A pitched battle in a factory, the police subduing strikers with electroshock guns, an activist who spends 100 days perched on a chimney are examples of the brutality of social relations in South Korea that inspired the series. The squid game.
The long-awaited second installment of “The Squid Game” premiered on Thursday, after the series managed to be the most watched in Netflix history with its first season. The production shows desperate characters competing in a deadly version of a traditional children’s game, in search of a reward.
Its director and screenwriter, Hwang Dong-hyukclaims that the protagonist Gi-hun’s experiences were inspired by a violent strike at the Ssangyong plant in 2009, when a group of workers took over an industry to protest a layoff plan.
“I wanted to show that in the world we live in, any middle-class person can collapse and fall to the bottom of the social ladder overnight,” he explains.
In May 2009, the automotive giant Ssangyong announced a layoff plan that would affect more than 2,600 people, 40% of its staff, to address its difficulties.
Workers mobilized and occupied the plant during a 77-day strike that ended with clashes between strikers and riot police armed with stun guns and helicopters dropping tear gas. Many unionists were violently repressed and some were imprisoned.
But the conflict did not end there.
Five years later, the union leader Lee Chang-kun He began a 100-day protest by climbing a factory chimney to denounce the ruling of justice in favor of the company and against the strikers. The union leader was fed thanks to a basket with a rope and, according to him, he suffered hallucinations.
The union leader was fed thanks to a basket with a rope and, according to him, he suffered hallucinations.
For some workers who participated in the protest in 2009, it is hard to talk about “The Squid Game” because of the lingering trauma.
After the takeover, the workers faced judicial torment. More than 200 were prosecuted and nearly 100, including Lee, were sentenced to prison terms.
About 30 workers committed suicide due to stress problems, Lee recalls. “Many lost their lives,” he says.
For Lee, the workers were perceived as “obsolete activists who had lost their minds.” “The police continued to beat us even after we fell unconscious and this happened at our workplace and was broadcast for many to see,” he says.
For Lee, many scenes from the first season of “The Squid Game,” in which the protagonist fights to avoid betraying his competitors, were moving.
But the activist regrets that it did not lead to real change for workers in a country with great inequalities, tense relations between employees and companies and a policy marked by tension. “It seems like inequality is so entrenched that there is no turning back,” he said.
The shadow of state violence
The success of the series in 2021 made him feel “empty and frustrated.” “I felt that the story of the Ssangyong workers was reduced to a disposable product,” says Lee.
“The Squid Game” became part of the “Korean wave” embodied by the international success of films such as Parasites and K-pop bands like BTS.
But the second season premieres at a time of political crisis in South Korea, after the president Yoon Suk Yeol was dismissed by Parliament for his failed attempt to decree martial law. Yoon was suspended from his duties until the Constitutional Court rules on his future.
Vladimir Tikhonovan expert in Korean studies at the University of Oslo, believes that some of the country’s most successful cultural productions chronicle state violence and the cruelty of capitalist society.
“We continue to live in the shadow of state violence, and this state violence is a recurring theme in highly successful cultural products,” he highlights.
Fuente: AFP
