Squid Game Season 1
Review of Squid Game’s season one / 오징어게임 (2021)
Oh Squid Game. It’s on track to become the most-watched Netflix show, and everyone is sitting here and talking about it on the Internet. On a lonely Wednesday morning with nothing to do but procrastinate on my real work, I knew it was time to sit and binge watch the show.
And from the very moment I saw Gong Yoo as the salesman luring a bunch of debt-ridden people into a deadly game, I knew I was into this hook, line, and sinker. Ended up watching every single episode within the span of a day, but I’m thinking about it quite a bit even after I’ve finished watching it.
Will I rewatch it? Probably not. But the show gives you a lot of information to chew on, one that really reflects the society that we live in.
Be careful though if you’re watching in Korean with English subtitles—as someone about intermediate in Korean (I’m not fluent, but I get the gist of things), I really started noticing that the subtitles were wrong right when Gong Yoo appeared in the first episode.
On with the review! Because this is mainly an analysis, please note that this review contains major spoilers.
Rich versus Poor
Our main characters are very reflective of Korean society today—we have the alcoholic father Seong Gi-hun who is divorced and just wants to see his daughter, whose mother has remarried a richer man who plans on moving them all to America.
We have Cho Sang-woo, whose mother brags about his achievements, but in reality he’s been stealing from his clients.
There’s the South Asian man who is a immigrant worker and is stiffed by his boss, who just straight up refuses to pay him because of probably who he is (an immigrant with very little rights).
Then we have the old man dying of a brain cancer and Sae-byeok, the North Korean defector who just wants to bring her family to the South.
We learn quickly that all of the characters brought into the Squid Game are people who are at the bottom rungs of society, ones that have been shunned by the mainstream and are often deep in debt.
As we progress through the Squid Game and discover how everyone but the winner must die for this cash prize, it reads a lot like capitalism on the screen.
Because the game can be ended by a simple majority vote to end, it adjourns once, but all of these people, despite knowing that others have to die for the money, come back to resume the game.
They don’t care about other people suffering; they want the money to end their own suffering. And this is demonstrated most with the character of Sang-woo.
He started out friends with Gi-hun, and then joins in on befriending the other players in the game. As we, the viewers, gain an emotional connection to these characters and their plight, Sang-woo continues to detach himself.
He tricks Ali, the South Asian immigrant, into giving him his marbles during a game, directly leading to his death.
Then when there’s only three people left, he kills the wounded Sae-byeok with a knife when Gi-hun isn’t looking, leaving only two people left to play the final game.
Then there’s also the dichotomy between the rich and the poor. The game is led by The Front Man, who, at the end, is revealed to be the cop’s missing brother. The brother went missing during the games, which my theory is that the The Front Man won his game, became rich, and then became a part of this ecosystem.
He speaks English and surrounds himself with all these treasures and gold, things that irrelevant in the grand scheme of things.
He also seems no longer human, coming across as the leader of this operation, and then even shoots his own brother, leaving him to die in the ocean.
Starting with the game of ddakji
I found the fact that the game is started with a game of ddakji to be interesting as well. The salesman, played by the ever-talented Gong Yoo, approaches people that are probably pre-picked at a subway and offers to play a game of ddakji.
You play this traditional Korean game by throwing a square piece of paper onto another until it flips.
Naturally, this is rigged so the player wins and the salesman loses, leading him to give you 100,000 won and a business card that ultimately brings you to the games.
I found this to be symbolic because you must use brutal force and tactics in order to flip that piece of paper, just like how you must force a human to kill another. And that’s what the games lead you to do: kill others in the name of money.
Evil versus Innocent
We also have themes of innocence versus evil here. Some characters truly are quite innocent: such as the girl that sacrifices herself for Sae-byeok and Ali. That girl might’ve murdered her father, but her reasoning is slightly justified, and in the end she makes up for her sin by allowing Sae-byeok to win.
Ali also just wants to rejoin his family in Pakistan (I wasn’t sure where he was from, especially since the subtitles say he and his wife were speaking Hindi when I thought they were from Pakistan) and is trying to get the money so he can leave Korea.
He, too, maims his boss in order to get his paycheck, leading him here, but he is unintentionally sacrificed in Sang-woo’s greed.
Evil here is depicted as the pursuit for the money. We have a corrupt doctor in the games selling off bodies in exchange for information about what the games are about.
We have the guards who seemingly don’t care about what’s going on, ones who act like emotionless robots that kill. The rich gleefully spectate the games from above, considering this to be entertainment for them.
The inspiration was Battle Royale, which The Hunger Games is claimed to plagiarize from, and that really comes true as we watch the rich in gold fancy animal masks complain about the lack of action and whatnot.
The Symbol of a Mask
Masks also are a symbol here. The guards all wear plain masks with shapes on them, making them indistinguishable from each other. If they reveal their identity, they’re shot dead.
This implies that they are a nameless, faceless crowd only following orders from the rich with no particular motive on why they’re there. One could even say they enjoy this, or cannot escape from the destiny they’ve been corralled into.
Then we have the ultra-rich white spectators watching the crowd, one of whom is wearing a pig-looking mask, another a wolf mask. They are both pig and wolves; they are stuffed with money and essentially eat this shit up, but they are wolves because they hunt for the thrill.
But they don’t actually do anything for this hunt, which makes the gold lacquer on the mask so much more visible—they’re fake wolves and pigs. They earn this off of the exploitation of others.
The Ultimate Debt
While many of these people, if not all, were in debt to begin with, they essentially sold their souls and debt to the game. These are the people in society who are so desperate to escape their circumstances that they are willing to engage with the games of their childhood.
This is why the old man who runs this game system says that he’s testing to see if there’s any human goodness left—because they’re willing to kill each other and engage in a ridiculous spectacle in order to get what they want. But what he’s saying is also hypocritical too.
If he’s so rich, like all of these people running the games, then why isn’t he trying to be a force of good? Like I said before, it’s a spectacle. He claims that this is a test, but he himself has only worsened the situation by his inaction.
We have all these characters who represent so many facets of modern societies, who have stories we can relate to, and he knows everything about every single one of these individuals.
But it’s apparently humorous to watch them scramble for money, rather than give them the money and let them live normal lives.
And that, my friends, is capitalism at its finest being represented on the small screen. Bravo Netflix. You’ve broke the Internet.
