In the Flesh: Squid Game (Patreon)

Squid Game has a fascinating cinematic pedigree, evoking everything from SAW to Battle Royale to The Running Man as it spins its story of poverty, desperation, and dehumanizing cruelty. Anchored by the masterful performances of Lee Jung-jae, Anupam Tripathi, Park Hae-soo, HoYeon Jung, and O Yeong-su, the series roars out of the gate with some of the least sentimental depictions of the crushing daily anxiety of live in poverty to be found anywhere in the last decade of film. Its second episode, which contains no trace of the bloody games which claim the lives of all but one of its core cast, is among its hardest to watch solely for the way it handles the feeling of slipping over the edge into total despair. Watching uptight, composed Cho Sang-woo (Park Hae-soo) stare with fixed, dead eyes at his cell phone as two days of messages from creditors, colleagues, and clients all looking for their pound of flesh unfurl rapidly along the screen is as unbearable as nearly any of the show’s crisis images.

The games around which the series revolves are some of the most harrowing television ever made, a series of mean-spiritedly arbitrary events in which the debt-ridden are forced to fight for their lives in the most infantile manner possible. That all six games are playground pastimes like tug of war and red light, green light only adds to the humiliation of being forced so low that your only way forward is a protracted gauntlet of life or death challenges dressed up as childish amusements. The relationship between the wealthy and their helpless, exploited social inferiors is made to mirror the often brutal and dictatorial relationship between parents and children, a connection with no room for individuality or dignity, only incoherent demands and unhesitating compliance. The games enable a perfectly paced progression of psychic tension, first dumping the entire cast into the unknown, then separating them to fight for their lives alone, then forcing them to kill each other, then to kill their friends, and finally it hurls them with a laugh into the unreasoning face of brute dumb luck. The fourth episode’s many games of marbles constitute perhaps 2021’s single most heartbreaking and stressful episode of television.

Squid Game’s only real weakness is that it doesn’t know quite when to end, walking back one of its most devastating moments in order to pull a Lost-style fast one and reinject a sense of drive and purpose into its sole surviving player’s life. It’s a cheap pleasure, and after a series-long arc built around an attempt to expose the games and the feckless elites who sponsor and bet on them ends in abject failure it feels bizarre to suddenly resurrect the idea, especially in the absence of a connection between the two efforts. Still, if it pulls a few of its final punches and the titular event, when it arrives, is a hair underwhelming, what remains is largely undiminished, a ruthless story of exploitation, suffering, and ratlike panic which reflects with painful relevance our own disordered world of hateful and inhuman capitalist gamesmanship.