The final season of Netflix’s hit Squid Game arrived this summer, reigniting its global fandom. Social media buzzed with fan edits, theories and merchandise hauls, from McDonald’s x Squid Game Happy Meals to Pop Mart collectibles.
But this record-breaking frenzy sits uneasily beside the show’s central message: a scathing indictment of capitalism. The very marketing of Squid Game reveals the hit Korean drama as a textbook case of “redwashing” — when corporations adopt the veneer of social justice to deflect from their own misdeeds and generate profit – and effectively neutralizes the show’s radical message.
Squid Game’s anti-capitalism is as clear as day. The show’s premise involves hundreds of people in crushing debt taking a chance to play in a deadly, last-man-standing competition for a cash prize. Participants watch their competitors die en masse in a series of twisted children’s games, all for the entertainment of bored elites. Even setting aside these obvious plot elements, the show’s artistic form is reminiscent of socialist realist fiction, the official literary doctrine of the Soviet Union.
But without its dark, scathing commentary on our economic system, Squid Game is an empty spectacle, another part of the money-making machine of pop culture.
But without its dark, scathing commentary on our economic system, Squid Game is an empty spectacle, another part of the money-making machine of pop culture.
After racking up more than 130 million views, season three reportedly broke Netflix’s three- and 10-day viewership records for a non-English show. Seasons one, two and three respectively hold the first, second and third positions for the most-popular show amongst the non-English genre.
With the help of the billionaire corporation Netflix, Squid Game sells its progressive capitalist indictment to generate more exploitative capital. Its critique of monopoly capitalism becomes its product, enabling collaborations with other corporations, including JustEat, Crocs, Puma, Primark, McDonalds, Duolingo, Dominos and Cadbury — the show itself even becomes a brand, entirely commodifying its message. This excessive commercialization not only trivializes the show’s radical message, but diminishes its power.
But there’s a deeper insight in this, too. The truth is that if Squid Game had at all succeeded in destabilizing the system it condemns, it wouldn’t be global merchandise; it would be censored, blacklisted, erased. That it became a franchise that’s driving a fan frenzy proves its ultimate point: Resistance is permitted only when it poses no real threat.
Neutering radical art
It was critical theorist Theodor Adorno who first coined the term “culture industry.” He theorized that, in a capitalist society, art and media function to pacify the proletariat. The culture industry makes it bearable to work away an entire third of our lives. Cultural products, whether consciously or not, reflect social desires — the zeitgeist — shaped by capitalist greed.
Capitalism’s individualistic nature, whereby people are dehumanized and turned into cogs in a system without human recognition, alienated from community and from a sense of accomplishment, typically leads to a societal yearning for human connection and life’s deeper meaning. Art under capitalism is shaped by market logic; it must appeal to audiences and justify its existence through consumption.
The culture industry creates a feedback loop, producing the very dreams people need to tolerate their material conditions. Sitcoms depict close friendship groups or families with all the free-time in the world; romcoms present a sense of social mobility post-makeover; feel-good movies show a poor man’s economic advancement through the ranks in the classic ‘made it from nothing’ trope. This art serves not to awaken, but to comfort.
But Squid Game offers no comfort; its depiction of debt, desperation and death refuses catharsis. There is no justice or redemptive arc, only despair. Seong Gi-hun, the show’s central “activist” figure, does not succeed in dismantling the oppressive structure, but is ultimately defeated by it, capturing a modern pessimism toward the possibility of meaningful systemic change within capitalism.
Gi-hun therefore acts as a mirror to the director himself: Just as Gi-hun fails to dismantle the system from within the game, so too does Squid Game director Hwang fail to provoke real societal change through his art, because it must be produced, aired and consumed within the capitalist framework it critiques.
The show’s lack of a cathartic ending reflects a pervasive sense of disillusionment that the system will never change. Is this artistic failure, or simply realism? The show refuses to motivate action through idealistic resolution, marking a clear divergence from the socialist realist fiction that Squid Game seems to mirror; instead, it suggests that any potential for change has already been neutralized by the structure in which it must operate.
The very commercialization of the message is also part of Hwang’s story. The plot of Squid Game was born from the director’s own suffering: In the depths of poverty, in debt and unemployed, Hwang himself grappled with the decision to turn to gambling. We can’t separate these autobiographical elements from his decision to sell his critical fiction to a capitalist company for it to be exploited.
Hwang too is both a product and a casualty of the system he indicts, which is the very reason he wrote such a show. So while we may criticize his choice to “sell out” to Netflix, this criticism should ultimately lead back to the oppressive economic structure causing it. It’s a bleak reflection of the system’s totalizing grip: Even art that seeks to indict capitalism must first submit to it, and in doing so, it becomes complicit.
Squid Game is a bleak reflection of the system’s totalizing grip. Even art that seeks to indict capitalism must first submit to it, and in doing so, it becomes complicit.
It’s a truly pessimistic message. You cannot dismantle a subjugating structure without being a part of it, and once you learn to survive within it, you have already upheld it, contributing to the harm it inflicts.
It is this sentiment that best sums up Gi-hun’s trajectory in seasons two and three: Survival within capitalism often requires compromise and collusion. For artists, this means the self-commercialization of their work.
The idea that art can successfully criticise capitalism only by operating within it is the paradigm of Squid Game. It fails to be revolutionary not by accident, but because it is not allowed to. As it succumbed to monopoly capitalism to survive, so too did the power of its indictment dissolve.
On a broader scale, it reveals something sobering: Art has lost its capacity to effect radical change. It must be commodified to be seen, and this commodification blunts its critical edge. Ultimately, Squid Game exposes the brutal truth that under capitalism, even indictment must turn a profit. Impact demands visibility, and visibility demands marketability.
