We Are Not Horses

And the winner of Squid Game is...

You bet on horses. It’s the same here, but we bet on humans. You’re our horses.

Front Man

I’m not a horse. I’m a person. That’s why I wanna know who you people are… and how you can commit such atrocities against people.

Seong Gi-hun

Squid Game has finally declared itself a winner. A series distinguished by its nihilism has decided to infantilise its audience by ending on an upbeat note. Drum roll please.

The last man standing in Squid Game’s no holds-barred death matches was…a baby girl.

A CGI Baby standing tall in the face of adversity.

The third (and final) series needed to jump through some narrative hoops to reach the goal of delivering its newborn baby to victory. Note that the whimpering baby - aka Player 222 or Little CGI - has been carefully gift wrapped in Player’s 456’s (Lee Jung-jae) green tracksuit top. The reason is simple: CGI is Squid Game’s gift to humanity. Nonetheless, the show’s hero has also left the baby to fend for itself on top of a giant pillar as he fell to his death in slow motion.

Lucky the baby hasn't learned to crawl yet.

Squid Games’ biggest obstacle course proved to be thematic coherence or staying within the bounds of credulity. If the baby had been born during the first season, it would have been tossed over the side, left to starve to death or scavenged for spare parts. She certainly wouldn’t have been saved by (spoiler alert) this guy.

It’s not as if the show played unfair. The poor defenceless baby had some stiff competition during the final elimination round. The remaining contestants boiled down to these shady looking characters hoping to eliminate one another.

Writer/director Hwang Dong-hyuk was no doubt laughing to himself when editing this composite shot together. It is a funny image, especially when seen in motion. The oblivious baby is happily suckling on the teat of a milk bottle as the anxious players are being told that they can now vote on eliminating each other before the final elimination round. The writer/director also makes sure that the surviving players comment on the absurdity of their newfound situation: how can a baby be allowed to compete in the games or be given a say at all?

Hwang, however, is adamant that we take the absurd new development seriously. As the image indicates, the newborn has taken pride of place or centre stage in the latter part of Squid Game. She has unexpectedly replaced her deceased mother Player 222, who was forced to skip the previous round of Jump Rope due to a leg injury.

The baby’s inability to talk, stand, move or act are not the handicaps they might seem - she is an all powerful symbol for new beginnings or fresh starts, and symbolises the potential for human growth and (social) transformation. It’s the reason that Player 456 ends up sacrificing himself for her - the newborn baby has become a stand in for the possibility of another, better life.

Little CGI is also a surrogate for the estranged daughter he lost custody of when his wife divorced him for being such a hopeless ‘loser’. Revived paternal instincts will therefore take precedence to his survival instinct or feelings of having already died of shame. To be able to finally care for or protect a child will be his moral victory.

So what originally began as a social allegory about the competitive nature of modern capitalism has turned into a parable about the audacity of hope.

Squid Games is obviously not talking about the hope of individual players. They’re just hoping to survive the final round so one of them can claim all the prize money for themselves. Squid Game is more alluding to humankind per see: CGI baby is its best hope for the future.

Squid Game would have ideally remained a self-contained or limited series in an increasingly competitive marketplace. The irony is that the audacious first season was a victim of its own success in that a market-driven economy ensured its return for two more seasons to diminishing creative returns.

Equally ironical: the last two seasons - in reality, one season split into two - was only made because Hwang Dong-hyuk felt exploited by a system that profited off his labours, and he wanted to be adequately compensated for the spectacular success of his own creation.

The final two seasons are not without merit or interest, and are notable for the way they endeavour to explore Squid Game’s own premise in provocative ways. We see, for example, the original season’s victorious - if traumatised - hero chose to return to the killing floors in order to subvert an exploitative system from within. Seong Gi-hun now knows how to play the game, and he attempts to game the system for the unsuspecting (yet increasingly suspicious!) players’ advantage.

It goes without saying that Seong Gi-hun is doomed from the start: how could an individual player beat the rigged game that is global capitalism or manipulate rules that invariably put every player at a disadvantage?

The show’s master of ceremonies aka the Front Man (Lee Byung-hun) also infiltrates the games under false pretences as Player 001. Hwang In-ho’s aim is to befriend Seong Gi-hun and thwart him at every turn. Player 001 knows Squid Game’s rules - and its players - better than anyone else. The Front Man in disguise is the system personified: he is pretending to be on the player’s side as he manipulates the rules (and other players) to the game’s advantage.

Both players are former survivors/winners and have therefore returned to play against each other in the 37th Squid Game. Player 456 will invariably get the better of the Front Man when offering himself up as a human sacrifice.

The last two seasons also play up the theme of people voting against their best interests (collectively and individually). The series constantly - if interminably - calls into question the voting process itself, or the democratic principle of majority rules (‘wins’). As Matthew Sherwood acutely observes

The voting mechanism serves as a powerful metaphor for real-world societal divisions and the illusion of choice in oppressive systems.

The (new) voting process forces participants to confront their own values and motivations while grappling with the consequences of collective decision-making. It pushes characters and viewers alike to examine the nature of free will, group psychology, and the exploitation of societal divisions. By incorporating this element, the series deepens its exploration of human nature under duress and the structures that perpetuate inequality.

Despite this added layer of complexity, the Korean series is not the first show to culminate in overt symbolism or seek refuge in a bland platitude.

The ‘children are our future or last best hope’ symbol transcends cultural and linguistic boundaries. English viewers (amongst the millions of other people watching) didn’t need subtitles or a dub to understand what was being said here. Given Squid Game’s relentless nihilism - or pessimism about humankind’s innate goodness - its final appeal to spiritual renewal or purity and innocence felt disingenuous. It’s not as if Little CGI should be conceived as pure or innocent either. The baby is (unknowingly) tainted goods or has blood on its little hands too. She went to her new crib with money won at the expense of other people’s lives, and (unlike every other player) will start her life with unfair social advantages.

It might be helpful to remind ourselves about what Squid Game originally purported to be about: life as a battle royale. And like the gates of hell, the circle of life would have previously been inscribed with the warning: abandon all hope, ye who enter here.

Squid Game did not, of course, originate the dystopian survival game scenario. The Netflix series merely capitalised on an increasingly popular or ubiquitous genre originating in ancient times. Battle Royale (Kinji Fukasaku, 2000) might be the modern source of literal elimination rounds, but the film adaptation of Köshun Takami’s 1999 novel merely resurrected an ancient blood sport: Roman gladiator games primarily involving captured slaves. It is no coincidence, then, that battles royal figure prominently in historical slavery narratives or recur in stories about descendants of black slaves learning to live with their heads in lions' mouths.

The resurgence of gladiatorial contests - as either a relatively passive viewing experience or through active participation - is obviously not without cultural significance or historical import. The popularity of battles royal distils a contemporary worldview - namely, that the social contract is really a zero-sum game.

Instead of viewing social bonds in terms of mutual rights or obligations, participants see humankind as being divided into two classes that remain inextricably bound to each other: we're either predator or prey. Consequently, 'survival of the fittest' was the real name of the game, and everyone is 'fair game'.

Squid Game arguably provided the most interesting variation on the battle royal trope. The titular contest's 456 players were initially unaware that they were playing an elimination tournament, or that they will end up needing to turn on (and pile on top of) each other. Unlike Battle Royale or The Hunger Games (Gary Ross, 2012), the South Korean series was not about a group of young people taken against their will and forced to play death matches against one another; this particular game played by its own rules, and it is worth noting what they were:

* The participants were unsuspecting adults from various age brackets and backgrounds who have been tricked into playing deadly children's games on a remote island. The only thing they had in common was that they were all in dire financial straits, and have been promised a way out of the lion's mouth via a cash prize.

* When the first round of surviving players realised what was at stake - their own lives - they are given a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity: they can vote to either not play anymore or to keep playing for the ever-expanding cash prize - eventually totalling W45.6 billion10 - that is literally dangling over their heads like a sword of Damocles.

* Returning players were subsequently forced to compete against one another to survive the five remaining elimination rounds.

* There is no penalty for eliminating other players in between games. Not playing by the rules was one of the rules of the game - and some of the adults try to game the system by levelling the field in other ways.

* The new voting system repeatedly gives the players an out or an alternative to ‘winner takes all’. Individual selfishness and/or their desire for social harmony, consensus and cohesiveness is what kept the socially divisive/destructive system going to the bitter end.

Squid Game complicates its battle royal by including an unspoken (and paradoxical) rule made famous by the reality TV show Survivor: if players wanted to survive elimination rounds, they needed to form alliances and look out for one another. Since they were all playing the long game, though, they'll also need to go on to eliminate the very people responsible for their survival.

Indeed, treating other people as a means to an end - as mutually beneficial and/or exploitable - is the overriding goal of the contest. Although it is frequently claimed that the violent series was itself exploitative, Squid Game is careful not to endorse cynical worldviews like 'the end justifies the means' or assert that violence as entertainment is socially redeemable. The series instead delineated emergent gameplay via the competing players' interactions and dynamics.

Squid Game was primarily interested in exploring the genuine feelings of affinity and enmity that emerged during tournaments involving duplicitous individuals and/or situational ethics. The series' own endgame was to show the corrosive effects that the contest's shifting power dynamics had on tenuous alliances and surviving players. Consequently, Squid Game became an allegory about a different kind of 'game'- the difficulties of surviving the killing fields of modern capitalism. Impersonal market forces and free-for-all trade practices are, in the show's portrayal, the ultimate battle royal.

Squid Game allegorised capitalism by depicting the ways it preyed - and wreaked havoc on - the poor, weak and defenceless. In the battle royal that is global capitalism, there are already clear winners and losers; and, in the series, all of these enslaved 'losers' were simply being further exploited by their bored capitalist overlords for (more) fun and games. As Hwang Dong-hyuk noted in an inverview, Squid Game is

an allegory or fable about modern capitalist society, something that depicts an extreme competition, somewhat like the extreme competition of life. But I wanted it to use the kind of characters we've all met in real life.

Squid Game's elaborately designed game-world mapped out its treacherous moral terrain in aesthetic terms. As series production designer Chae Kyun-sun noted, the interplay between physical spaces and stylised imagery was arranged to accommodate the show's overarching themes. While the candy-coloured visual scheme suggested that the players had entered a children's storybook, Squid Game's interior designs more anticipated the twisted fairytales of the Brothers Grimm.

An MC Escher-style spiral staircase figured centrally and relativised the state of play: ascending and descending players were all similarly caught in an inescapable death loop. Squid Game's painstaking mise en scene - compositions, sets, props, colours, costumes, etc. - worked together to disorient the viewer, heighten the tension and amplify the terror. The fun looking game-world was a series of elaborate death traps, comprised of spaces designed to capture, torture and destroy unsuspecting victims.

The game's dwindling player-base remained under constant surveillance, and subjected to coercive controls and summary executions. Although the rules appeared to be equally arbitrary, the contest's host falsely claimed that their game-world was a level playing field - that everyone was fair game because everyone had an equal chance to win:

Every player gets to play a fair game under the same conditions. These people suffered from inequality and discrimination out in the world, and we're giving them one last chance to fight fair and win.

The truth, of course, is that they were not playing a game 'fair and square'. A genetic and social lottery was already in play, and had determined their starting positions and likely outcomes. Although these unlucky men and women needed to be team players to survive odds deadset against them, the game added insult to injury by turning teammates against each other.

Up until the first series' pivotal - and still best - sixth episode Gganbu, the players were able to present a united front: they needed allies to survive elimination rounds and/or one another. Previously, the players were invariably asked to partner up with one of their teammates, and led to believe that the partnerships would continue in the spirit of collaboration and camaraderie. In the series sixth episode, a game of marbles revealed that everyone had been competing in a battle royale all along.

In depicting this melancholic death match, Gganbu simultaneously did two very interesting things: it exposed the players' pretence of 'united we stand, divided we fall'; and it reminded viewers that the rules of the game were designed to win participants over and make them equally complicit in a system based on structural inequalities and systemic oppression.

Indeed, this is one reason why global capitalism had proven to be such a success against competing economic systems: its invisible hand conferred advantages to society's supposedly more deserving members, all while ostensibly directing mutual self-interest in service of the greater good. Free market capitalism merely engenders, however, the myths of meritocracy and self-determination at many people’s expense. Consequently, a competitive marketplace doesn't so much mark the place between 'good' and 'bad' people or 'right' and 'wrong' decisions - it merely created the illusion of fair play by legitimising the dividing line between society's 'winners' and 'losers'.

It was unfortunate to see the first series take a turn for the worse in its remaining three episodes and belabour its worst impulse in the final season’s last two episodes.

Squid Game conveniently displaced its observations and concerns about the role individuals play in determining distributive justice (allocation of rewards and punishments through socially sanctioned actions). Although the series never lost sight of the fact that these desperate individuals had chosen to compete against one another in death matches, its introduction of crass American VIPs into the game minimised the existing players' collective accountability in the corrupt (and corruptible) economic system they were also trying to benefit from.

The series' social allegory transferred the thematic emphasis to competitiveness as spectator sport - our capitalist overlords are emperors in new clothes, and we are their mere playthings! - and the narrative's 'last person standing' motif raised the risible possibility of retributive justice (I’ll be back!) Nonetheless, it was nice to see these cartoon villains finally left speechless when they realised what the previous winner had done. They are genuinely moved by Player 456’s sacrifice, and (like the audience) are left struggling to process a newborn baby as winner. Or maybe they were also just stunned into silence by his poetic final words (a cryptic call back to season 1).

A significant irony is that Squid Game tested the limits of mass entertainment and consumption in that it was produced, distributed and consumed on a streaming platform committed to a corporatist global culture.

Witness the contradictions at the heart of the show's (capitalist) enterprise: instead of facilitating widespread discourse about class resentments or systemic inequalities, the series has primarily functioned as a safety valve. Squid Game has thereby acted as a highly profitable pressure release: it has released rising anger and despair back into global capitalism's oppressive, fail-safe system in the form of mass consumerism and entertainment.

And although Squid Game's sympathies purportedly lie with the oppressed, it cannot avoid turning the millions of viewers at home into members of a digital colosseum deriving pleasure from watching other people's suffering. Moral degradation has been transformed into a spectator sport, as many of the show's visibly shamed losers appeared to be getting their just deserts for our delectation.

Equally contradictory is the role that consumerism has played in distracting or mollifying us from systemic oppression and exploitation. If the popularity of Squid Game - and its offspring in the form of TikTok videos, memes and fan edits - are any indication, we are more than happy to amuse ourselves to death so as to avoid the unpalatable truth that there might not be an alternative to liberal capitalism.

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