America is the Squid Game
Image; CNET
The hit Netflix series Squid Game is a serialized drama about contestants participating in a deadly series of challenges. In the same vein as works like Battle Royale (2000) and Alice in Borderland (2020), the players participate in childlike games for the chance at fortune. The losers die, often brutally so, and the winner is offered an obscene amount of money.
However, it's more than merely a kitschy excuse to have people play deadly childhood games. The Squid Game is having a pretty extensive conversation about class and the lengths people will go to pay off their debts and secure a financial future. The game is an on-the-nose metaphor for the predatory nature of our current financial system.
The show has shot to the top of the charts in America, quickly becoming one of the most top-watched shows in Netflix history. This success is not only because of the compelling acting and the brilliantly surreal cinematography but because most counties, including America, have many of the elements of the Squid Game. The poverty and desperation among the show's characters are not just a grounded premise, but an emotional reality that we feel in our day-to-day lives.
All of the contestants are in this game because they "technically" chose to be there. All of them have racked up a substantial amount of debt for various reasons (e.g., gambling addiction, bad bets on the stock market, medical costs, etc.) in our capitalist society. They need the game's prize money— over 45.4 billion won (or roughly 37.9 million dollars) — to pay off their financial obligations. "Every person standing here in this room is living on the brink of financial ruin," lectures one of the faceless workers of the Squid Game.
Even after the murderous stakes are revealed to the contestants, and they temporarily decide via majority vote to leave, the bulk of them decide to come back anyway because this money to them is a matter of life and death. "Yeah, what they say is true," says one of the alleged contestants on his reason for wanting to go back to the games, "Out here, the torture is worse."
This level of debt is not fictional to many people in our capitalist society. According to one analysis from Money Geek, the average US household has more than $155,000 in debt, with about 76% of all households having some kind of debt. We know from other sources that the number of bankruptcies filed has steadily increased over the years, and most of them are coming from individuals, not businesses, usually due to some kind of medical issue. The Money Geek study didn't analyze medical debt, but one analysis coming out of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research claimed that medical debt exceeded all other forms of debt, writing in a takeaway:
“Between 2009 and 2020, total medical debt in collections decreased less than reductions in nonmedical debt. By 2020, individuals had more medical debt in collections than they had in debt in collections from all other sources combined, including credit cards, phone bills, and utilities.”
When characters like Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae) fret about being unable to pay for their mother's diabetes treatment, it's coming from a place that many Americans know all too well. Many of us are drowning in financial burdens that will not be paid off in our lifetimes — certainly not with new debts being cumulatively added every year. This precarious situation leaves people just as desperate as the contestants in the show.
Sometimes that desperation manifests into the get-quick-rich schemes that have proliferated the Internet in recent years. Every year, millions of Americans fall for scams, legal or otherwise, because they are desperate for money. There is no shortage of people taking how-to-get-rich-quick classes that promise to make them independently wealthy, or in some cases, investing in actual Ponzi schemes and other financial fraud in the hopes that that will lead to a more secure future. However, these efforts are far more likely to only enrich the pockets of the scammers selling these offers.
We also see this desperation in how many Americans claw at any chance for fame. Millions contribute free content to sites like YouTube or TikTok in an attempt to translate that potential social capital into cash, but most users will never see a return in investment on their work. As Todd C. Frankel writes in The Washington Post of one 2018 study: "…the odds of striking it rich on YouTube — or even making a modest living — are small. Reaching the top 3.5 percent of YouTube's most-viewed channels — which means at least 1 million video views a month — is worth only about $12,000 to $16,000 a year in advertising revenue." People are fighting for a fraction of a diminishing pie, and in exchange, they are giving away much of their work for free.
This trend also applies to reality TV. Thousands every year sign up for reality shows so they can be rich and famous. Yet, these shows are often just effective vehicles to help producers get around union regulations. For example, the show RuPaul's Drag Race infamously required that their contestants do all the things actors do (e.g., reshoot scenes, enter the contestant's home or place of business to position cameras, participate in sponsorships, etc.), while also having fewer benefits, reduced pay, and having to provide their own food.
Most reality shows operate like this. They hire amateur actors who willingly sign up for labor exploitation in exchange for a slim chance at greater wealth and fame. It's in many ways the same dynamic in Squid Games, only not so much death. As former reality contestant Leonie McSorley says of their experience on the MTV show Ex on the Beach: "They basically sell you a dream and say you're going to be famous and it's going to be great, but they don't really emphasise enough how that's a slim chance."
Sometimes the things people are doing to get ahead are not even that glamorous. Its well-documented that Amazon warehouses are not great places to work. The benefits are mediocre, the labor is excruciating, and you can be fired at any time for not meeting increasingly difficult quotas. At $18 an hour for full-time workers, however, they pay people well more than many competitors in their profession, and that's incentive enough. When I visited the Baltimore Fulfillment Center years ago, more people were trying to sign up for work than those looking to inspect the facility. It's not that workers didn't know they were being exploited (though some were undoubtedly in denial). Many knew what type of economic system they were in, and we're trying to make the best of it.
The majority of us have an underlying level of desperation within our current economic system, which makes most of us disposable to those in power. At any moment, we can be swapped in for another, more pliant person who doesn't ask pointed questions about the status quo. In the past couple of decades, corporations have been more than willing to fire disgruntled workers en masse who try to unionize or protest.
This disposability is something Squid Game captures rather poignantly in nearly every frame. Not only are the contestant's disposal, marching to their deaths for the amusement of unseen VIPs, but so are the workers maintaining the facility. We learn halfway through the first season that the masked workers doing the labor to run the games are also treated indifferently by upper management. They are also called numbers and don't even have the privilege of taking off their masks or speaking with their superiors unless given permission to do so, or they risk being gunned down. "It's a huge problem when a player goes missing, but when it's a soldier, no one cares," says one worker to a player.
It's not simply an us vs. them dynamic within the Squid Game, but a system of oppression that traps most everyone to varying degrees. Some may be better off, as the workers in the Squid Game are compared to the players, but the moment someone takes off their mask, they receive a similar fate — they are discarded. They cannot reject their role any more than the players can.
This reality is the same in our world. If you are a middle-class worker making your money off the exploitation of the lower classes, you cannot stop showing up to work. Sure, you may "choose" to go someplace else, in the same way, the players were free to stop playing the game, but eventually, you will have to play someone else's game. Very few of us will ever get the money to check out. It is an illusory aim that many of us will die before reaching. Refusing to participate in American capitalism may not always be as quick as in the Squid Game, but it's death nonetheless.
The most ironic part of this series is that the person overseeing the Squid game, the mysterious Front Man (Lee Byung-hun), thinks this game is fair. When one of the workers assists another player in episode five, A Fair World, he monologues about how these actions interfered with the integrity of the games, saying: "you ruined the most important aspect of this place. Equality. Everyone is equal while they play this game. Here, every player gets to play a fair game under the same conditions. These people suffered from inequality and discrimination out in the world, and we're giving them one last chance to fight fair and win."
But the game isn't fair. It's an emotionally manipulative mess that purposefully hides its rules and objectives, so only the most manipulative and lucky players get ahead. It's a game that biases physical mobility, strength, and emotional sociopathy. Its essentially creating the perfect conditions to replicate the worldview of those in power — one that claims that people are inherently bad and that our system rightfully rewards those who embrace that component of human nature.
When the game's mysterious VIPs come to watch the final game in person, they are almost all rich, white businessmen who are there because they are bored. There is no greater purpose here, only terrible people rationalizing their own cruelty. The Front Man hasn't stumbled into a meritocracy but is merely facilitating a ruthless game arranged for the enjoyment of the very rich.
America is like this in many ways. We are not the only country that struggles with wealth inequality, but we have exacerbated it. We lack the protections of many developed countries (paid paternity/maternity leave, a livable wage, universal healthcare, etc.), and so many people are desperate, struggling to gain a foothold in a country that doesn't want to give it to them. Like in the Squid Game, many workers are so focused on hustling and figuring out their next steps that, out of survival, they ignore the fact that most of us will not win the game of capitalism, and far more will die trying.
In the meantime, the rich get to do whatever the hell they want. It doesn't matter if their desires are as absurd as restarting civilization 244.57 million miles away on a dead world, discovering immortality, or in the case of the Squid Game, having the poor kill themselves for entertainment, the rich have the right to do it. They can do whatever they want — the needs and wants of the many be damned.
And all the while, we rationalize this inequity by claiming that the system is fair — that anyone can get ahead if they truly work at it. We are a deeply unequal country that tricks itself into believing the game we play is meritocratic, ignoring that this fact is simply untrue.
But hey, at least you get to choose the unfair game that you play.