What one is willing to do for money is often dependent on how bad they need the money. That seems easy enough to conceive, but one thing that is fairly universal in capitalist societies is that we put poor individuals in situations that jeopardize their health and safety to survive. The medium I will be exploring is the series Squid Game.
The film identifies a distinct identity of people right from the start and that is the low income individuals of Korea. The individuals are identified by their willingness to gamble their physical safety in order to win small amounts of money through a children’s game on the subway. These
Individuals are identified and then given a card and asked if they want to be involved in a game that could potentially win them a large amount of money.
Once they are identified and brought in they are all numbered and told that they will be playing grade school games like Red Light, Green Light to win the prize money. The catch is that their other alternative is they die. The prize money is built on the number of people who die throughout the games. The players are made to believe they are not forced to participate because if half the group decides to quit they may do so.
We learn, however, when these players leave the game that they do not have anything to lose by playing. Most of them are in such bad living and economic situations that death with the possibility of more money than life on the outside. So they elect to get back into the game. Where 455 players out of 456 players die by the end of the game, leaving the winner with 45.6 billion Won. This is equivalent to just over 38 million US Dollars.
A main troubling dynamic with this show is the dehumanization of the poor. This is represented by giving them numbers instead of using their names. Even for most of the show the poor individuals in their own class do not even share or call each other their names. This represents that it is not just the people in “power” oppressing those below them but also that those in the lower class have dehumanized each other because of the system issues.
This issue has a lot of gruesome scenes and ways of showing these individuals dying. It is complicated because it is not just those in power that are killing the poor, but they are forced to kill each other as well. Even though there are gruesome killings the most haunting part of this show is that it personifies the lengths someone is willing to go for money when they have no other choice and it makes the viewer uncomfortable because in the society we live in it is so easy to identify with the characters.