OPINION - Dark fantasy, brutal violence and chilling politics: what Squid Game season 2 says about us

Yahoo

11-01-2025

Imagine a world in which a cabal of extreme libertarian oligarchs operated with complete impunity. In which they did what they liked on a private island outside the reach of the law, operated a uniformed militia, and saw ordinary people as subhuman 'trash' whose struggles for survival only have value as a resource for the entertainment of the bored overclass.
Are we anticipating season 3 of Squid Game, or looking forward to, say, 2028? At this point, it's looking like a bit of a toss-up. This show – which sees a crowd of leisure-suited unfortunates competing to survive a series of lethal playground games with the last man standing becoming a billionaire – has caught the Zeitgeist like no other show.
That, I think, is because underneath its gaudy, popcorn-chewing horror-thriller exterior Squid Game season 2 is a quietly thoughtful piece of work. It's a narrative of ideas: an exploration of the social contract, an investigation into collective-action problems, and a story that's interested in testing two radically different views of human nature.
Are we, like the show's inscrutable masked 'Front-Man' (Tom Choi), with Hobbes — who saw our state of nature as a vicious struggle of all against all? Or, like the show's hero Gi-Hun, played by Lee Jung-jae. with Rousseau and Adam Smith, who saw compassion and co-operation as part of the human fabric? The great virtue of Squid Game, it seems to me, is that it's delicately ambiguous in the evidence it supplies.
It shouldn't, incidentally, be a surprise that something so lurid and unrealistic should be the vehicle for a serious inquiry. Many of the most enduring big-picture fictional investigations into human nature have been fables, fantasies or works of science fiction. Lord of the Flies, A Clockwork Orange, or Mandeville's Fable of the Bees – none are what you'd call bourgeois realism.
So it is a show that stands in a lineage. A dash of the Stanford Prison Experiment here; a tincture of Hunger Games there; just a soupcon of Dr Fischer of Geneva, Graham Greene's chilly novella about extreme avarice and game-playing. And its style – the kindergarten colour-scheme, the surrealism, the lurches between brittle social comedy and horror – owes a big debt to that 1960s epic of seaside paranoia The Prisoner.
London, with its glittering skyscrapers, empty mansions and widening gap between rich and poor, belongs to the same world it parodies
Squid Game was originally local: a satire on the extreme divide between South Korea's plutocrats and its underclass, as also explored in the award-winning movie Parasite. But it's also global; and it doesn't half feel timely. London, with its glittering skyscrapers, empty mansions and widening gap between rich and poor, belongs to the same world it parodies; and the return to oligarchy in the United States gives it a particular moral force.
Here is a fantasy with its hooks in the real world. Jeffrey Epstein had a lawless private island. Peter Thiel has been buying up chunks of New Zealand in preparation for the breakdown of civilisation. Everything from social media to political discourse has now been gamified. And we see everywhere a rhetorical dehumanisation of the underclass ('NPCs') and the global ultra-wealthy floating free of the legal and political constraints that bind us normies.
Could there be anything more brilliantly Squid Game, for instance, than the cranky techno-futurist Curtis Yarvin (credited as an influence on Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and J D Vance) sort-of joking that a good use for the poor would be to be turn them into 'biodiesel' to fuel the motor vehicles of the rich? ('Just kidding!' he clarified – before explaining that the real problem was finding 'a humane alternative to genocide'.)
What's especially pungent about season two of the show is its emphasis on rules and norms and consent
What's especially pungent about season two of the show is its emphasis on rules and norms and consent. Much of the real drama comes not from the bloody massacres that accompany each game, but from the votes that are held after each one. Even though they are shot at will and policed by armed soldiers with PlayStation buttons for faces, they are not prisoners, exactly. They are bound by the terms of an elaborate consent form.
As the Front-Man rebukes Gi-Hun, these people are there voluntarily. At any point, a simple majority vote will stop the games and the competitors will be free to return to their lives with an equal share of the prize money so far accumulated. But each time, even after watching dozens of their comrades gunned down, the poor, blood-spattered shmoes in their green tracksuits — hypnotised by the pile of banknotes accumulating in a glowing piggy-bank above them — vote to continue the games. One more game, they think; reasoning that until the prize is big enough, their lives are just as cheap in the outside world.
Democracy, here, means no more than a choice between frying pan and fire. And what does consent mean, anyway, in such circumstances? Can a majority vote constrain the losers in that vote to risk violent death? And who – in the context of the vast illegality of the whole enterprise – meaningfully enforces this elaborate contract? Is it real, or is it a sort of kayfabe, a pretence at a rules-based order when in fact, before even entering the games, the participants have already lost?
One answer to this question is supplied by Gi-Hun. He refuses the framing by seeing the fortune he won by winning season one as blood money: its only moral use is to dismantle the games themselves. Gi-Hun is prepared to risk his own life to steadily insist on his worldview. But Front-Man, who inserts himself anonymously into the games at (presumably) the risk of his own death, is also putting his money where his mouth is. In a piece of foreshadowing in an early episode, a recruiting sergeant for the game takes his own life rather than admit he's a powerless creature of his oligarch paymasters.
Here's a show that asks probing questions, to which it doesn't supply ready answers, about the value and meaning of human agency, and what democracy and consent mean in the context of overwhelming and unchecked oligarchical power. Squid Game 2 may be fun to watch on the telly, but it's a bit more than a diverting piece of fiction.
Sam Leith is the literary editor of the Spectator