

There is no way to describe the premise of Squid Game without sounding like you ate Tide Pods for breakfast. I binged it in three total sittings, and thought about both film theory and economic determinism a lot. Squid Game is a show in which masked soldiers in hot pink tracksuits force adults to play schoolyard games in a giant children’s playland. Jameson said that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. The second declaration is usually attributed to Fredric Jameson, the great Marxist political theorist. Truffaut said that there’s no such thing as an anti-war film. The first is by François Truffaut, the great director of the French New Wave. Over the past 48 hours, as I gasped, stared, shrieked, hid, laughed, and sort of incoherently burbled my way through Squid Game, the astonishing new South Korean survival thriller whose nine episodes have just been released on Netflix, two famous declarations kept popping up in my mind.
