Squid Game: The Uncanny Horror of Capitalism
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- Опубліковано 2 лис 2021
- Squid Game shows the horrors of capitalism in bright, happy colors. Sigmund Freud's theory of the uncanny tells us why Netflix's hit show is so disturbing - the games in the battle royale distort the playground games of our childhood. This not just an interesting take on the horror genre, it's a commentary on how our way of life has become distorted and brutal. Squid Game makes us look at the frightening side of our economy.
This review contains spoilers. And psychoanalysis. You have been warned.
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SOURCES:
Squid Game lays bare South Korea’s real-life personal debt crisis
Nemo Kim & Justin McCurry (2021)
www.theguardian.com/world/202...
International Monetary Fund: The Korean Financial Crisis of 1997
www.imf.org/en/Publications/W...
Half a Million South Korean Workers Walk Off Jobs in General Strike
Jia Hong & Ju-Hyun Park
truthout.org/articles/half-a-...
South Korea's Debt Hits an All-Time High in 2020 Q4
• S. Korea's household d...
History vs Sigmund Freud
TED-Ed - Todd Dufresne
• History vs. Sigmund Fr...
MOVIE CLIPS SHOWN:
The Exorcist (1973), Aliens (1986), House on Haunted Hill (1959)
SOCIAL MEDIA:
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OTHER VIDEOS:
Dear Evan Hansen: What Media Gets Wrong About Mental Health
• Dear Evan Hansen: What...
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Inside, Bo Burnham and the Internet’s Identity Crisis
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Cheugy: A Millennial Tragic Comedy
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(What the latest funny word to come off of Tiktok says about the central sadness of the Millennial experience) - Фільми й анімація
With all that reference to Freud, childhood memories and trauma, it's worth pointing out that the old dude who turns out to be (one of?) the initiator(s) of the game would have been a child or maybe adolescent during the Korean War and its aftermath, no? He may well be re-staging his own traumas in this game...
Soooo good! Each new video essay (videssay?) is somehow better than the last! Thank you!
I asked a German ex-pat friend for a definition of "unheimlich". He thought for a bit and then said, "Unheimlich is the feeling you get when you step through the door to your home and you suddenly realize everything and everyone inside has been secretly replaced with a nearly exact copy."
That's a definition that paints an incredibly vivid mental image. So creepy, and yet so conceptually interesting. That idea would make for an excellent slow-burn horror game, if someone hasn't already made it!
A fantastic and comprehensive video essay. I thoroughly enjoyed it, well done!
Thank you! Psychological theories around horror are fascinating and when I saw such a perfect example of the uncanny I had to talk about it.
@@maevemonroe Well, you did a fantastic job and earned an extra subscriber!
excellent piece as always. re: uncanny horror - i have questions lol. How much of what we would consider "uncanny" is predicated on individual lived experience and / or shared experience? is it possible to meaningful separate these two things when talking about them? also, how much of what we generally consider "uncanny" is learned / informed by our lived experience and how much of it is intrinsic (if it is at all)?
i understand that these questions are probably a bit loaded and open up a whole different discussion, but the first part of the video definitely got my mind racing and i'm dying to learn more. could you recommend some good reading on the subject?
For good reading, there are enough essays that I'm going to ahead and add a "Further Reading" section to the description after I'm done writing this comment! A recent article I liked a lot is on the uncanny and Coraline. It's by Robin Moon and called How Fragile That Can Be.
As for lived experience or shared experience: my first thought is some of both. When we were first talking about the idea of the uncanny in college the class had a whole debate, as psychology classes often do, about the validity of the theory and if it was more of a nature vs. nurture thing.
There's a compelling argument that some of the effect of the uncanny is instinctive. (Please forgive the rather morbid description ahead.) Dead bodies look almost familiar, almost like living bodies but then more different from what we know everyday further along the decomposition process. Our unease around the uncanny could be an instinctive horror to avoid the risk of infection associated with being around corpses. But what's uncanny is also very personal. Some people find clowns utterly terrifying and some don't, and anecdotally it seems to come down to experience.
Then, if you leapfrog from Freud to his protege/friend/the whole relationship deserves a biopic Carl Jung you get into the idea of the collective unconscious. Jung thought that there's a kind of shared human experience, and he used that idea to explain why so many myths and archetypes repeat in different cultures. That's an idea I find fascinating even though I can't point to much in the way of solid scientific proof that it exists.
Squid Game's fad will fade off eventually. Just ask MMPR and Pokemon.
How do you not have more subs? So happy you should up in my recommendations, since I’ve been binging Evan Hanson reviews.
Thank you! UA-cam and recommendations are a total mystery to me but comments like this make my day. Thanks for giving a small channel like mine a chance, it's very encouraging
"I'm gonna make that everybody's problem!" Since that's pretty much what Sigmund Freud did, I say fair enough! And your pronounciation of "unheimlich" is perfectly fine for an anglophone non-speaker of German!
On pronunciation: If I hadn't seen the word written on screen, I'm 99% confident I'd know exactly how to transliterate it. (German is my second foreign language, but I get a decent amount of practice and exposure.)
One road to improvement: the ending 'ch' is not pronounced like a 'k'. Also not exactly like the 'ch' in Johann Sebastian Bach, but that's closer-the real pronunciation doesn't have the throat friction which sounds like you're coughing up a wad of slime; instead it has a lot of airflow.
Gosh love your channel 👏🏼👏🏼
Squid Games fell down on many levels from inconsistent motivations to getting bogged down in unnecessary subplots, but visually and psychologically it was actually really compelling viewing I thought. Loved the brightly coloured Escher-esque staircase throughout it, which is a good example of the familiar yet ominous vibe you mentioned.
"Freud would have a lot to say about the Mother part" from the little I know of Freud, he probably would have had a lot to say about Mothers even if there wasn't a single one featured or even mentioned in the story!
Sometimes an Oedipal complex is just a cigar...
great video
Well narrated ....
Uncanny horror of capitalism 👍
Thanks 😊
Squid Game is about the human condition. It is such a stretch to call it a critique of Capitalism or any other economic system.
I think (and I will keep complaning about this until the cows come home) that this isn't capitalism, it's corporatism and that there's a difference between them. Capitalism is the private ownership of things for profiteering. Corporatism is power exercised through large businesses and interest groups, which is what this is.
Capitalism can and has turned into corporatism, though via shit like Amazon and Facebook commanding technology.
May I add that Disney's mastered the uncanny with their movies now, in particular their CGI?
Yes, all "critiques" of capitalism are actually critiquing corporatism because it's easier, but I don't think Squid Game was attempting to do either, it was a commentary on the human condition, not an economic system.
What???
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