Dystopia as Entertainment

Netflix's new reality show should make us all uncomfortable.

When it aired on Netflix in 2021, I tried—but ultimately didn’t have the stomach—to watch the South Korean series Squid Game. The premise, in case you’re unfamiliar: In the slim hope of winning a huge cash prize, fictional contestants on the brink of financial ruin play traditional children’s games… to the death. In a variation on Red Light, Green Light, for example, contestants who fail to freeze on the “red light” are mowed down by machine guns. The show is gritty and dark, and I made it through only one episode before I quit.

But the show is also social criticism. At its core, it’s a story about human psychology (what desperate people will do), and usually my interest in the mind and in social behaviors overrules my squeamishness. The show isn’t meant for passive consumption; it’s a thought experiment, intended to make you uncomfortable. That instantaneous “ick factor” is telling us something about how the world should and should not be.

You aren’t supposed to enjoy watching Squid Game. Presumably, if you did, you missed the point.

So what was the point? Creator Hwang Dong-hyuk wrote the show when his family was cash-strapped during the pandemic in South Korea. Life, by his own observations, was unfair; the powerful around him were gluttons, while hard-working people like his mother could not make ends meet.

That was his reality. But, he wondered, what if that unfair reality were ALL there was? What if life were stripped down to only that—no shared family meals, no dancing in streets, no painting or singing or silliness? What if we could see the whole covert human strategy (that evolutionary compulsion to hoard power and resources) made plain? Like in a (large-scale, dramatic, and terrifying) game?

In the mind of Hwang Dong-hyuk, that was Squid Game.

One thing that makes the show so dark is the juxtaposition of opposites: the bright innocence of children’s games paired with grisly, violent deaths. The set pieces are designed to shock. A children’s game is played on a playground, complete with bright colors and empty swings, a place we associate with laughter and fun. But when the contestant fails at the game (the cookie he is carving snaps), his head explodes and the playground sand is soaked with blood.

It is the artist’s imagination that gets us from here (our lives, as they are) to there (this darker scenario, Squid Game). The underlying hope is that, from some distance, we might all agree to do what it takes to collectively avoid such a scenario. The story relies on shock to jolt you out of comfort into paying attention. Like most dystopian media, it’s meant not as entertainment but as a sort of warning. No matter how bad things get, artists can always give us an admonition against an imaginary worse.

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It is Monday night. The kids are in bed, dinner’s leftovers have been shoveled into lidded glass dishes, and the blue light of the dishwasher signals the end of the day. From the sofa, my husband moans, “How about I lie here and you scratch my head?”

“I’m going to read,” I said, “but I will do this for five minutes.” I slump onto the sofa next to him, rubbing his needy melon with my right hand and searching Netflix with my left. I click on a show because Netflix wants me to, because they have maximized its screen area and squared it with my remote and put a badge on it that says, essentially, “other people like this!” It is Squid Game: The Challenge.

Two years after the original Squid Game earned Netflix more money than any show, EVER ($900 million), the streaming service has done what we’d all expect it to do: spun off the original into a reality show. I click on it for diversion, but two minutes in, I announce that this is not the show for me. “Ugh. I can’t watch this. It gives me the willies.”

I aim the remote at the screen again. Eventually, I stop rubbing my husband’s head. But an hour and a half later, I am still watching.

It’s a game. Instead of being shot to death, these contestants are shot with black ink, paintball-style. And instead of dying, they mime falling to the ground dead.

Since the original Squid Game is “a grim and violent allegory of capitalism exploiting the desperate many for the enjoyment of a wealthy few,” it’s particularly ironic to watch Netflix use its success to, now, exploit real humans.

But I guess it’s not that simple. The real people in the reality show are only pretending to die, but the money they will get for winning is real. The actors in the original show are actually dying, and their captivity is real, but the money isn’t real because the whole thing is a fiction. No, the actors in the original show are pretending to really die, and the money they get is real, to them, as characters, in the show, which isn’t real. The real people in the game show are competing for real money, but the show itself is the brainchild of the actual money-makers, the tv execs whose faces you never see. The game show isn’t real (it’s a game), the series isn’t real (it’s a fiction), but the contestant’s desperation is real (they need real money), and the actors’ deaths are fake (they are acting), and the contestants’ deaths are fake (they are pretending) but also real (they are eliminated) but not in the same way the actors’ deaths are real (they die).

See how this gets slippery? Hyperreality, allegory, imagination, simulation, acting, playing, competition, perception, representation. A game! A story. Fun! Pretend.

Actually, it’s spooky af. But to dust off Jean Baudrillard would be going too far, no? We are talking about an innocuous time-passer—America’s opiate, the television game show. To call to mind theories of collapsed reality would be, just, hysterical.

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But now it’s Tuesday night, and I’m two episodes deeper into The Challenge. The creep factor has mellowed a little, or maybe I’m just inured to it. The whole thing might feel like any other reality show (alliances are forming, drama is manufactured) if it weren’t for the distinct dystopian elements. The contestants sleep in stacked bunks in a concrete dormitory (think: Holocaust movies), they’re bossed around by a loudspeaker (think: 1984), they line up to eat meals out of metal tins (think: A Brave New World), and they are dressed in matching uniforms (think: A Handmaid’s Tale).

These elements aren’t incidental—they’re the point. The show makers are aware that we will be more entertained by contestants in this pseudo-nightmare scenario than by the same contestants playing the same game in a “normal” environment. Why? Why does [the illusion of] violent fascism entertain us?

Because that’s what’s happening. I’m critiquing and parsing and questioning, yes, but I’m also being entertained. For the second night in a row, I’ve chosen to spend my few precious hours of leisure under a blanket watching a simulation of a simulation of… hell.

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Imagine a dystopian story about a society with an insatiable hunger for other dystopian stories. These people read dystopian books, watch dystopian movies, cheer for contestants on dystopian game shows. They make constant jokes about how the world feels like a dystopia. In the story, these people feel lucky that their world is not like that other, scarier, dystopian world. But while they are busy being entertained by hypothetical dystopias, they wreck their own world, ignoring what’s good about it and becoming indifferent to growth and improvement.

This is what I’m thinking on Wednesday morning. At this point I have spent four hours watching people in numbered tracksuits fight over their place in line. I have seen them cheer while stacks of fake money are dropped into a transparent globe hanging out of reach in their dormitory, goading them like cheese at the end of a rat’s maze.

Is there some consequence, I wonder, for letting what was supposed to be a warning become, instead, entertainment? Ancient Romans forced their slaves and their criminals and their poor to fight one another for public spectacle. Sometimes they put lions in there with those people! There was blood! It was super inhumane!

Nothing feels better than the kind of moral superiority we brandish, thinking of those bloodthirsty Romans in the coliseum bleachers, watching death like television, breathing fear and rooting for gore. We can walk our 21^st century sneakers across the 1^st-century coliseum sand, knowing we are better than they were.

Are we, though? Am I?

I wonder if these images are acting on me, if I’m less bothered by the black masks in Squid Game than I was a few years back by the red hoods in A Handmaid’s Tale. Do we think we’re watching a game show when, really, we’re just sort of acclimating to dystopia?

Eventually, “there is no longer any distinction between reality and its representation; there is only the simulacrum.” When we let evil entertain us, do we run the risk of collapsing the distinction between the two?

Squid Game was supposed to be uncomfortable. It was a game, but it was never supposed to be fun.

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Mercifully, the imagination cuts both ways. If it can transport us from an okay scenario (our lives) into a horrific one (Squid Game), it can also transport us out of a horrific one into an okay one.

I am thinking of the games we play to modify reality, and I remember the film Life Is Beautiful. A Jewish father, Guido, and his young son are sent to a concentration camp. To protect his son from their new, gruesome reality, Guido makes a game of everything. They are playing for points, he tells his son, to win a real tank! The boy wins points for hiding from a Nazi soldier; he loses points for asking for his mother.

In this movie, the game is invented not to lay bare the survival-of-the-fittest strategy at the core of society but to escape that reality. In fascist World War II Italy, all reality has to offer is death. But the game offers fun. Because he loves his son, the father warps reality, but this time it is from ugly to beautiful.

The filmmaker’s method is inverse, but this film, too, is social criticism. If we only laugh at the funny father, if we see the film as comedy, if we are merely entertained, we have (quite obviously) missed the point. We are meant to grieve the space between reality and this man’s benevolent imagination.

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So, it is Wednesday afternoon, and I’ve spent the first half of my week thinking about exactly the show Netflix wanted me to think about.

I have decided the instinct I had in the first two minutes of watching The Challenge was the right one. It lasted only a moment, and it was terrifyingly easy to ignore. Hours of Netflix later, I am accustomed to the masked guards and the black ink that explodes on the chests of eliminated players. Hours later, it’s all in good fun. Hours later, I am no better than the spoiled Roman housewife longing for a violent diversion from my toilet-less, toothbrush-less existence. “Release the lions!”

But in those first two minutes, I knew there was a trade-off to clicking.

I try to imagine the show through the eyes of my children, who might wander through the room while The Challenge played on tv. Because they are young, not yet calloused to violence and fear and oppression, I think I know what they would say. “Why would you want to watch this? It looks scary.”

If I start the show over, if I go back to the beginning, it does look scary. If I somehow give this show to the me of 15 years ago, it looks even scarier. Today? Wednesday? It’s a game show, geez.

At this point, watching or not watching is probably irrelevant on a personal level, though our collective viewing will make so much money for the Netflix execs, they will interpret it as a deafening scream to “MAKE MORE OF THIS KIND OF TELEVISION!” And we will deserve exactly what we get.

On a personal level, though, the “challenge” is whether I can hold the line between engaged observation and entertainment. If I can remember the difference between “this is what we don’t want” and, eventually, “this is what we have.” If, instead of discarding or discrediting or diluting the ick factor, I can trust it.

Without the ick factor, I am the wealthy Roman, and we’ve made of our world a coliseum, and the sleekest Netflix show in the world can’t separate us from our savagery.