Squid Game is officially Netflix’s most popular series ever, with 111 million views in just four weeks. The streaming service announced the news this week, tweeting that the drama has had the ‘biggest series launch’ of any show including Bridgerton, Money Heist and Stranger Things.
Watching the show myself, I can see exactly why. The premise of South Korean drama centres around rich people using the most vulnerable in society as entertainment, offering them cash rewards to play warped versions of children’s games that they can bet on. The players, all in serious debt and desperate for a way out, die if they can’t complete a game successfully. The rich investors watch their attempts at survival, laughing and betting on their success along the way in order to make their money at the expense of others lives.
What’s ironic then is that Squid Game is considered a ‘dystopian’ drama – which is defined as ‘relating to or denoting an imagined state or society where there is great suffering or injustice.’ Reading that description of the show above, I would hardly say it’s an imagined society, but rather a very real metaphor for ours.
Squid Game’s creator and writer, Hwang Dong-hyuk, doesn’t necessarily see it as dystopian either. ‘I wanted to write a story that was an allegory or fable about modern capitalist society, something that depicts an extreme competition, somewhat like the extreme competition of life,’ he told Variety last month. ‘But I wanted it to use the kind of characters we’ve all met in real life.’
Squid Game is an allegory about modern capitalist society.
In South Korea, that’s more true than ever. Financial crises over the past two decades there has created stark income inequalities in the country, with personal debt rising and job markets decaying. But even in the UK, the idea that vulnerable people live and die at the mercy of the most affluent is hardly a far-reaching metaphor. Rather, it’s most of our realities.
Our government, ran by the most privileged among us, creates policies that have active implications on our survival. The mishandling of coronavirus is the most recent proof of that, with multiple ministers accused of giving expensive, life-saving contracts to close friends. Right now, the cuts to universal credit are resulting in lifelines being taken away for the most financially at-risk, while the government is increasing our National Insurance payments to fund an NHS they’ve been part-privatising for years.
While our living costs rise, the richest in society are able to reinvest their capital and watch their wealth grow – meanwhile many of us are barely paid a living wage. But hey, I don’t need to explain capitalism to you – watch Squid Game and that will do it for you.
Ultimately, it’s no surprise so-called dystopian dramas prove so successful on Netflix. The past 18-months have awoken even the most apolitical to how much our lives are truly at the whim of a certain few. For a long time, whimsical period dramas about romance and royalty offered a much-needed escapism from our bleak reality. But now, as we watch our society played out in the form of a survival drama, there’s no escaping how much Squid Game speaks to people's realities around the world.
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