Influenced by the hype for the new season, I watched Squid Game and yes, it’s an amazing series. Great allegories and metaphors, addressing many social and political issues. It’s well-written, with beautiful shots and characters, etc.
The following are not a review just some thoughts.
It falls into the category of dystopian fiction, along with other classic masterpieces of cinema and literature like Metropolis, Alphaville, V for Vendetta, 1984, Fahrenheit 451, Brave New World, The Matrix, Brazil, The Lobster, The Purge, Snowpiercer, and the beloved Idiocracy.
All these works have always been successful with a very wide and diverse audience. Often, they even inspired and influenced people whom these works theoretically criticize. Their success is often related to the fact that they describe reality in an exaggerated and outrageous way that manages to resonate with everyone—either to warn about a future danger or to make something obvious even more apparent.
And here's where the problem lies. These works, precisely because they are written to resonate with everyone in the same way, end up shaping a distorted image of reality. Watching something like Squid Game, for example, you see lower-class people competing to the death in children's games, but you don’t see how this crystallizes in real life. In contrast, Parasite showed former and current servants of a bourgeois family fighting to the death over who would get the day’s wage. This portrays real life better, though it always risks being criticized as politically motivated (sic). Furthermore, people already critical of the current social system risk starting to view the real world as dystopian, dismissing the means through which every social progress has been and is still being made.
That’s why, although dystopian fiction is always interesting and somewhat accurate, my personal preference is for works that address social reality and the class divide in a realistic way.