male protagonist go on a horse, and the male protagonist can survive and get rich.
This becomes a ridiculous closed loop, a well-known director in the capitalist country of South Korea, standing on the shoulders of the Japanese, spending a decade creating a script that says that they want to make a fable about the so-called contemporary capitalism in Korea, and they have completed the story with the support of big American capital. In the story, only one of the bottom group died, or because of the sympathy of the upper class, they were lucky enough to get a livelihood. Then use the mouth of the male protagonist to warn everyone to be kind.
It's also a kind of pungent irony.