As 28 Days Later deftly illuminates, human beings have an innate tendency to carry on even when every possible piece of evidence exists for them to just get it over with and off themselves. One of the foremost reasons to do that—apart from a zombie apocalypse—is the all-too-common occurrence of being in financial ruin. Increasingly, this is an unignorable norm, not just in the “get rich quick” “Promised Land” known as the U.S., but all around the world. Including, of course, South Korea, where two of the most brutally honest depictions about class have come out in the past three years, Parasite, and now, Squid Game.
Created by Dong-hyuk Hwang (whose previous short film titles have tellingly included Our Sad Life and Heaven & Hell—names that could easily double for what Squid Game is all about), the show centers on the hopelessly debt-ridden. Not necessarily limited to the so-called “dregs” of society, but people from various walks of life who, for whatever reason, and through a series of unfortunate events, have found themselves in this “between a rock and a hard place” situation. At the center of the plotline is Gi-hun Seong (Jung-jae Lee), a gambling addict who occasionally makes some money as a driver. Forced to live with (and off) his mother, Gi-hun wouldn’t likely bother so much with trying to reclaim his dignity (better known in our capitalist society as “financial freedom”) were it not for having a ten-year-old daughter to attempt “being present” for. She, in many ways, is the primary catalyst for finally pushing Gi-hun into The Game. Just another reason kids are a goddamn pain in the ass.
However, the majority of players—four hundred and fifty-six of them, with Gi-hun being #456—end up so disgusted with what The Game actually turns out to be (in large part, thanks to an animatronic Younghee’s fucked-up version of Red Light, Green Light) that they all vote to end the madness after episode one. Alas, just as the Front Man (Byung-hun Lee) warned them, life is actually worse outside the Lord of the Flies-inspired compound where they’ve been taken to. The “outside” is where they’ll be endlessly harassed, subpoenaed and otherwise shaken down for the cash they simply don’t have, and likely never will. Case in point, an old childhood friend of Gi-hun’s from the neighborhood, Sang-woo Cho (Hae-soo Park). The second he reenters society, the creditors’ texts and calls come in a massive barrage, not to mention the warrant out for his arrest due to his embezzlement as an investor at a securities firm.
This is where episode two, “Hell,” comes in as a means to force—with the hand of their shitty circumstances—the players back into a game they were so quick to write off as morally reprehensible. And yet, how is it really all that different from “civilized” life, where we’re asked to stomp on people every day for the sake of looking out for “number one”? Ah, and speaking of that number, there is the elderly man, Il-nam Oh (Yeong-su O), playing The Game with that numeric identification. Becoming close with Gi-hun, he tells him he’s dying of a brain tumor, and would rather play for big money within the unidentified island compound than sit around waiting to die in the outside world.
Another key player is #67, Sae-byeok Kang (Ho-yeon Jung), a girl who is risking it all in the hope of both getting her mother across the border and taking care of her younger brother, currently relegated to an orphanage as she has no funds to watch over him herself. As “Hell” kicks off, so, too, does the plotline of Jun-ho Hwang (Ha-joon Wi), a police officer in search of his missing brother, infiltrating The Game by following Gi-hun. He grows suspicious of the whole thing after hearing Gi-hun tell this “insane” story of what happened to him to the cops at the station. When he sees the same nebulous calling card that Gi-hun left behind on the cop’s desk also at his brother’s apartment, that’s when he decides to go on his own secret mission. Additionally at the apartment is a copy Jacques Lacan’s Theory of Desire, strategically laid out on the desk. The theory in question posits the very thing that capitalism as a system banks on (no pun intended): “Desire is the desire of the Other’s desire, meaning that desire is the object of another’s desire and that desire is also desire for recognition.”
In the capitalist setup, everything is based on false desire and “need” fulfillment, as well as performing all of these acts (read: purchases) for the sake of impressing other people who don’t fundamentally give a shit (for they’re too busy trying to prove how impressive they are themselves). There’s something to be said for the fact that children’s games are what end up being the key to one’s ultimate sense of “happiness” and “carefreeness” (money) in The Game. Because, yes, childhood is arguably the first and only time most people (even the poorest of kids) don’t have sentient concerns about money, what with usually relying on their parents for that sort of thing. Their only worries are in relation to undiluted acceptance, which, even at this early juncture in life, can still be (and often is) based on socioeconomic background (e.g. the kid with “tattered” or “out of date” clothing being ridiculed).
Nonetheless, the decision to make adults play these games is a psychological serve, to be certain. For not only does it give literal meaning to all those times as a child we were rendered “dead” when we lost a game (hence, parents being up in arms about kids watching the show and reenacting it on the playground), but it also reminds the players just how much all of life is, in fact, a game. We play to win, yet so many of us lose day after day. Hoping that somehow, against all odds, things will “turn around” if we keep gambling on our luck (knowing full well that if we didn’t win the birth lottery to begin with, there’s not much else one can do in the way of “generating prospects” to ascend the proverbial ladder). This, more often than not, is also the cycle of debt, therefore poverty.
As the second game commences, centered on honeycombs and the extraction of their cutout shapes without breaking any part of it, the personalities of the most recurring characters become highly distinct. Especially that of Mi-nyeo Han (Joo-ryoung) and Deok-su Jang (Sung-tae Heo). The former is a calculating woman who wields obsequiousness to get what she wants, imagining that she has the aesthetic of a much more nubile woman in order to get it. Deok-su is a soulless underworld gangster willing to string her along for enough time to get a quick bang out of her in the bathroom. After that point, things between them start to go tensely downhill.
This much is made clear in “Stick to the Team,” which, again, has a decidedly Lord of the Flies meets Orange is the New Black flair, with the “triangle men” (the ones with a square shape on their black mask are “supervisors” and the ones with the circles are merely low-level workers who aren’t armed) encouraging infighting among the players by withholding the correct amount of food to be apportioned to all. Eventually, Deok-su, who gets insider information that the next game is to be tug-of-war, betrays Mi-nyeo by not picking her for his team of ten, wanting only the “strength” and brute force of male “power” to increase his chances of survival. This, naturally, sets off her vindictive side as she vows to get back at him.
In episode five, “A Fair World,” more background about Gi-hun’s financial disarray is given when he explains to Il-nam that his life was veered entirely off-course when he was laid off from the car parts manufacturing company where he worked for ten years. Obviously, as we’ve seen time and time again, loyalty like that means nothing to a corporation’s bottom line. In the background of it all, Player #111, Byeong-gi (Sung-joo Yoo), a disgraced doctor who has been exchanging his surgical know-how for knowledge of what game will be next, goes off the rails when the group of triangle men he’s in league with don’t have the answer to what the subsequent game will be. As their altercation escalates into various fatalities, the Front Man chastises the head of the organ-harvesting operation by telling him, “You ruined the most important aspect of this place. Equality. Everyone is equal while they play this game. Here, every player gets to play a fair game under the same conditions. These people suffered from inequality and discrimination out in the world, and we’re giving them one last chance to fight fair and win.”
A lovely thought, except for the part where Player #1 is the orchestrator of the entire Game, and, thus, is immune to any real consequences (least of all, “elimination”)…as Gi-hun later finds out in the cruelest way. So yes, even in The Game, which exists outside of the taint of “ordinary” society, and with all its “pretty principles,” is still somehow rigged. Which just proves that whenever a large group of people (or just one rich person) are involved in anything, subterfuge and trickery end up being used to get ahead. It’s the indoctrinated sense of competition everyone seems to have inherited from humanity’s more primeval days. Not gone and not forgotten (not by imprinted DNA, anyway).
As is the case in any base survivalist mode, by episode six, “Gganbu,” everyone freely admits that there’s no room anymore for “political correctness.” All people want is someone strong (a.k.a. not a woman) and youngish (a.k.a. not an old man like #1) to pair up with in order fight for their lives and the prize. Or rather, they think they’re pairing up to work together, only to find that they’re actually playing against each other, and that the purpose of the game, marbles, is to ensure whoever loses will be “eliminated.” This breaks many players’ hearts to no end, including Gi-hun, who specifically took the old man under his wing to protect him from being the odd person out and getting killed that way. And all at great personal risk, or so he originally thought…knowing that Player #1 is a dead-weight liability to have on any “team” considering his age.
In this sense, too, the games one plays as a child—including the ostracism of the “weak link” and peacocking of the “bully” that comes with them—manifests in even more pernicious ways as an adult. The bully roles in life effortlessly translate to those who end up inhabiting positions of power, as elucidated in episode seven, “VIPs.” Complete with a 50 Shades of Grey kind of setup in terms of masks and secret rooms, we learn that The Game is orchestrated entirely for the entertainment of bored rich men betting on the fates of the broke asses. To them, as the Front Man mentions, it’s like horse racing. Which is so plebeian, n’est-ce pas? Why settle for mere animals when you can watch humans squirm to much more fanfare? With this specific plot point, Hwang highlights the beyond figurative ways in which the rich ruling class of this Earth relish watching the poverty-stricken “sweat it out” for their own amusement, knowing that, in the end, no amount of protesting or “hemming and hawing” can topple the system in place designed expressly to insulate the uber-wealthy from anything resembling “comeuppance.”
As the VIPs watch the penultimate game unfold, a still-undercover but increasingly exposed Jun-ho, switches costumes to pretend to be one of the waiters in masks that look a little too much like blackface. But since Koreans ain’t white, they’re better at “getting away with” any such accusation. To further add to his stress level, one of the VIPs, an overweight American with a Korean boy fetish, homes in on Jun-ho and tries to get him to take off his mask. Jun-ho deflects the situation by offering to go somewhere in private with him, resulting in his ability to extrapolate more information about what, exactly, The Game is. But if Jun-ho was looking for a more complex response (just as Gi-hun is when it all comes to an end), he would be disappointed to find out that there’s no “grand” reason other than rich people like to treat others outside of their income bracket as playthings. It’s a literal sport to them—that much is made clear by The Game.
With most remaining players having plummeted to their death in episode eight, “Front Man,” the “reward” for the three remaining parties is being seated at a triangular table that doesn’t look unlike Judy Chicago’s “The Dinner Party.” The permutation pits the players against each other in more ways than one. Although they’ve been dressed in evening wear and served a lavish dinner that might give them some preview of how they could live if they won the money, the end of the dinner concludes with everything cleared away from their setting except a knife. This, of course, indicates that it will be a fight to the death before allowing just two players to continue on to the final “activity”: squid game.
With the season’s coda, “One Lucky Day,” Gi-hun has the same solution to his existential crisis that most people do: getting a radically different hairstyle. While in the salon, a news report highlights how the country has never had such a high rate of citizens in personal debt, compounded by the government itself loosening lending restrictions. And yes, this smacks of what created the 2008 financial crisis (the very “phenomenon” that initially inspired Hwang’s idea). Because when they loosen restrictions on borrowing money, somehow the consumer is blamed for getting in over their head…even though all the circumstances have been created by others for them to fuck themselves over. Governments and banks count on it, knowing what they do about (what’s left of) human nature. In the meantime, the top tier “earners” (who have earned nothing other than being born into wealth already) suffer no punishments. Regardless, they still complain of their problems, specifically of being “bored.” Like the spawns of celebrities who start luxury jewelry companies or go into modeling for the sake of telling themselves they have worth, they know how to “struggle.”
But even Bob Dylan once sang, “I’m helpless, like a rich man’s son.” In other words, without their inherited money (de facto security), it’s unlikely they would be able to win in the game of life or at The Game in the show. And yet, if they did win, it’s highly likely they wouldn’t feel half as bad about how they came into that money as Gi-hun, who suddenly finds that even having “the necessary means” isn’t making life as worth living as he thought it would be. Because of course there needs to be an assuring message in Squid Game somewhere. However, for those who know the system is not liable to change drastically enough or in enough time to spare environmental decimation, the inherent truth of the show remains that: there’s not much point in living (in a capitalist society) without the required funds.
