Squid Game: South Korea’s latest cultural phenomenon

A dystopian vision of a polarized society, Netflix smash hit ‘Squid Game’ blends a tight plot, social allegory and uncompromising violence to create the latest South Korean cultural phenomenon to go global.

It features South Korea’s most marginalised, including the deeply in debt, a migrant worker and a North Korean defector, competing in traditional children’s games for the chance to win 45.6 billion won ($38 million) in mysterious circumstances and losing players are killed.

The juxtaposition of innocent childhood pastimes and terminal consequences -- coupled with high production values and sumptuous set design -- has proved wildly popular around the world.

Within days of its release last month, Netflix’s top executive said there was “a very good chance it’s going to be our biggest show ever”. 

It is the latest manifestation of the ever-growing influence of South Korea’s popular culture, epitomised by K-pop sensation BTS and the subtitled Oscar-winning movie “Parasite”.

Critics say that regardless of its Korean setting, the show’s themes and its critique of the ills of capitalism are relevant everywhere , doubly so with the coronavirus pandemic exacerbating global inequalities and are key to its ubiquitous appeal.

“The growing tendency to priorities profit over the wellbeing of the individual” is a “phenomenon that we witness in capitalist societies all over the world,” Sharon Yoon, a Korean studies professor at the University of Notre Dame in the United States, told AFP.

‘Squid Game’ director Hwang Dong-hyuk finished his script a decade ago but failed to attract funding as investors were reluctant and called it “too bloody, unfamiliar and abstruse”.

The filmmaker’s previous works have dealt with themes including sexual abuse, intercountry adoption and disability, all loosely based on real-life events.

And the television series -- his first -- makes clear references to several traumatising collective experiences that have shaped the psyche of today’s South Koreans, including the 1997 Asian financial crisis and the 2009 layoffs at Ssangyong Motor, both of which saw people take their own lives.

Social mobility had become “much less possible” now than before 1997, he said, “and the trauma of deepening inequality... is spilled onto the screens”.

Netflix offers the show in both dubbed and subtitled versions in multiple languages, expanding its potential audience.

Brian Hu, a film professor at San Diego State University in the United States, said the fact it was popular in almost 100 countries was evidence it was not made only for Western viewers.

Western audiences have long associated foreign media with depictions of poverty, and it’s become a way of looking down on the backwards rest of the world,” he told AFP.

“The unique thing about ‘Parasite’ and ‘Squid Game’ is that while the works depict poverty and class inequality, they do so in a way that exerts Korea’s technical and cinematic modernity,” he added.