Squid Game

Netflix is moving ahead big time. It's right up there now with other agencies that blur the line between popular culture and corporate power, like Facebook, Amazon, Google and Youtube, all natural-born children of the internet. This latest contribution to the phenomenon of bingeing shows that it has made a brilliant move in terms of commercial success by expanding beyond the borders of the U.S. and of the English-speaking world. Squid Game is a local Korean production that has exploded into the largest-selling Netflix streaming offering of all time.

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.

Pflicht

Growing up semi-bilingual - my German never actually reached the level of my English - I learned early on that certain words are difficult to translate. You can get the general idea, the denotation, across. But the connotations often don't survive the transfer. The expression "lost in translation" is not an idle notion.

In later years, after I had spent years in Japan and acquired a better than entry-level familiarity with the Japanese language, I added other untranslatables to the pile. "Ikenai" - literally "that doesn't go" - for example. Mothers say that all the time to their kids. A translation that gets a little closer to the Japanese might be "People don't do that!" In Japan - at least in the Japan I first got to know half a century ago - the importance of not looking bad in the eyes of your neighbors carried a hell of a lot more weight than it did in other places I had spent any length of time. I might even make an argument that when a mother says "ikenai" to her kids, what she's actually saying is "don't you dare embarrass me in the eyes of everybody we know."

"Komaru" is another of those words. In my head, I hear "I am having a hard time with this." It's a verb with a very broad semantic range. It covers everything from distressed to troubled to inconvenienced to embarrassed and at a loss. When it's time to harness the dogs for a walk, and they fail to line up fast enough to satisfy my Japanese husband's sense of proper dog behavior, he scolds them with "Komaru yo!" (I am "komaru!")

From my German grandmother, I learned such concepts as "Ordnung" - "order" - as in "Ordnung muss sein!" - "there must be order."  I once heard her describe the bedrooms of my sister and me as "Sodom and Gomorrah." She liked things to be in their proper place. Another German concept was "Disziplin" - discipline. As in, "if you haven't got it, you're of no use to anybody, including yourself!"

And my grandmother came immediately to mind when I saw this sign the other day,

English: STOP! From here on, the wearing of a mouth-and-nose covering is a DUTY (sic - all caps)!

Modern Germans, like modern Americans, are more likely to respond to carrots than to sticks, so it's now not unlikely you'll see this sign instead:

Same icon with face mask, only this time the imperative is a polite one. Note the use of "thank you." (And, of course, the presence of an English translation suggests the people posting the sign are addressing an international audience. And that begs the question of whether the first one, in German only, comes from a mindset that assumes when one shouts "Achtung!" everyone within hearing will jump immediately to attention.

In any case, the first one reminds me of my grandmother. There's no "please," no "thank you." 

There's simply that wonderful German word "Pflicht" - "duty".

One can almost hear the second part of that command:

"Violators will be shot!"

She was a loving lady, not militarily inclined in the least. But she was a native speaker of the German language, and imprinted on me not just a lot of everyday German vocabulary items, but a whole bunch of unspoken connotations, as well.

Kerson Leong

Kerson Leong

Don't know if this is a trend, or just a nice coincidence, but I love the idea of Canada - what's not to love about Canada? - being a place where Asian families can immigrate to and produce brilliant young musicians. I know, I know.  One sweetly twittering birdie does not a springtime make. Or two, for that matter. But after going off the deep end over Montreal Canadian Bruce Xiaoyu Liu at the Chopin Competition this month, I am now grooving over another Chinese Canadian - this one from Ottawa, I believe, also really easy on the eyes, whose mode of seduction is the violin.

His name is Kerson Leong. For a little background, click here.

Here he is playing Zigeunerweisen, that honey-on-sugar-cubes overschmalzed Hungarian tune erroneously attributed to Gypsies by the Spanish composer, Pablo de Sarasate, back in the 1870s. Everybody knows the tune. It's an oh-so-Hungarian (think Liszt's Rhapsodies) romanticizing of the Gypsy Life (Zigeunerleben), the German analogue to Stephen Foster's Old Kentucky Home where "tis summer and the darkies are gay."  Today Zigeuner is a word effectively banned as insensitive in modern-day German. The traditional "Gypsy Sauce" is going the way of Aunt Jemima and Eskimo Pies and being replaced by "Paprika Sauce."  

But I digress. Here's Kerson playing "Gypsy Airs," using the "traditional" word (Zigeuner) for gypsy.

And it's a toss-up which part of the whole I love most. The beautiful young face, the music, the patent leather shoes, the virtuosity at the violin...

I guess I'd have to say the shirt.

I've got to get that shirt to wear at weddings and parties.

Once again, Zigeunerweisen. Click and swoon.

photo credit