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HONG KONG – Why do South Koreans watch “Squid Game”? Because everyone is.
The nine-episode horror series on Netflix reached No.1 in 90 streaming service markets around the world, including South Korea, where it was made.
“I got to the point where I couldn’t hold a conversation without watching the show,” said Jung Dunn, a security analyst in Seoul, the South Korean capital.
But the show also touches a sensitive point because it tackles without flinching a problem particularly anchored in South Korea: the debt and the endless struggle to repay it.
The cast of “Squid Game” features some of South Korea’s biggest stars, including Lee Jung-jae as the protagonist, Seong Gi-hun, a desperately in debt father who receives a business card from a stranger offering him a issue. Along with 455 other contestants – from all walks of life but all heavily in debt too – he agrees to compete for a cash prize of 45.6 billion won (roughly $ 38 million) by playing a series of traditional Korean children’s games, for discover this elimination. of each turn means death.
“There’s this dissonance between the Korean pride that this Korean show dominates Netflix around the world, and the unease with what the show seems to be exposing about Korea,” said CedarBough Saeji, assistant professor of Korean studies. and East Asians at the National University of Pusan. in Busan, South Korea. “Koreans love to be # 1, but # 1 at the cost of some sort of airing your dirty laundry is a little different. “
The fact that South Korea also produced “Parasite,” the 2020 Oscar winner for Best Picture which also focused on themes of inequality, likely accentuated this unease, Saeji said.
Still, “Squid Game” is very popular in its home country.
The show was released on September 17 just before Chuseok, a Korean Thanksgiving-like holiday where families get together, the perfect time to over-watch. The increase in network traffic led an Internet service provider to sue Netflix to cover its costs.
The fervor also spilled over into real life. A street vendor in Seoul who supplied “Squid Game” makers with dalgona, a brittle sugar candy at the center of one of the games, told Reuters he saw a boom in business.
Thousands of curious South Koreans have also tried the eight-digit phone number that appears on the business card, which the show’s creators didn’t realize would reach a real person. The owner of the number, and even people with similar numbers, were inundated with calls and messages around the clock.
On Wednesday, Netflix said it was working with the show’s local production company to resolve the issue, including editing scenes to remove the number.
Park Sae-ha, an economics student at Seoul Yonsei University, said “Squid Game” was “spellbinding because it was so explicit and straightforward.”
“Although I am young, I could easily understand the harsh reality of a very competitive society,” she said.
This intense competitiveness may be one of the reasons South Korea has been so successful, with a period of rapid industrialization starting in the 1960s making it the 10th largest economy in the world. But like in many other countries, a college degree and white-collar job don’t guarantee the financial security they once had, Saeji said. With an average income of around $ 42,000 a year, many Koreans now have to borrow to keep pace.
Fueled by low interest rates, South Korea’s household debt has increased dramatically in recent years and is now equal to the country’s annual GDP. (In the United States, on the other hand, household debt makes up about 80% of GDP.) People can get into debt because of credit card spending, unemployment, or gambling losses, but much of it is linked. to real estate.
House prices have risen rapidly, especially under President Moon Jae-in, and the average price of an apartment in Seoul is around $ 1 million. Credit restrictions and efforts to cool the housing market have done little to curb household borrowing. In addition to housing, some Koreans, especially young people, borrow money to invest in cryptocurrency.
Many Koreans start by borrowing from legitimate financial institutions like banks, said Koo Se-Woong, a Korean culture commentator based in Germany. When this avenue is exhausted, they can move on to second-tier lenders who charge higher interest.
In the worst-case scenario, he said, borrowers turn to loan sharks who can charge triple-digit interest rates, “and then you’re pushed into situations that you really can’t. go out”.
According to some estimates, there are 400,000 Koreans in debt to loan sharks.
“When you look at the characters on the show who are involved in this game, they represent this demographic of Koreans who are in the worst possible situation because of their personal debt,” Koo said.
In a recent widely shared post on Facebook, Koo said he was shocked when a friend told him he was living paycheck to paycheck, despite a good job.
The friend “doesn’t seem extravagant to anyone,” Koo said, but struggles to afford the pitfalls of middle-class life: an apartment, a car, and occasional commutes with his wife and children.
“Everything is paid for by loans, I tell you,” his friend Koo told him. “We just don’t have the money.”
Jung, the security analyst, said the plot of “Squid Game” was easy to accept because “it dealt with such familiar stories of people in debt that you meet in real life.”
“The story stems from a deeply rooted perception of how society views failure, especially individual financial failure,” he said.
Bankruptcy in South Korea is generally seen not as a chance to start over, but as a devastating fate. This is emphasized in “Squid Game,” Saeji said, when the contestants have the option to leave but choose to continue playing even at the risk of their lives.
“In the ordinary world, it’s not just the death of their body, it’s the death of their pride. It’s a shame to have to be such an unhappy person in front of your family, ”she said.
Viewers in South Korea say the show is all the more disturbing because it injects death and violence into recreational games like Red Light, Green Light and tug of war.
The show plays on the nostalgia of childhood “and with it the innocent times when you had no problems,” said Kim Hern-sik, pop culture critic in Seoul. “Yet history tells you that escaping from reality is not the answer.”
“Squid Game” is “basically a Korean story, featuring games that people would remember playing as kids,” Don Kang, vice president of Korean content at Netflix, told NBC News in an e- mail. “So we knew it would resonate with our members here. “
Its popularity in the West is rather a surprise. But Korean cultural exports have been sweeping through Asia for years, and Netflix was already banking on their growing appeal. The company is spending $ 500 million this year on Korean content, almost as much as it has spent in the past five years.
Saeji said that after decades of Western cultural influence, the success of “Squid Game” shows that South Korea can make a TV show with a Hollywood feel “and it can do it better.”
Although “Squid Game” is not the first story of a fight to the death, director Hwang Dong-hyuk, a film graduate from the University of Southern California, made it influential in his own way, said Oh Dong-jin, a leading film critic in South Korea.
“Every movie borrows this and that from other movies. So what matters is the creativity with which you can borrow from different references,” he said. “So even from that point of view, the traditional children’s games used by the series make “Squid Game” quite original. “
Margie Kim, a housewife in Seoul who watches “Squid Game” with her family, said that while she appreciated its intensity and pop-art influenced visuals, the underlying messages were also important.
“I feel the pain of what our society is going through,” she said. The show deals with so many pressing issues, she said – income inequality, youth unemployment, a rapidly aging society – that it’s something her whole family can relate to and she can relate to. can talk.
“So many ordinary middle class people live with so much debt,” she said. “I could totally sympathize with the people who joined the game.”
Jennifer Jett reported in Hong Kong and Stella Kim reported in Los Angeles.
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