Squid Game and The American Dream

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past month, you have undoubtedly caught wind of, or better yet binged, the newest piece of entertainment out of South Korea: the wildly provocative and thrilling Netflix series that is Squid Game.

Released to the mega streaming service on September 17th of this year, Squid Game didn’t waste any time in its worldwide takeover, quickly spreading its tentacles from Europe to the United States where it grew to the most-watched show within days triggering a Netflix higher-up to state that it is on pace to become the most popular Netflix show of all time.

Yet oddly, in its country of origin, Squid Game was met with mixed and skeptical views that starkly run contrary to its reception by basically the rest of the world. According to The Economist, many South Koreans found “the characters to be cliched, the plot unconvincing and the violence gratuitous.”

The thing is…the Koreans aren’t wrong.

When I first sat down to watch Squid Game I felt my hand creeping towards the remote for a swift change of programming, an urge that was quickly halted by my insistent roommate who seemed to predict its success before the rest of the world.

I found, in that first episode, the series to be exactly that which bothered the Korean critics: the characters had no depth, the plot dragged along like molasses, and worst of all, it didn’t come anywhere near originality.

Against all my instincts, I persisted and by the end of the second episode, the coin had flipped. I was inexplicably hooked and so too, it seemed to be, was the United States as a whole.

So why exactly is it that we Americans are so fascinated with Squid Game, more so, perhaps, than the rest of the world?

Well, there are a collection of superficial components that could explain our rapid and unusual attraction. For starters, that very “gratuitous violence” that bothered Korean viewers is exactly what we Americans seem to look for in a show. It’s no secret that the American viewership has a special attachment to violent media whether it be in our shows and movies, our music, or, of course, our video games.

Another explanation might be our recent and growing infatuation with Korean culture. Since the explosion of K-Pop on American soil several years ago, interest in the Korean entertainment industry has expanded significantly peaking during the recent, gargantuan success of Parasite (the first foreign-language film to win Best Picture at the Oscars).

While these and other explanations are by no means invalid, I would like to propose an alternate, more subtle explanation for the extraordinary interest in Squid Game by the United States: The American Dream.

The American Dream is an ideology that we have been collectively fed since birth. It posits that among the many freedoms guaranteed to us as Americans by our founding fathers is an equal opportunity at prosperity and upward social mobility.

This thought permeates our language, our daily lives, and the stories we tell so completely that it has become invisible, inherent, and, indeed, part of who we are. It is referred to in the Declaration of Independence as “All men created equal” and that message echoes endlessly in the stories we tell, the offices in which we work, and the households and classrooms of our children.

Yet the cruel reality of the American Dream is that while all may be created equal, we certainly aren’t treated that way and that is a sentiment that becomes more and more clear as the gap between the super-wealthy and everyone else continues to expand.

Today, the citizens of the United States call out those individuals and corporations that have achieved an ungodly level of wealth upon the sweat-drenched backs of those who themselves believe to be in an equal race toward the tantalizing American Dream.

So what does this all have to do with Squid Game?

Like shows and movies before it (i.e. Battle Royale or The Hunger Games), Squid Game highlights the very inequality one faces in the “Pursuit of Happiness.”

Here you have 456 contestants, voluntary ones at that, who all start on equal ground promised that, if victorious, they will relish in the spoils of prosperity, their financial problems gone, and their minds forever at ease.

At a glance, the game seems like the dream, the quixotic dream that we have all been told exists. Yet like reality, it isn’t long before certain characters emerge that seem strangely familiar.

First, you have the common criminal, represented by Deok-Su, who employs violence, fear, and physical tools (indeed, sex) to cut corners and rise above the others. Think of everyone from the bank robbers of the 1930s to the masked gunman who holds up an unsuspecting victim at an ATM.

Then you have the much more slippery and difficult-to-digest villain in Sang-Woo who masquerades as a helping hand only to have his fingers crossed behind his back. Sang-Woo could be seen as big banks and financial deviants who steal far more from hard-working citizens and are reprimanded far less.

Sang-Woo’s past is by no means vague in its pursuit of this archetype as he ended up in the game by cheating millions out of the financial world. He is ruthless, smart, and quick to step on his friends to reach that golden piggy bank hanging from the ceiling.

HoYeon, the beautiful North Korean defect turned pickpocket can even be seen as the role immigrants play in The American Dream. She employs her cunning and individualism for the more admirable goal of providing care for her younger brother and finding a way to bring her mother across the border.

This falls in line with the millions and millions of immigrants who have overcome enormous hardship to find prosperity in The United States in order to uncover better lives for their families.

Finally, we have Gi-Hun, our protagonist. Gi-Hun, a man hard on his luck, threatened by loan sharks and the prospect of his only daughter being taken away from him (to the United States), emerges as a White Knight of sorts who stands up, through comradery, to the evils at work.

Gi-Hun is guided not by the money but by an infallible moral compass that, of course, leads him directly to the prize at the end. He stays true to his childhood friend despite misgivings, eagerly invites the immigrant into his circle of trust, and most important of all lends a helping hand to the old man when no one else would.

Who is the old man, you ask? Well, he must certainly be none other than God. It’s no coincidence that Gi-Hun’s undying loyalty to the old man (dare I say his faith?) is exactly what helped him conquer the many pitfalls and would-be villains of the game. Faith in a higher power is also explicitly linked to The American Dream as, according to the founding fathers, it would be futile to chase such exploits without a divine trainer in your corner.

And just as so many people who have been exposed to the true horrors of life do, Gi-Hun fervently questions the old man’s intentions upon discovering that he is in fact the creator. Why? Why must there be so much evil? Why did you create this? Why did you put us here?

Why indeed, Gi-Hun.

To take it a step further, the creators of Squid Game included an uber-rich viewing party protected by a two-way mirror and clad in jewel-covered masks who seemed to be predominantly made up of Americans. Coincidence? I think not!

These “investors,” or better yet fans, trivialized the lives of the contestants and placed large bets on their successes adding an interesting component to the story as it pointed to a much larger scale operation that was at work.

It also exposed a class of people who seem to think they are above everyone else and who have no problem playing with the lives of others for their own entertainment and monetary gain.

Placing these characters behind the curtain was a brilliant stroke as they resemble so closely the villains who we would like to see fall in real life. They take the spotlight, and suddenly we don’t hate Sang-Woo or Deok-Su as they are just players trying to do their best to survive.

I don’t believe that Hwong Dong-hyuk had the American Dream in mind when he created this seminal piece of entertainment. I do believe, however, that it is the numerous jarring parallels outlined above that could be a possible reason for our fascination with the project.

Like Arthur Miller’s hyper-successful “Death of the Salesman,” Squid Game strikes a chord within our collective consciousness, making it difficult to look away.

Is it a cautionary tale describing the dangers of sacrificing your humanity to playing a game that is indeed rigged from the beginning? Or perhaps a declaration of war upon those members of society who truly deserve to have the finger pointed at them?

Maybe still Squid Game is simply a violent, cliched TV show that our brains have been conditioned to enjoy after so many installments of movies like The Fast and the Furious.

In any case, Squid Game’s popularity in The United States is encouraging for it shows that Americans are more willing to open their minds and accept a challenging piece of art (with subtitles, no less), to accept the work of another culture, to leave themselves at the door and allow themselves to be engulfed by a good story.

At the heart of it, when you strip away all this allegorical nonsense and rhetorical criticism, that is exactly what Squid Game is: a good, entertaining story.