Lord of the Squid Game
Squid Game is Netflix’s most streamed show ever. Set in South Korea, it tells the story of Gi-Hun, Sae-Byok, Sang-Woo, Ali, and others as they join high stakes games for truly desperate people.
And yes, I KNOW I’m several months behind!
I watched the entire series over the weekend. It’s as binge-able and intriguing as everybody says, and a great continuation of a genre that includes Battle Royale and Hunger Games. But when thinking back on the show, I keep thinking back to an older story: Lord of the Flies.
BIG OLD SPOILERS AHOY. FOR REAL. STOP HERE.
If you lose the games in Squid Game, you die. That’s one of those spoilers that seem so obvious that you can’t talk about the show if you don’t mention it, so let’s just get that one out of the way.
What interests me about Squid Game and Lord of the Flies isn’t so much the direct similarities (a mysterious island, life or death stakes, conspiracy, and tribalism) as the fact that the stories are mirrors of one another. Lord of the Flies is a story about kids acting surprisingly like adults when left to their own devices: when a plane full of boys fleeing war crashes, the boys end up making government, religion (and I think that appeasing “the beast” counts), and all-out war. This is unsurprising to those who believe children are monsters, like the author William Golding, Ray Bradbury, and, naturally, me.
Squid Game is the opposite: adults, when torn away from the people they know and society as they know it, grown adults behave like children: they form cliques and teams, they bully and cheat, they flirt and they talk behind each other’s backs. This is unsurprising to those who believe that people are monsters (me again.)
The goals of each transformation are different. Golding’s story is an allegory. It defies the idea that people are essentially good or innocent, even as children, and says that people are predisposed to superstition, deceit, and war. The fact that they act shockingly like the adults that they learned from is a general statement about the kinds of people are in the world. And when Ralph is finally rescued at the end of the story by a Royal Navy ship, and the naval officer is shocked that the kids have fallen to such depravity, he turns around and looks at his warship, realizing, “Oh, shit. Who am I to judge?” The kids are shaped by their society, largely unintentionally, to become violent and untrustworthy.
In Squid Game, the transformation from adult to childhood is coaxed on at every turn by the mysterious creator of the games. The games give desperate people a “choice": play the games to win enough money for all your problems to disappear, or go back to a life of soul-crushing debt. Then the players are moved to a compound that deliberately sends them back to childhood: fake schoolyards, primary-colored rooms, school lunches, and, of course, the childhood games that they must win or die.
The message of this seems to be less about the inherent childishness inside everyone. It feels more like a statement on how society looks down on those in poverty: the games are entertainment for those wealthy enough to never need them, and the players are “naughty children.” Screw-ups. They should be fully functioning adults, but instead they messed it up, and need to play children’s games for a shot at “normal life.” And if you have to murder ordinary people to earn that “normal life,” so be it.
And what better example of that than the first player we meet, Gi-Hun? A loser in real life who can’t even be trusted to buy a gift for his daughter’s birthday. His mom is still supporting him well into his thirties. He’s a loser and a man-child, and he’s used to gambling on game to try to get ahead. The farther he gets, the more guilty he becomes. The less he cares about the other players as real people, the more he thinks of them as other kids to beat, the further he can get. And there’s a certain ugly part of us that is more like the audience constructing these games than the scrappy adults trying to survive them.
I don’t think these connections are intentional, but I do find them interesting. Adults and kids aren’t that different, sadly. But, then, who’s going to tune in for nine episodes of happy stories?