February 2025
By Gabriela Semenov, Staff Reporter
In a world of constantly moving, changing and shaping parts, it’s hard to notice when we’re suddenly stuck in the mud, forced to decide the fate of our lives– suffering now? Or suffering later? Money, as much of a blessing as it is a curse, is oftentimes the villain of this prophecy…but do we recognize it as such? You tell me.
Based on a traditional South Korean children’s game, also known as squid game, or Ojingeo, the Netflix show Squid Games is a South Korean drama that launched in the Fall of 2021. The ongoing eighteen episode, two season program follows Seong Gi-hun: the cheeky lead of season one and trauma stricken vigilante of season two. Suffocating in debt and gambling compromises, Gi-hun, alongside four hundred and fifty five other bankrupt contestants, accept dubious invitations to the Squid Games.
Unbeknownst to them, the invitation would be to participate in a deadly six round elimination sequence of children’s games. The winner gets a cash prize of 45.6 billion won, or 38 million dollars.
The games test the strength or flexibility of the contestants’ moral character, as well as their survival skills and will to win. While simple, every game holds the highest stakes imaginable; life.
The show’s central theme of survival is explored through visual representations of capitalism in South Korean society. While Squid Games is set in an entirely unique polity with its own distinct economic troubles and social constructs, it spreads a universal message; desperation, morality, free-will, and sacrifice are concepts that exist concurrently and intersect at many points in a person’s life. They are able to overtake us in times of trouble, exploiting our own rationality and making us the most incoherent, and sometimes naturalistic forms of ourselves.
In the case of Squid Games, this intersection becomes most apparent when those invited are inserted into the games and forced to play, not just by the makers of the game or the Front Man, but by the players themselves.
Before being introduced to the Games, we are shown characters unable to settle into the liberties of a comfortable life because of what they owe, and who they owe money to.
When thrust into the crux of the games, these same characters vary in becoming increasingly tactless towards others or protective of their comrades as more contestants die and the games present themselves undiscriminatorily ruthless. Each character displays their humanity in different ways, with no distinct black or white expressions to describe their actions, decisions, or feelings.
Korea’s presentation of wealth inequality and its correlation with choice in Squid Games is both very different and very similar to the realities of other Capitalist countries. Maybe you don’t gamble on horse racing. Maybe you don’t work for a street mobster because you owe money. And yet, we are all, at one point in our lives, going to be a Gi-hun, or a Saebyeok, or a Sangwoo. Life is going to hurdle financial obstacles in our way that will challenge our humanity, morality, logic, or empathy (maybe even all at once).
As Americans, we experience the hard strike of Capitalism first hand– in our social systems, economic classes, how we interact with identity, the clothes we wear, the food we eat, the music we make, the media we see, you name it.
The trick of Squid Games– what it fails to be transparent about– is that death really isn’t a choice; either the contestants wither in their crippling debt, or they get eliminated trying to fight for its relief.
Capitalism has set up the perfect system so that the line between life before the game and after the game is blurred for the contestant. Our life and the hellish escapes we see in TV shows like Squid Games fall very close to the fine line of “fiction” and “reality”, too.
It comes down to what you’re willing to accept and what you’re willing to ignore: how you choose to operate yourself in times of distress and how you operate yourself among others who are just as scared as you.
If you try to deny or are blind to the traps society has for you, then you’re just as likely to wake up in a green hall with towering bunk beds, preparing every night to fight against your demise!
If you cannot see the value in being emotionally or mentally strong, how different are you compared to a meek, stray player– following around the Alpha personality until you’re inevitably used as a barrier between life or death?
If you do not have enough compassion to maintain sympathy and patience with people who are stuck in the same boat as you, what makes you think you’ll last until day six?
Acceptance in a Capitalistic society is dangerous but ignorance? It will be your executioner. Survival is confrontation; Will you accept the little brown card and call the number? Will you vote O or X? Will you turn back from that plane and step away…leap towards something unknown?
The Cardinal Post 