We are not nice!

Squid Games (오징어 게임, Korean; 2021)

Screenplay & Direction: Hwang Dong-hyuk

Childhood games prepare us for what is in store for us ahead in our lives. Failures are inevitable, and winners take it all. It is not and was never a level playing field, and some get favours merely by starting with an added advantage. Life is no bed of roses; deal with it. The players may claim fair play, but deep inside, we can sense insider collusion.

We are taught about the need to be fair to others. They tell us about 'one good turn deserving another' and our past karma haunting us until the end of time; hence, the need to do good and be fair. But, just look around us. Nature does not give a fair crack of the whip to all. The floods terrorise the poor who can ill afford the expensive real estate on higher grounds. The pandemic intimidates the economically challenged layer of society where living space is a challenge.

We always fight for equality for all. We want the system to be fair for all. We criticise the various economic and political modules presently available, and we scream for change. We think communism is the way to go. How wrong we were. See how the upholders of the tenets of communism, China and the Soviet Union, have crumbled and modified their social agendas to meet their worldly demands.

So we decided that money was the panacea to all our woes, the very thing that we thought was the root of all evils. What actually makes us happy? To what extend do we push the boundary to achieve this happiness at the expense of betting our lives on it?

This, being the theme of their experiment, the story writer went around studios after studios selling his script for almost a decade. The fact that that story, Squid Games, is now the number #1 hit on Netflix is testimony to the age-old adage that perseverance pays.

Capitalism has clearly failed us. Even Covid threat did not make us realise our vulnerability. We thought we would drive to recognise our vulnerability, but alas, we forget. On the contrary, we continue our rapacious hunt for material things. The divide between the haves and have nots continue escalating at phenomenal proportions. 

We use material gains as a yardstick to determine one's attainment in life. Hence, wealth is what everyone wants. The trouble is some of us are excellent at acquiring whilst others fail miserably, digging themselves in a quagmire of hopelessness. We thought that by having equal distribution of wealth, we could reach a utopia. Sadly, the world has all our needs but not our greed. Deep inside, we are all evil, and this miniseries perfectly depicts our selfishness and the evil that resides in us all. It unleashes when our desires are not met. We would turn against each other for money. 

456 members of the public are gathered together (selected) in a secret location to partake in a series of games. These games are mainly the ones that most Asian kids played as children, Red Light - Green Light, Tug-of-War, Squid Games, marbles, etcetera. The only trouble is that here the losers pay it with their lives. As one by one, the players get eliminated/killed, the prize money snowballs. The idea is to have a single winner who would acquire the accumulated cash. The players are not given a clue on the game they will play; hence, they cannot strategise. As there can be only one winner at the end, the players use their own way to outdo the other. 

One common denominator unifies all contestants - they are all desperate for money. From a highly erudite university graduate to a loafer, to a gangster, an immigrant running from the law, a North Korean refugee, to a senior citizen with a brain tumour, they are all desperate for the big prize. 

Poverty is not the only reason for the game to exist. Even the super-rich find life purposeless, without having some thrill of seeing the helpless and the poor squirm and die. It is just horse racing. The only difference is that here, the horses are people. The moral understanding of the extremely wealthy, the 'Squid Games' wants us to believe, is essentially egoistic. The hedonistic need to stimulate the senses and feel the experiences occupy high on their list of priorities. They assume everyone shares this sentiment, making it perfectly normal to prey on others. Conversely, the remaining 99% has to deal with the didactic quandary between egoism and altruism.

The characters are all so complex and have a life of their own, possibly spurring the possibility of a second season. The winner, after the first season, feels compelled to return to the game to correct something. What is that?

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.