SQUID GAME : What's the difference?
By: Cherly Cho
Bong Joon Ho, the director of the Oscar winning movie, Parasite, had said during an acceptance speech:
“Once you overcome the 1-inch-tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films.”
How right he was. Fast forward to 2021. If you haven’t heard of Squid Game, then you are super sus. Are you even from planet Earth? Even North Korea has opined on the series!
Squid Game has come for global domination, and it is still dominating through various Tiktok trends, people making the infamous sugar cookie, their tracksuit costumes and masks being sold out for Halloween, to the soundtrack now being spun at EDM concerts. As if South Korea wasn’t already dominating every other industry in the world, they have now dominated Netflix. Squid Game is a series in which the main characters are desperate for money as life has not been so kind to them. They participate in a series of children’s games to level up and get closer to winning 45 Billion Won or $38,393,239.20. The only catch is, if you don’t win each game, you die. No Super Mario bonus life mushroom here.
Not only does the series illustrate parallels to modern capitalism, it also takes a much more profound journey into the depths of the human psyche: no matter how much we try to do the right thing, when faced with a desperate set of circumstances, our instincts for survival overrides any moral compass.
Viewers were quick to point out the white actors who played a set of elite VIPs – incredibly rich men who arrived to watch the finale of the games. They were objectively the worst part of the series due to poor acting, cheesy dialogue, and English spoken with a distracting accent. American critics were already taking to the internet to make note of how they were being [mis]represented. It certainly is a noteworthy moment for Asians who have long been misrepresented for a near century in American media through the likes of hits such as:
Mash- Hiring a mix of Chinese and southeast Asians to play poor Korean villagers and speak jumbled dialogue that sounds Korean. There is no universal “Asian” language like that of the Latin community where they all speak a version of Spanish. Asians have their own languages and their own distinct culture separate from one another. Having a Chinese actor say Korean dialogue is like having a Russian speak English with a thick accent. It’s obviously not authentic.
Memoirs of a Geisha – A Japanese story shot with a predominantly Chinese cast directed by Rob Marshall.
Just like Asians are interchangeable in the eyes of White American, Anglo-Saxons are equally interchangeable in Asian media. Asians don’t care if the actor is German and speaks his American dialogue with a heavy German accent. He’s there to fill the role of a white man, right? He looks white. Job done and complete. So what if he has an accent? Asians can’t tell the difference, just like white media can’t tell the difference between Chinese, Korean, or Japanese. Kind of sucks to be on this side of the table now doesn’t it? This particular lesson can also be extended to other races and not just limited to Asians.
One of the great consequences of Squid Games attaining global success is, [hopefully] providing an opportunity for white audiences to perhaps sample a bit of what Asian Americans have endured for a long while:
The lack of accurate representation.
One of the indirect achievements that Korean media is accomplishing is simply educating global audiences, broadening their horizons. It’s good that people watched Squid Games and had an opinion on the white actors and their role in this series. It’s good that people are talking and sharing their perspectives because we are all learning and seeing things we haven’t seen before. We are educating each other and evolving, hopefully for the better.