SURVIVING SQUID GAME by SUK-YOUNG KIM

Author:SUK-YOUNG KIM
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: APPLAUSE THEATRE & CINEMA BOOKS
Published: 2023-01-28T00:00:00+00:00

2

PLAY AT YOUR OWN RISK

The pandemic era has arrived. Through the birth canal of horror and despair, it has brought about the simultaneous sense of a new beginning and an imminent end. More than three years into this new epoch, where do we find ourselves in this world? What is at stake? Putting our ears closer to the heartbeat of today, we hear symptoms of our times in recurring sound waves and visions: filled with tension and crisis, an eschatological view of the world emerges, warning us of the precarity of human life, the ethics of medicine, and the ubiquitous presence of surveillance mechanisms, all mitigated by the horrors and wonders of technology.

Without the pandemic, what would our perception of Squid Game have been like? Squid Game is, among many other things, a pandemic-age opera, where risk taking and crisis, like shapeshifting villains, sing duets in endless variations. They might not be identical twins but first cousins. After all, what is crisis other than the unfolding of miscalculated risks? The enormity of the crises in our times forges various entanglements: one’s crisis might be another’s opportunity, or one’s calamity—in an extremely perverse fashion—might be another’s entertainment.

As a millennial parable on the pandemic, Squid Game speaks of the impossibility of free choice, the futility of human willpower, and the uneven rise of new cultural networks brought about by ever-intensifying global streaming wars. Risk-taking by the show’s characters and viewers alike signals the pressing symptoms of the current era, when digital transformations and accelerated sociopolitical changes have been compressed to intensify the stakes of our everyday lives. What made Squid Game a fresh wheel to spin a time-proven story of money, death, and family is the extraordinary risks ordinary people take every day. One risk averted, and we’ve survived another day. But how many more minutes and seconds will our luck last?

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.