[COLUMN] The Capitalist Body Horror of Squid Game | by Darren Mooney

Note: This piece contains spoilers for the first season of Squid Game. And graphic descriptions of violence.

Netflix’s Squid Game is a genuine cultural phenomenon.

By any metric, the show has been a massive success for the streaming service. It reportedly pulled in 1.65 billion hours of viewing in the first four weeks after its release in September 2021, quickly surpassing Bridgerton as the company’s most-watched original to that point. By the start of December 2024, the first season had been watched by 330 million viewers (who have streamed 2.8 billion hours of it) worldwide.

Squid Game is very firmly rooted in South Korean culture. The eponymous tournament is built around children’s games, many of which are specific to South Korea. For example, Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae) is recruited into the tournament following a game of ddakji chigi with a recruitment agent (Gong Yoo). One of the show’s most iconic challenges finds contestants trying to trace the outline of a shape from a piece of dalgona candy, a traditional Korean snack.

However, Squid Game taps into something much more universal. It’s a dystopian horror story about the nightmare of late capitalism, of characters forced to subject themselves to inhuman suffering and torture for a shot at economic independence. Gi-hun is a failed entrepreneur and gambler, in debt to loan sharks. Kang Sae-byeok (Jung Ho-yeon) is a North Korean defector looking to buy her family passage to the South. Jang Deok-su (Heo Sung-tae) is a gangster fleeing his creditors.

Although the anonymous and masked officials operating the contest insist that all competitors are participating voluntarily, Squid Game makes it clear that very few of the contestants have a meaningful choice. Those taking part have no practical alternative. If they do not play, many players face death, imprisonment or ruin. While the players consent to the dystopian rules of the game, that consent is at best manufactured.

Indeed, one of the smarter structural conceits of the nine-episode first season is the decision to have the players vote to end their involvement after the first round – a variation on “red light, green light.” Realizing that the stakes of this competition are literally life and death, with “elimination” being fatal, the players panic and vote by a majority to suspend the games in accordance with Clause 3 of the “Consent Form.” Early in the show’s second episode, the players all opt out.

However, over the course of that second episode, the overwhelming majority of the 201 surviving players opt to return to continue the games. There is no real choice for these characters, only the illusion of choice. These characters are manipulated into corners, placed in impossible situations with no tangible or reasonable means of escape, then presented with a path to freedom that inevitably profits the person making the offer more than the individual paying the price.

Writer and director Hwang Dong-hyuk understands this reality. During the decade that he spent trying to develop Squid Game as a film, he, his mother and his grandmother each took out loans to keep their family solvent. One of the very real barriers to completion of the script was that Hwang was forced to sell the laptop on which he was writing Squid Game for $675 in cash. Despite its bleak science-fiction trappings, Squid Game is anchored in first-hand experience.

One of the most interesting motifs in Squid Game is the emphasis on body horror as a metaphor for the more abstract nightmare of contemporary capitalism. This is baked into the premise. The game begins with 456 players, each competing for a prize fund of ₩45.6 billion (worth about $38 million in September 2021). With the death of each player, ₩100 million is dropped into a transparent ball at the center of the dormitory, demonstrating precisely how much a human life is worth.

When recruiting potential candidates, the salesman gambles with money that he knows his competitors do not have. When they lose, he asks them to agree to accept a slap in place of payment, leveraging their bodies to write off the debt. When he wins, he slaps Gi-hun repeatedly. However, when Gi-hun wins and moves to return the favor, the salesman catches his hand mid-air and pays Gi-hun the money that they bet. He can afford not to offer his bodily autonomy as a prize.

Throughout Squid Game, there is a tendency to think of human beings as nothing but raw material from which economic value might be extracted. When a loan shark (Kim Pub-lae) finally tracks down Gi-hun, he makes it clear that he will recover his money from the gambler one way or another. “If you don’t pay it off by next month, I’ll take one of your kidneys,” he warns. “And then after that, I’ll take one of your eyes. Okay?” Gi-hun literally signs the terms of his extension in his own blood.

At one point, the loan shark licks a drop of Gi-hun’s blood from his fingers. “Your blood was tasty,” he muses. “I think my boys and I should make a nice, delicious soup in it.” Vampirism has long served as a metaphor for capitalism, dating back to Marx, and the show’s title invites comparisons to Matt Taibbi’s famous description of Goldman Sachs as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity.” It is a manifestation of capitalism as a parasitic entity, eager to feed on human flesh.

Harvesting body parts as collateral is seemingly standard operating procedure in the world of Squid Game. When Deok-su meets with an associate (Lee Choong-goo) during the suspension of the games, he is shocked to discover that his old friend sold him out to his Filipino creditors. “The guys from the casino came here looking for you,” the gangster explains. He boasts, almost gleefully, “They’ll take your liver, your kidneys, and your eyes for the money you owe.”

Even within the games, the bodies of dead contestants are just another potential revenue stream for any individual enterprising enough to seize an opportunity. Contestant Byeong-gi (Yoo Sung-joo) is able to leverage his outside experience as a doctor to assist several of the guards in an organ-harvesting ring, trading his skills for foreknowledge of the upcoming games. The logic is cold and bleak. Those dead bodies would otherwise just be going to waste.

Tellingly, when the Front Man (Lee Byung-hun), the master of ceremonies overseeing the games, discovers this side hustle, he isn’t outraged by the desecration of these dead bodies. “Whether you sell the dead bodies’ organs or eat them or whatever, I don’t give a damn,” he explains to the ringleader of the organ harvesting scam. Instead, he is angered by the betrayal of “the most important aspect of this place”, the illusion of “a fair game”, through the trading of information.

This recurring preoccupation with organ harvesting is just the most literal manifestation of this commodification of the human body. It plays out in other ways throughout the season, some heightened and some much more grounded. When a group of wealthy spectators arrive to watch the final rounds, beautiful naked servants covered in body paint serve as literal human furniture, particularly cushions and foot stools.

When contestants don’t have any other way to leverage a situation, their body becomes currency. Desperate to survive but without any inherent skills or advantages, Han Mi-nyeo (Kim Joo-ryoung) trades on her body, exchanging sexual favors with Deok-su in return for protection. The guards have similar ideas. One guard (Heo Dong-won) admits to raping one contestant who survived her elimination before harvesting her organs. “Before we operated on her, we took turns having sex with the girl, okay?” he confesses to undercover detective Hwang Jun-ho (Wi Ha-joon).

Ultimately, the economics within the reality of the game are really just a heightened expression of the unarticulated logic of capitalism in the outside world. Contestant Ali Abdul (Anupam Tripathi) is missing two fingers on left hand as a result of a workplace accident. During an argument with his employer (Seo-ha Kim) over unpaid wages, Ali’s boss’ hand gets caught in a rolling machine, a very visceral metaphor for the show’s preoccupation with human beings caught in capitalist machinery.

When Squid Game was released and became a global sensation, there was some hand wringing about the show’s graphic and gory depiction of human suffering. Certainly, there is no shortage of blood and violence on display, which has led to some criticism that the show’s “violent and deranged” brutality towards the human form was “unnecessary”, serving as little more than a provocative contrast with the ostensible childish games that the cast are forced to play.

However, the show’s consistent focus on the human form, on the limits and the tactile reality of the human body, is central to its core themes and ideas. Capitalism is a philosophy built around materialism, the idea that objects have intrinsic value that can be commodified and traded. The human body is the most basic resource that a person has, something that they retain even after losing everything. In a materialist world, it is the last object a person can trade, sell or leverage.

There is an irony here. The wealthy operators and spectators of the tournament can gamble on the lives of players, but their own bodies are still subject to the laws of nature. Elderly contestant Oh Il-nam (O Yeong-su) is eventually revealed to be the original designer of the games, even modelling the rooms on his own childhood. His immense wealth and power means nothing when he is diagnosed with a fatal brain tumor. The human body is a commodity, not an equitable investment.

Squid Game creator Hwang Dong-hyuk understands this as well. The stress of producing the show was so great that he lost “eight or nine” teeth in the process. This was the cost that Squid Game exacted from him. With that in mind, one might ask why he returned to make a second season. His answer was the same given by any of those players who returned to the game after the original hiatus: “Money.”