{"id":570,"date":"2021-11-11T12:35:06","date_gmt":"2021-11-11T12:35:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sirenmag.net\/?p=570"},"modified":"2021-11-11T12:35:06","modified_gmt":"2021-11-11T12:35:06","slug":"brutal-late-capitalism-or-are-we-living-in-a-squid-game","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sirenmag.net\/index.php\/2021\/11\/11\/brutal-late-capitalism-or-are-we-living-in-a-squid-game\/","title":{"rendered":"Brutal Late Capitalism or Are We Living in a Squid Game?"},"content":{"rendered":"

For those of you who haven’t got a TV, or possibly are living off-grid in a cave somewhere, Squid Game is the latest global TV sensation. It riffs off The Hunger Games and all that dystopian SF where people murder each other for money. It has learned from Game of Thrones that killing characters makes screen glue, and nobody should be completely evil (Deok-su excepted).<\/p>\n

Insta-recap: a bunch of indebted ordinary Korean duffers get sucked into a child’s game where you throw envelopes at the floor against a smoothie-sinister man in a suit. He gives them a logo card with a telephone number. Potential players are sleep-gassed and transported to a luridly coloured MC Escher zone where they play children’s games, to the death<\/i>. Only one of the 456 will survive to reap the \u00a330+ million prize.<\/p>\n

SPOILERS AHOY!<\/p>\n

\"Squid<\/p>\n

After some extreme violence in Ep.1 where about 200 people are shot by snipers, in the second episode the players vote to return to ordinary life, or Hell as it is more readily known. They find their awful existence is so lacking that returning to a merciless game is preferable.<\/p>\n

The series is a critique of turbo-capitalism, in a rather simplistic way. It’s classic meta-language, in the same way the Simpsons (a Fox Channel Series) is always contemptuous of Fox and ridicules Rupert Murdoch. Essentially playing both sides. The most villainous player turns out not to be the two-bit thug Deok-su.<\/p>\n

Like Game of Thrones it loves to put the viewer in an impossible dilemma, and twist your emotions till they pop. The kindly protagonist Gi-Hun steals from his mother, gambles away money for his estranged daughter, and then takes advantage of the senile old man Player 001 in Episode 6. That\u00a0 one, called Gganbu (or “best friends”) is as harrowing as the GoT episode where Theon is tortured.<\/p>\n

It wouldn’t be half as effective without the investment we have made in the characters. They are all real people with understandable issues, so we care about them. Even some of the bit-players, for example the glassworker we meet for a couple of minutes in the penultimate game, is a believable person.<\/p>\n

Fantastic television, but not any more a critique of capitalism than Keir Starmer is a human rights lawyer. A trope of fiction is you can have ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, or extraordinary people in ordinary circumstances, but not both. Squid Game applies that principle. The survivors don’t revolt against their oppressors, they just continue on, so it is a form of escapism.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For those of you who haven’t got a TV, or possibly are living off-grid in a cave somewhere, Squid Game is the latest global TV… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":571,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_FSMCFIC_featured_image_caption":"","_FSMCFIC_featured_image_nocaption":null,"_FSMCFIC_featured_image_hide":null,"footnotes":""},"categories":[33,41,46],"tags":[22,32,67],"class_list":["post-570","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-arts-culture","category-tv","category-world-politics","tag-games","tag-tv","tag-violence"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sirenmag.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/570","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sirenmag.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sirenmag.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sirenmag.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sirenmag.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=570"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/sirenmag.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/570\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":574,"href":"https:\/\/sirenmag.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/570\/revisions\/574"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sirenmag.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/571"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sirenmag.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=570"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sirenmag.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=570"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sirenmag.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=570"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}