I just watched this recently because I’m too overwhelmed with all those spoilers!!! But what???!! Now I’m getting crazy all over the overall plot twists! Like those ppl behind the story was just geniuses! And we badly want its season 2 Netflix ヽ( ´¬`)ノ

Squid Game (2021)

There are a lot of really subtle lessons hiding beneath the shock value of Squid Game. Each of the games when viewed individually is a striking thought experiment, but when you compare the games and view the entire competition as a whole, it’s a thorough condemnation of the human race.

What’s the difference between the marbles game and tug-of-war? Nothing, except one exploits human connection to elicit tragedy, while the other thrives on innate group think to inspire bloodthirsty competition.

Spoilers ahead.  

For me the most emotional challenge was the marbles game. It told the story of three sets of partners forced to invent a game with marbles where the loser dies. Now, obviously nobody deserves to die, but pretty much everyone has encountered notional dilemmas where they’re asked to ponder who deserves to be saved more, or conversely, who might have more to live for.

The easiest resolution among the pairings is between Ji-yeong and Sae-byeok. Ji-yeong is an orphan with a tortured past who just got out of prison, Sae-byeok is a North Korean refugee trying to get her mom out of North Korea and get her brother out of an orphanage. Ji-yeong recognizes the disparity in their situations and graciously sacrifices herself for Sae-byeok. It’s hard to watch and caused a lot of tears, but it’s just as hard to argue with her logic. It’s also easier to accept because it’s a decision she made herself.

Then there’s Gi-hun and Il-nam. Gi-hun is a relatively young man with a daughter and sick mother and Il-nam is an old man with a brain tumor. We learn a lot more about Il-nam and his role within the game later, but at the time the marbles game occurs, he just appears to be an old man who’s both literally and figuratively losing his marbles. At first, he pretends he doesn’t want to play, which will presumably get them both killed, but when Gi-hun finally convinces him to participate, Il-nam quickly begins winning.

Gi-hun realizes Il-nam’s vulnerable mental state means he can easily trick him into losing and almost immediately we see Gi-hun’s heart shatter as he struggles with the ethics of deceiving an old man to save his own life. But most of us, if forced to make the choice between the two as a third party, would agree that Gi-hun appears to have a lot more to live for compared to Il-nam, who regardless of the outcome of the game, has already lived a long life and will probably soon be dead of a brain tumor. I ugly cried at the resolution of their match.

But I angry cried at what transpired between Ali and Sang-woo. Ali is a Pakistani immigrant with a wife and young child who found himself deeply in debt because his boss withheld his wages and he got stuck in vicious cycle of poverty. Sang-woo is his mom’s pride and joy, the son of a fish monger who went to a great school and scored a career in finance.

Side note,—most of the first episode is devoted to showing us what a sad sack Gi-hun is, because he blows the money his mom lent him at off-track betting and then can’t afford to buy his daughter a decent birthday dinner or present. He’s a degenerate gambler. Meanwhile, Sang-woo is presented as an Icarus-like character, a man who just flew a little too close to the sun while in reality, he gambled away his client’s money and found himself facing criminal charges for embezzlement. Gi-hun and Sang-woo are basically there for the same reason, but are presented very differently based on their educational attainment and the source of the money they gambled with.

Anyway…at the beginning of the series, Sang-woo seems like one of the most redeemable characters. Though he’s deeply in debt himself, he goes out of his way to help Ali by buying him food and cab fare home during a pause in the game. Then when the marbles come out and it seems like he’s going to lose, he tricks Ali into giving him all his marbles for “safekeeping” and switches the bag out with a bag of rocks. A single man with no family to support decided his life was worth more than a young husband and father he befriended. He seems a little troubled by his decision, but he also gives the impression that he’ll still be able to sleep at night.

Three separate storylines with three different endings present the three people we could try to be: Ji-yeong, who recognizes the greater good and sacrifices herself for it, Gi-hun, who recognizes the greater good and sacrifices someone else for it, or Sang-woo, who either doesn’t recognize anything beyond his own benefit as the greater good…or doesn’t care.

But the real lessons of Squid Game are more insidious than just the obvious thought experiments, especially when viewed macroscopically. I cried at lot at the marbles, but the previous game of tug-of-war actually elicited feelings of thrill, horror, and excitement. Why?

The whole thing felt like a high-stakes sporting match. Yet if you really think about it, both games are functionally the same, except one is a game played between individuals, while the other is a game for teams.

I didn’t cry when our protagonists murdered ten other people to save their own lives. I only felt relief because all of “my” people made it. Why is it so much easier to feel emotional anguish for one person than to feel it for ten? Do we really not imagine that the ten people who lost to the main characters didn’t also have hopes, dreams, loved ones, and sympathetic stories?

It’s the weirdest part of human society that we can segregate ourselves into communities and almost instantly develop us-versus-them mentalities. Though groups are made of people, we don’t think of groups as people. Groups are easier to ostracize, ignore, or even eliminate. When Sang-woo told them how to trick the other team in tug-of-war by taking three steps forward to throw them off balance, we called it a brilliant strategy: when he switched out the marbles for rocks, we called it a dirty deception. Pretty sure the only difference comes down to the number of people involved. 

Mr. Spock in Star Trek once famously said of war, “You Earth people glorify organized violence for 40 centuries, but you imprison those who employ it privately.” And that’s the truest thing anyone has ever said about human society. Murder is bad, but war is a necessary evil. Isn’t it?

The overwhelming majority of soldiers who have ever fought in any war for any reason were just people with lives, loved ones, and plenty of reasons for living. Few if any are irredeemable zealots who only go to war because they love killing. To me the most profound, human lesson of Squid Game is if you give someone a weapon and a few friends to defend, and they’ll gladly kill “the other side” to save themselves and their group. Whatever set of morals and ethics they’re working with, they almost certainly won’t feel as bad about going to war with a group as they would if you gave them a weapon and told them to go to war with one person.

Or as Stalin said it best, “One death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic.” In Squid Game context, “Me-versus-you is a gritty drama, us-versus-them is an action movie.”