After three seasons of Squid Game, what have we learnt?

Australia Broadcast Center

2 days ago

For more than a decade, South Korean director Hwang Dong-hyuk couldn't convince a studio to fund his film project about a brutal game show that preyed on society's most vulnerable.
It wasn't until the late 2010s, after Hwang became a household name in South Korea, that Netflix took notice. They convinced the director to elongate his proposal, and he created an eight-episode miniseries that would become Squid Game.
When he was writing Squid Game, he had one goal: to make the show rank "No 1 on the Netflix US chart for at least a day".
The success of the show's first outing resulted in a second season, released while South Korea was in the middle of political unrest. Now, the third and final season has arrived.
While the international interest in capitalism-critical dramas from Korea might seem to have come from nowhere, appetite has been steadily growing in the country for decades.
To understand its rise, you must first understand the climate in which it has flourished, says Dr Sung-Ae Lee, an expert in Korean popular culture at Macquarie University. Over its short history, South Korea has experienced radical social change at an incredibly fast pace, Dr Lee says. The country went from military dictatorships of the mid-20th century to "capitalist industrialisation" to the "fragile and conservative version of democratisation" in the 1990s.
"However, the country still manifests distinctly traditional characteristics of a feudal society. Power and wealth are concentrated in the hands of 1 per cent of the people, and social mobility is almost impossible," Dr Lee told ABC Entertainment.
"Censorship had eased by the turn of the century but South Korean media are still liable to censor 'political' material. So criticism of capitalism really only dates from the 21st century."
Soon after the turn of the millennium, anti-capitalist themes began popping up in South Korean films — such as Bong Joon Ho's The Host (2007), which "uses the monster genre to comment on the negative effects on the lower classes of South Korea of foreign economic manipulation, environmental pollution and military intervention".
Bong's interest in capitalism-critical creations would lead him all the way to the Academy Awards, where his 2019 film, Parasite — a story about a lower-class family infiltrating a rich family — became the first non-English-language film to win Best Picture.
Dr Lee says the social anxiety prevalent in modern South Korean cinema has spoken to disgruntled attitudes towards capitalism worldwide.
"Squid Game articulates anxiety about neoliberal capitalism: precarious employment and disposable workers (they kill them!); huge income inequality; the callousness of the rich; and suggests that aspirations to wellbeing are futile," she says.
"Unlike most TV dramas, it eschews a 'happy ending'."
Squid Game is also not the first Hwang original to have a tangible impact outside of the screen. His 2011 film, Silenced, tackled a real sexual-assault scandal at Gwangju Inhwa School for the Deaf in the early 2000s.
"The film attracted over 3 million viewers nationwide within two weeks of its release and became a box office sensation," Dr Lee says.
"As a result of the events depicted in this film, the case was reopened and stronger legislation was established."
Wi Ha-joon — who has played police officer Hwang Jun-ho since the show's inception — says he's seen the tangible impact Squid Game has had on the Korean film and TV industry.
"[Squid Game] led to a lot of attention coming from abroad and that facilitated a lot of investment," he told ABC Entertainment through an interpreter.
"This has made the production conditions for these Korean content better and also better in quality."
And, for better or for worse, the Squid Game effect hit reality TV with a resounding boom.
First there came Squid Game: The Challenge, a Netflix-branded British reality show that mimicked everything about its Korean inspiration (minus the killing). Then Amazon produced a rival show that capitalised on the popularity of YouTuber Mr Beast.
While Beast Games also eliminated slaughter, it still caught-class action lawsuits for allegedly leaving contestants starving, injured and in need of therapy.
But Squid Game's impact has reached further than television screens. In late 2021, dozens of Korean Confederation of Trade Unions members donned the distinct hot pink jumpsuits of the deadly guards in the show to protest about pay and conditions.
Last year, as the Korean government was wading through political turmoil following South Korean president Yoon Suk Yeol's declaration of martial law, Hwang used the launch of Squid Game season two to address the similarities between the show and reality.
"Season two draws a lot of parallels with what we are witnessing in the world right now," he said while urging Koreans to take to the streets over political unrest.
"And with a heavy heart, I feel that watching … Squid Game is not going to be very different from watching the news — and that's how I want you to take it."
Hwang has never been reticent about why he signed onto more seasons of Squid Game.
"Money," he told BBC.
"Even though the first series was such a huge global success, honestly, I didn't make much. So doing the second series will help compensate me for the success of the first one too."
The ravenous desire for Squid Game reached further than demand for more episodes, and their dystopian spin-offs.
Since the first season, the show about the very worst side of capitalism became a full-on brand.
Fashion labels such as Crocs, Puma and Oodie clambered to announce collabs. The distinct green-and-pink Squid Game branding has been plastered on everything from whisky bottles to frozen dumplings, with Netflix bragging about more than 100 'partnerships' with the show.
McDonalds Australia released an official Squid Game meal, complete with a dalgona dessert — a reference to the candy-based task in the show that saw characters shot if they didn't complete it in time.
But for the show's long-time stars — Wi Ha-joon and Lee Byung-hun, who plays the morally corrupt leader of the games, The Front Man — it's never been about taking didactic lessons from a television show.
"I don't think [Squid Game] is trying to force a message on the viewers," Lee told ABC Entertainment. "It is just an embodiment of all the social and political issues that are going on in the world, that everyone is feeling.
"I think it's just trying to create room for us to have that conversation."
Wi agrees, saying his time on the show made him ponder his own choices.
"[Squid Game] is showing the world on a smaller scale the side-effects of capitalism," he says.
"[Over the three seasons] I was also asking myself, 'Is there humanitarian love and humanity existing in this world still?'"
Squid Game season three is streaming on Netflix now.