The question is why, and I don't have the answer. It won't surprise me to see reviews and commentary popping up that go on about the fall of civilization. Squid Game is about people in Korea who have fallen on hard times and are recruited into playing a series of games which, if they win, will provide them with a fortune. And if they lose, they will be shot and killed. Or dropped from a great height and killed. Or killed in bloody face-to-face encounters by their friends and loved ones.
It is listed as a horror film. I think that's the wrong category to place it in. A more appropriate label for the genre, I think, would be sadism.
Intellectually, you can come to its defense and claim it's too artfully made, too original, to be reduced to sadism pure and simple. It can be seen as a satire of capitalism, where some people are reduced to abject poverty and others get so rich that wealth comes to bore them and the only way they can entertain themselves when their cars and yachts and bigger houses no longer satisfy, and their need for novelty is so inflated, is to watch people they see as losers claw and club each other to death over money.
If you have never given serious thought to the mentality of ancient Rome, where rulers kept their people under control by "bread and circus," circus being watching the losers of society being eaten alive by lions, now's your chance to direct your thoughts in that direction. If you've never marveled at the willingness of one gladiator to hack off the limbs of other gladiators, ask yourself why. How have we managed to avoid the cynicism out there that makes us see all human life as little more than a casual encounter between those lucky enough to get ahead and those who, through physical or mental weakness, or simply by being in the wrong place at the wrong time, are randomly selected for destruction?
All morally justified by the possibility that a good performance can be rewarded with a "thumbs up" that will release the victim from the fate of death.
The question I'd like answered is this one. Is Squid Game being watched because people appreciate its original approach to satire? - it's nothing if not original. Or because we have arrived at the same place the Romans did when they set up the Colosseum to entertain themselves by watching other people suffer and die? There might well be a third or fourth possibility, but at the moment, I can't for the life of me think what that might be.
One can't help marveling at the fact that Squid Game starts off with a warning that the film shows people smoking. And at the fact that it is being watched all over the world by large audiences and that people are buying costumes worn by the guards who shoot the game losers to wear at Hallowe'en, that nobody seems too concerned that in a satire on capitalism, the promoters are boasting of the profits the series is bringing to the investors at Netflix. You can't make this stuff up.
I contributed to this exercise in absurdity. I went back and watched the whole nine episodes after getting into a discussion with friends who were wondering what it was all about and why it was getting so much traction. I decided I needed to know what the hullabaloo was all about. I had earlier turned it off after one episode, not just because of the violence, but because I really hate the histrionic Korean style of acting which involves shouting at the top of your lungs, pushing your face into all sorts of contortions, groveling on the ground when asking for favors and other examples of a lack of irony and subtlety. Not my cup of tea. Nothing against Koreans. Maybe there is plenty of subtlety in Korean theatre and I've just been looking at the wrong stuff. But Squid Game did nothing to alter my biased view, if that's what it is. In fact, it has set it back years.
There are other things wrong with the story. Clumsy plot line, things that don't make sense. But spending time critiquing them is on the same level as warning viewers they might encounter smoking in any given episode where they will witness characters they've come to care for get a bullet to the forehead.
By all means watch it so you'll be able to join in when it comes up as a topic. If you've seen slasher films and are, like most people today, inured to blood and violence, have at it. And do tell me, please, if you think I've got this take all wrong.
But don't say I didn't warn you.
photo credit: this image is all over the place, and I can't find the original source. Sorry. It depicts the contestants in green uniforms trying to solve a puzzle. The figures in red are the guards ready to shoot them if (and, in most cases, when) they fail.
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