Was Squid Game Too Violent?

Time is constantly moving ( feels like even faster these days ) so that it makes the memory of someone like me who already suffers from poor memory even worse off, that being said I can’t remember the last time anything on television caught fire the way Netflix's “Squid Game” (A Korean drama directed by Hwang Dong-hyuk ) did since HBO's “Game of Thrones”. Thing is though that Game of Thrones had HBO's considerably better marketing arm behind it, and it still took a little while to cook, while Squid Game ( born knee deep into the binging era ) took off like a Rocket immediately with almost none I’m aware of besides word of mouth. Barely a few weeks into its release the show has been discussed and talked about ad-nauseum as its steam has picked up over the last couple. The show is engrossing, and was never short on surprises. Almost everytime I thought it would go one way it went another. It was extremely well acted and when there wasn’t star making or star type performances by folk like Seong Gu-hun, Oh Young-soo, and Park Hae-soo, then there were star making character performances by just about everyone else including Ho Yeon-jung, Anupam Tripathi, Heo Sung-tae, and Kim Joo-ryung. The games themselves are invenntive even moreso I’m sure if you’re outside the culture, and the stakes well you can’t get any higher, but they're also tied to a rather large and vast amount of violence and there’s enough of it to give anyone pause, but is it too much? Is it gratuitous, excessive, does it desensitize the audience?

Firstly, I think it’s important to establish a difference between what we feel and what is intended by the authors of any given form of entertainment. Also think it's important to correctly identify and define the words that we're putting in use in regards to a critique, or emotional response, especially when it comes words like gratuitous, excessive, or desensitized. Something feeling or actually being excessive by way of the amount or the number of people that it's happening to is not the same as it being excessive in regards to the story. For example in a film about war it stands to reason that a large amount of people are going to die, that in and of itself doesn’t make the death excessive, or gratuitous, it also doesn’t grant the storytellers carte blanche to be reckless with the lives that are snuffed out on screen. The latter part is something I think is vital to having this conversation. The treatment of the lives that are taken on screen. What the camera focuses on, how long it stays there, The language in the composition, the set up before and after are just some of the variables important to the task of discerning gratuity, excessiveness, or disheartening desensitization. Watching “Squid Game” I paid a lot of attention to the violence, I couldn't help but to. In the first place violence to me is something that I immediately catch onto anyway in film, but also this show could feel relentless and though I didn't find it as graphic as I was told going in ( especially as compared to shows like “The Walking Dead” ) the constant and consistent death gave me a very palpable sense and feel of anxiety. Then I got a chance to further look at it after seeing this show the initial time, and since, I think in actuality the show takes great care to care for ( in as much as is possible given time constraints ) and about various depictions of violence. It begins with the setup itself, 456 contestants arrive at a vast warehouse awaiting the games, and through the stories of the main characters and the time taken to explain their lives and the importance of it, we can extrapolate out that every person here has something worth living for, and a story of their own. The reason the violence is so striking in the first game is because you are intended to care about it. You watch the opening games violence ensue and you pay attention to how the camera's moving and where it stops and where it pauses and how long it chooses to stay in a certain moments around the violence, you can see that this is not just shock for shocks sake, this meant to make as much of these people as can be done - feel like they’re people!. Conpare that to a film like 2008's “Rambo”…

You watch how the violence is displayed in portrayed in a movie like Rambo. and the framing device around it- especially as it pertains to enemy combatants- and it is almost as if these bodies are meant to be dead before they're even actually dead. They are on the other side of Rambo's righteousness so who cares, they're human confetti now. In fact I would argue that the framing devices of good and evil and collateral damage are two of the most insidious contributors to the desensitization of death especially in comparison to a show that takes care to say that these people's lives actually mattered, and that they are not bad or evil people despite the fact that they may do acts that hurt in harm others. To watch large scale violence go on in big box office films like “The Avengers” and “Man of Steel” and know that there is no way in a downtown metropolis without any evacuation signal ( and even with) that there weren't buildings full of people that are now being smashed, broken, cut in half but the damage there isn't gonna be on a catastrophic level to human life ..human life is a desensitization. The framing device of the zombification of human bodies that allows them to now be so disposable that hacking, dismembering, disembowling, them becomes an almost fanatical joy is the true form of desensitization to death as far as I’m concern especially as usually human bodies are also being treated the same way who are actually living. My argument here is that it is these framing devices and these ways of dehumanizing the act of killing are the worst kinds of gratuitous where I’m concerned, and that maybe one of the reasons why we we are so hyper aware, and why so many can look at this show and have a commentary around its violence or feel viscerally its violence is because the creators took the time to make sure we felt each bit of that violence, that they didn't throw it away and toss it in a corner in boxes marked “enemy combatant” or “invaluable human to the story”. There were very few times in this show if any where it felt like the tactics being used, the functions at use weren't absolutely there to make you feel the death, that somebody was losing their life here, from how the camera is posed to the music, to the sounds of the guns themselves. I have been a action lover basically since I was a child. It is pretty much by far the genre I go in the most for when it comes to my movie watching. Many of my favorite films that I grew up on and still love come from the height of the action era in the Eighties with films like “Raiders of the Lost Ark”, “Lethal Weapon”, “Die Hard”, “Commando”, and “Aliens” right up into the Nineties with “Starship troopers”, “Hard Boiled”, “T2”, and"The Rock”. Having watched all of these films and much more I've always noted something about the sound sound of weapons - guns especially - in these films take on a rhythmic quality, there can be a sesne of gravitas to the sound, that gives it a sort of a lower allure, makes it sort of a draw something that you almost can't wait to hear. Pay attention you'll definitely hear it in films like Lethal Weapon, Beverly Hills,Cop, Die Hard, or John Wick, the sound design is for all intensive purposes cool, and sets you ina trance that acts as an anesthetic to the ensuing violence they cause. This is in massive contradiction to the soumd of the weapons in Squid Game, rarely have I heard a sound as consistently off -putting as the sound that came from the guns in the show. I never got used to that sound, I never got to settle into it’s rhythm, every single time one of those things fired it settled in and discombobulated my spirit and I believe that was done intentionally.

Another aspect of care I noticed the director in storyteller's involved, was that they seemed to notice when enough graphic violence whether in the form of sound or in the actual display - was enough. After already having so much gun violence, scenes where other forms of particular violence against the body took place were stepped back from in a way that allowed you to still note what had took place but not feature the violence itself. In another show, with different caretakers that cared less about the bodies than the morbid nature of bodies being destroyed I could totally see the scene from the tug-of-war game featuring the bodies falling and watching them hit the ground with an almost fanatical glee in the explosion of bodies, heads cracked open, bodies contorted, but Squid games folks merely showed the bodies from afar, in the dark, the conversations that take place afterwards about these deaths, and what they just did to these people in rhe elevator and back in the warehouse are telling as well. I don't think any show that took as much care as this one did in telling a story ( where they could easily have been lazy and stepped back on the premise of a capitalist machine that consumes and spits out bodies as if they are nothing ) can properly be construed as reckless or gratuitous in it's depiction of violence. Not in any objective sense that moves beyond your own subjective feelings about violence and depiction of it in itself. What that becomes is an argument for a depiction of violence, a shiny violence that desensitizes us by telling us certain lives don't matter when it comes to mass violence like this. That there are certain kinds of people who we’re meant not to care about so we don't have to avert our eyes, we don't have to put our hands up over our face and gasp out loud because these are ghost bodies, deserving carcasses, collatoral to a massive story about alien invasions, and superheroes duking it out in the name of these every people who are of course less than. Despite the fact that the true villain of this show is meant to be capitalism a machine invention where it is not as much about the people functioning as tools for the machine than as it is the gears and laws around the machines process. Despite the fact that the people wear masks that make them look as if they are a mechanical arm, a playstation controller that is connected to the hard drive in Squid Game even when those people die their lives count. Save for a few times these tools of of state masks were taken off to reveal a human being, so that even as a person who can be looked as a villain, it did not become vis a vis they're worthless. How to depict violence on screen and what goes beyond the pale, is inherently a difficult ask, and my thoughts here are far from above reproach or rebuttal, but in my mind we need to be asking more film and television to mimic this care, mass violence is always better if not depicted at all, BUT, if you're going to have this much violence be depicted because you're doing a war film, or whatever it is in a story that you're telling that may require a mass amount of people to be die, if this must be done in the first place then this is what we're asking you do, not this roundabout way of placing first and foremost our comfortability above a sensibility about the realities of what happens when a person loses their life, because funny enough it was Squid Game that never treated life as if treated life as if it was just a simple bad role of the dice in a loss of the game and it's many of our other forms of entertainment that have actually started to convince us that bodies should be treated as a form of fodder just as long as we don't have to focus too long on what just transpired.