In the two weeks since it landed on Netflix, the South Korean horror drama Squid Game has proved to be a runaway success. It became the No 1 watched show on Netflix in 90 countries in the first 10 days of its release and prompted Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos to speculate that it could soon become the biggest series in the streaming giant’s history.
Created by South Korean director Hwang Dong-hyuk, the show is a gruesomely violent fable about the inequalities of neoliberal societies in which the gap between the haves and the have-nots is so wide that the promises of wealth and prosperity which are sold to ordinary citizens are unattainable due to the realities of the cost of living.
Dong-hyuk came up with the idea for the show — in which debt-ridden Koreans are taken to an island to compete against each other for millions of dollars in prize money in a series of six lethal versions of traditional Korean children’s games — in 2008, when the global recession left millions of people in debt without financial security.
Since then he’s expanded the original feature film idea into a nine-episode show that has been updated to include references to the coronavirus and the debilitating effects of the pandemic on the ability of average Koreans to achieve basic economic stability.
Squid Game has inspired millions of tweets and more than 4- billion videos using the show’s title as a hashtag have already appeared on TikTok where you can see everything from food bloggers looking to replicate the recipe for the honeycomb cookies that form a pivotal part of one of its episodes to amateur created video games that mimic its terrifying twists on children’s games such as Red Light, Green Light and Tug of War.
While its premise echoes that of fan favourite survivalist pop culture phenomena like Lord of the Flies, The Hunger Games and the cult Japanese schoolgirl fight-to-the-death film Battle Royale, there is undoubtedly something going on in the world beyond the show that’s striking a chord with audiences about the world at this moment.
Some of its success may be pinned to the anxiety that many people are feeling as they emerge from over a year of isolation to go back to offices and participate in the rat race.
A lot of it has to do with the story of South Korea, a country whose post-war economic boom was held up as an example for developing countries, earned it the title of “the miracle on the Han River”, and made it one of the richest countries in Asia.
In recent years the reality of life for many South Koreans has been characterised by a huge gap in wealth disparity, leading the country to climb the ranks of the list of most unequal societies, measured using the Gini coefficient — where it now occupies the 11th position, behind the US and SA — the most unequal society on earth.
One of the strongest factors in prohibiting the economic mobility of average South Koreans has been the runaway price of houses, leading to huge household debt that threatens to hold back the ability of the country’s economy to grow. House prices there have soared over the past few years by more than 50%.
Dong-hyuk’s surreal version of the get-rich quick scheme with its violent twist is a horrifying extension of an already fast encroaching reality.
Korean society places immense stock in economic success and drums its importance into the children busying themselves with playground games at school but the difficulties of achieving that success are becoming impossible with large numbers of well-educated young people struggling to full-time employment that would enable them to plan for the stable future they’re supposed to aspire to.
The despondency at the difficulties in obtaining job security and houses has also led to a drop in birth rates, as young people believe that children are too much of an economic liability. More and more young Koreans have put their faith in the get-rich quick promises of lotteries and cryptocurrency.
Dong-hyuk’s surreal version of the get-rich quick scheme with its violent twist, in which unsuccessful players are murdered, is a horrifying extension of a fast encroaching reality. A mistake by the producers of the show, which saw one of the phone numbers that contestants for the games have to call to participate, mirroring real phone numbers, led to several poor South Koreans receiving more than 4,000 phone calls a day from curious fans of the show, asking to play the game for real.
That’s a worrying and depressing indication of just how successfully the show mimics the sense of despair and hopelessness that’s pervading the lived existence of many people in South Korea and the rest of the world where the inequality gap is so wide that it seems insurmountable.
The answer to the question of whether people would sign up if there was an equally violent real-world version of Dong-hyuk’s imagined show, seems to be that you’d be surprised at how many would. That’s a reality far more terrifying than anything a fictional show could conjure.
• Squid Game is available on Netflix.
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