Illustration by Luna Lopez.
Squid Game Debrief: Capitalism, Colonialism and Human Connection
Two friends discuss Squid Game after binging it in two days; reactions, predictions, conspiracy theories and spoilers included.
Sarah Afaneh
,- and
Andrew Riad
Nov 7, 2021
Editor's Note: This article is structured as a conversation between the two authors.
Andrew: Is it recording? Yay. Okay, let’s get right into it.
Squid Game, a South Korean TV show, follows characters who are immensely in debt participating in a series of games to earn millions and millions of dollars. But, they are actually just being pawned off as betting horses by a group of old rich (mostly white) men.
The players are contacted through a stranger who asks them to play a game. They volunteer to participate. They sign away consent to their body. Throughout the series, the losers are “eliminated” –– killed. In this process, there are multiple psychological and narrative dimensional digressions that ultimately depict reality in a horrifically resonant manner.
Sarah: They set up a dystopian-like world, almost, inside of the game, and then they slowly broke down how it works in a way that made sense. We only went in and out of the game once during the entire thing.
I wanted to ask why you predicted the old man was evil?
A: I don’t know, in some depictions he would have evident dementia, but then be able to do ‘Red Light Green Light’ ... Something was off.
S: I felt like the character’s dementia was good acting.
A: I feel like they casted the Squid Game characters so well where you really believed you were watching another human being, not an actor. You know what I mean? So when I thought of it like that, he’s doing things as a person that are questionable. It was just a feeling.
S: For me, their choice to make him the character that ends up being evil was almost trope-y. But they did it well.
A: That’s the thing. Actually, Squid Game is trope-y. But it is done in such a nice way. He just wanted to feel like a kid again before he died; that is why in the games, the house was decorated like his childhood home.
S: But why put all these people’s lives at stake as well? Why add people as bait?
A: Because how can you tap into childhood so much, without materializing it? And that includes other people.
S: He craved it so much that he created a metafictional game for himself.
A: But it’s not just people, it’s people in debt.
S: But Seong Gi-Hun’s win was premeditated.
A: That makes me question the entire essence of the game. Isn’t it supposed to be fair and equal?
S: Obviously they’re manipulating the players into believing that’s true. At the end of the day, it’s a bunch of old men who have too much money.
A: On the VIPs, at the beginning especially when they were introduced, it broke the image — I was so in the TV show, I was so in the scene. Guards had outfits, masks, but then these people walked in wearing suits and strap-on masks.
S: I feel like the VIPs were too expected. Okay actually, I have an interesting point. We are unaware of how much South Korean politics is at play — there is the young girl from North Korea and Ali's character. I think part of the VIP scene is that their audience wasn't international.
A: I feel like it was always expected to reach an international audience. But maybe we are missing something in translation, which is huge.
S: They tap into a lot about language and politics. I think what was more unexpected was the prison-like atmosphere that was created throughout the games.
A: Yeah I saw bits and pieces of the Stanford Prison Experiment, especially after the ‘lights out’ night, I can draw so many similarities.
S: Exactly there's a lot of psychology, like even the colors of the buttons in the first episode…
A: When we were talking, we said psychological intentions … It's not just games —
S: But I think for the old man, this is the biggest game he could ever play. Because for me, the only time I saw him as delirious was when he was playing the games. Even in the marble episode, you’re meant to pity him, but in reality, you should have been pitying the main character.
I think our main character was very naive to the old man. We’ve seen most characters through his lens, right? It's third person but it's very close. Even if we lowkey expected it, it’s not like he knew.
A: Wait, I wanted to say one more thing about the VIPs. I think it’s important, for example, when the only person who is naked on screen is the VIP who tries to assault the detective.
S: I think that’s more than intentional.
A: Under all this colonial patriarchy and capitalism, it is just a white man with money.
S: I think my heart broke the most when the detective died. I —
A: No, my heart broke the most when Ji-Yeong died.
S: Oh my God yeah, I think Sae-Byeok’s friendship with Ji-Yeong is so important. Just about human connection, a last minute need to bond, to have someone to remember you by, someone to mourn you.
A: Ji-Yeong had nothing in life. I mean … when it came down to killing yourself or your closest “friend” in the games, to die in the games and not in her reality seemed to be a better alternative.
S: Here is an interesting point: I don't think it's realistic that the players’ would not have picked up that they were going to start betraying each other. They had to have realized that they had no control.
A: Yeah, I agree. How did no one question that? But this is in translation. I think there are many partner childhood games in South Korea, or at least it seems like it from the show.
S: I feel like, to some degree, I would not have picked someone I cared about.
A: The trajectory of the intent to kill went from “you are on your own” to the shapes and what you pick, encompassing your luck a little to indirectly killing someone you care about —
S: This intent matters SO much because of psychology. The last level is direct murder with the knives and Squid Game. At the marble stage, if the majority felt they had to shoot someone, they would have backed out. People's consciousnesses were more at ease with the marble game.
A: It’s a process of desensitization.
I hated the ending. He went through all that for his daughter.
S: I think choosing not to get on the plane is supposed to break the resolve that we had just witnessed. A happy ending isn’t logical.
A: I do think it could be post-traumatic stress disorder. The games could psychologically condition the players into these traumatic aftereffects.
S: Ah, we could talk about this for hours — don’t get me started on the complexity of the Front Man’s character, the guards' own prison-like life, the cycle of the games and never escaping them and, of course, how these all parallel reality.
Sarah Afaneh and Andrew Riad are Contributing Writers. Email them at feedback@thegazelle.org.
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