By Dustin Rowles | TV | November 27, 2023 |
By Dustin Rowles | TV | November 27, 2023 |
The initial success of Suzanne Collins’s novel The Hunger Games in 2008 had much to do with heavy themes — oppression, poverty, anti-capitalism — built around what was a simple plot: 24 poor people fight to their death in a televised battle royale. The last one standing wins. It was Stephen King’s The Running Man with a romance and far better characters.
Adapting it for film four years later was a slam dunk. All Lionsgate had to do to ensure the success of this critique of Western society, reality television, and pop-culture excesses was to hire the most famous actress of the year, make an $80 million movie with a $50 million marketing budget, and screen it in every mall in America! It spawned four more films, one of which was an unnecessary two-film adaptation of the third novel. What a damning indictment!
Nearly a decade later, Squid Game would premiere on Netflix. It had similar themes and was likewise built around a simple battle royale, so simple that the games themselves were deadly, adult versions of kid games. The anti-capitalist series would become the most popular show of all time on Wall Street’s favorite streamer, Netflix.
Over Thanksgiving weekend, I watched Squid Game: The Challenge and The Hunger Games prequel The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. The latter was surprisingly good — arguably the best of The Hunger Games franchise — and while the prequel’s premise is similar to the original, the anti-capitalism themes in the $1 billion franchise have been sanded down to nothing. The Ballad of Songbirds was an origin story for a villain, essentially Breaking Bad for Coriolanus Snow.
Meanwhile, Squid Game: The Challenge is a terrible idea for a reality series that no one wanted. Nevertheless, it’s the top show on Netflix and will probably be for weeks. Almost every review I’ve read of the reality series says that it doesn’t understand the point of the original show and that it is also immensely watchable.
I agree with the latter: It is watchable. I turned it on expecting to watch one episode so I could knowledgeably write about how terrible it is, got completely sucked in, and finished the first half of the series that same day (the second half of the series arrives this week).
However, I agree that the series itself misses the point, but that’s because it is the point. To wit: The series’ executive producer, Tim Harcourt, has suggested that “the anti-capitalist allegory is only one very small part of Squid Game.” Only someone who lived in a Squid Game-like world would say that.
I also can’t entirely agree with the assertion that it’s not a successful critique of capitalism. We must pull the camera back and recognize that we are the villains. In the snow globe of American society being watched by much of the rest of the world, we have become the very universes these projects aim to critique. We are Panem, watching desperate people play a real game for a tiny chance to win a life-changing amount of money. We are watching a mom ruthlessly stab fellow contestants in the back (figuratively, here) to win $4.5 million she believes is necessary to take care of her family. Americans have likewise spent $100 million in the last ten days to watch 24 oppressed, starving, desperate (and often attractive!) people kill each other. Not only did we cheer the eventual victor but we empathized with a character we knew would become the most brutal, deadly, authoritarian leader of them all.
The original Squid Game was not a critique; it was a mirror. It was a crystal ball. Our reaction to Squid Game was not an indictment of its postapocalyptic universe; it was an idea we could incorporate into our own universe. Squid Game was not a satire; it was a parody, and Squid Game: The Challenge is proof. We are being entertained by people desperate enough to embarrass themselves for a 1 in 456 chance for a pot of money. The Hunger Games franchise, likewise, is not a damning indictment, either; it’s a lightly fictionalized version of a universe where someone made famous by a reality series, but disrespected by his peers, becomes the most powerful man in the world.