Category Archives: Netflix

dark comedy, Netflix, Standup comedy

Adrienne Iapalucci on Netflix: What Does Dark Comedy Tell Us About Society?

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Adrienne Iapalucci
Adrienne Iapalucci The Dark Queen

In her Netflix special The Dark Queen, Adrienne Iapalucci lives up to her moniker. She begins by saying, “I’m not a good person,” and nothing that follows gives us any reason to doubt this. I have no idea if her misanthropic persona is her true self. But if not, she does a great job of making us believe.

Standup comedy is one of the hardest forms of entertainment to pull off. More so now, for a couple of reasons. First, it’s gotten so mainstream that the competition is fierce, and being original is nearly impossible. Even the best of them start to sound like they’re regurgitating the same stuff after you’ve seen them a few times. The other reason is that it’s hard to know what you can joke about nowadays. The amount of backlash comics like Dave Chapelle and Ricky Gervais get for their un-PC jokes probably discourages others from stepping out of line. That is not remotely the case with Adrienne Iapalucci.

Nothing is off limits it seems, as she jokes about 9/11, Muslims, disliking Puerto Ricans, and victims of school shootings, for starters. Nor does she do it playfully, like Russell Peters who specializes in roasting every ethnic group. She unleashes one inappropriate line after another without any backpedaling.

Unlike left-leaning bluish comics like Sarah Silverman or right-leaning ones like Gervais, Iapalucci seems like an equal opportunity misanthrope. I can appreciate this about her, as she doesn’t push any particular agenda, apart from pure nihilism.

I find her more entertaining than your usual standup routine, but then I’ve never been the genre’s biggest fan. At least you never know what kind of unhinged, inappropriate thing she’ll say next. Her deadpan delivery adds to the effect.

Maybe cancel culture is already moving into the rearview mirror. People are finally realizing the futility of trying to quell opinions (and jokes) that offend them. After all, the controversy attached to Chapelle and Gervais has profited more than harmed them. They’ve turned their most objectionable jokes, regarding trans people, into branding tools. I’m not sure if that makes them funnier -I’d put them both into the large category of comics whose material has gotten overly predictable. But attempts to “cancel” them have surely failed.

I searched for reviews of the Dark Queen show and didn’t see much in the way of outrage or demands to silence her. I’m talking about “professional” reviews now as I didn’t scour the web for every Rotten Tomatoes review. It seems to be sinking in that calling attention to a message you don’t like is only fueling it.

What Does the Dark Queen Say About Us?

I’m a little torn when contemplating the societal implications of someone like Iapalucci, along with Anthony Jeselnik and others whose style of comedy is pure darkness. On the one hand, I wonder if such blatant misanthropy isn’t part of an overall desensitizing, contributing to a world where empathy is an anachronism and utter self-centeredness is the norm.

On the other hand, her utter disregard for limits serves to undermine the overly sensitive tendencies of cancel culture. As Kat Timpf points out in You Can’t Joke About That, society has become unsettlingly humorless in recent years.

In a better, saner world, comics like Adrienne Iapalucci wouldn’t exist, at least in their current form. The conditions and atrocities they chuckle at shouldn’t be part of reality. But given that they are, we have a choice. We can approach them with grim seriousness, allowing only pundits, experts, and leaders to address them. Or we can let the dark comics do their thing, for better and for worse.

Broadly speaking, Adrienne Iapalucci is part of a lineage that includes Lenny Bruce, Bill Hicks, and George Carlin (to name a few). They often cross the boundary into the offensive and tasteless. But they also hold a mirror to society, revealing uncomfortable truths that are present whether we look at them or not.

 

 

Indie film directors, movie reviews, Netflix

The Killer on Netflix: A Hitman’s Vendetta

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The Killer on Netflix movie poster

It seems like Netflix is specializing in made for streaming movies with extremely limited theater runs about contract killers. At least if we consider two recent offerings: Richard Linklater’s Hitman and David Fincher’s The Killer (2023).

Actually, the two films aren’t very similar. I’ve already discussed Hitman, where the protagonist isn’t even a real contract killer but an undercover quasi-cop pretending to be one. The killer in The Killer is a bona fide killer. In fact, as played by Michael Fassbender, he’s one of cinema’s most ruthless hitmen, at least for a protagonist (when it comes to villains, it would be hard to list the endless variety of psychopaths portrayed over the years).

The killer, whose real name we never learn, uses a long list of pseudonyms, one of the movie’s few borderline amusing aspects. Although we see him in action, we mostly hear his inner dialogue, accompanied by a Smiths soundtrack.

It could be tedious to hear someone repeating various Nietzschean and Machiavellian quotes (along with one by Aleister Crowley), but here it’s actually compelling. Many of the words are repetitive, but we’re interested to see how (and if) the killer acts them out in each scenario.

As the killer meticulously prepares to do a job in Paris, he makes a mistake and shoots a bystander instead of the target. This sets off a messy sequence of events that throws off his equilibrium. As you might imagine, people who hire contract killers aren’t likely to forgive mistakes. They attack his home in the Dominican Republic and maim his girlfriend. The assassins, however, make their own mistake and leave her alive and able to identify them.

The killer, it turns out, isn’t too cold and calculating to resist the lure of revenge. So most of the film follows him as he tracks down each and every culpable party. He continues to repeat his mantra: “Stick to your plan. Anticipate, don’t improvise. Trust no one. Never yield an advantage. Fight only the battle you’re paid to fight.”

As his actions clearly don’t fit this stoic ideal, he almost seems like a malfunctioning android or Terminator, functioning at a high and deadly level, but not quite the way he was programmed to work. Tilda Swinton has a nice role as a charismatic fellow assassin who is on the killer’s list. They play a life-and-death game of cat and mouse over drinks at a restaurant.

We get no backstory for the killer. Did he watch his family get murdered as a child? Was he mentored by a fellow sociopath? We have no idea as we only see him as a finished product.

It’s been a while since I’ve seen the 1967 French classic Le Samouraï, but that film similarly portrays a lone wolf, hard-to-kill hitman on the run.

The Killer brings an intense energy to a familiar genre. It alternates between action and slower-paced brooding scenes. While not exactly groundbreaking -a hitman seeking revenge is a familiar trope-, for fans of arty-Euro style suspense, it’s worth a watch.

Film Festivals, indie comedies, Netflix

Hit Man: Fun Noirish Comedy But Not Vintage Linklater

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Hit Man movie poster

Richard Linklater, one of my favorite indie directors, is known for his episodic and conversation-heavy films such as Slacker, Dazed and Confused, Waking Life,  Boyhood, and the Sunrise-Sunset trilogy. Hit Man, on the other hand, is more like a Coen Brothers movie: twisty and plot-driven.

Hit Man went directly from a premier at the 80th Venice International Film Festival to Netflix. It did open at a small number of “select” theaters, but the vast majority of viewers will stream it.

Based loosely on a true story, it stars Glen Powell as Gary Johnson, a college professor who also works undercover for the New Orleans police. His superiors persuade him to pose as a hit man to set up people desperate or unhinged enough to hire a contract killer. Things get complicated when he’s “hired” by a woman named Madison (Adria Arjona) who wants to kill her abusive husband. Unlike prior setups, Madison seems like an actual victim with a just cause. It also doesn’t hurt that Gary is instantly attracted to her.

The story is a fairly typical modern noirish-comic tale with quirky characters and twists. Is Madison really a victim or more of a femme fatale with a hidden agenda? Will she discover Johnson’s true identity? To make matters more complicated, Johnson has a rival on the police force, a real cop named Jasper (Austin Amelio), who wanted the fake hit man gig himself. As Johnson gets involved with Madison, Jasper is watching.

One problem I had with Hit Man is how it starts. Gary Johnson narrates and just announces that he’s a philosophy professor with a mostly boring life who just happens to work undercover for the police, as if this is a normal thing. We see how he’s reluctant to take on the hit man role. But, really, that’s a relatively small step compared to the initial stage, which we never see, of getting recruited by the police in the first place. Maybe they didn’t want to lengthen the film by adding exposition, but to me it seems like a big omission.

I don’t tend to watch movies multiple times, but I get so much enjoyment from the verbal exchanges in many Linklater films that I often enjoy revisiting them. Sadly, I can only think of one scene in Hit Man that has this quality: a brief conversation between Gary and his ex-wife Alicia (Molly Bernard), who fall into the kind of profound and completely-inessential-to-the- plot type of conversation found in Waking Life, Before Sunrise, and others. Otherwise, the narration and dialog in Hit Man is either functional or typical flippant movie dialogue.

As played by Powell, Johnson is an enigmatic character who fluctuates between nerdy, charismatic, and unpredictable. From my research, I see he’s been in some popular movies I haven’t seen (I’m basically an all-indie guy). He mostly comes across like a movie star confident that the script has him covered. The role reminds me a bit of Tom Hanks in Catch Me If You Can.

I put Hit Man in the category of an A- or B+ semi-indie/semi-mainstream fils that I enjoy but wouldn’t go out of my way to see again.

 

 

 

 

 

 

dark comedy, Netflix

When You Finish Saving the World: Gen Z vs Boomer

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Movie poster: When You Finish Saving the World

When You Finish Saving the World, Jesse Eisenberg’s directorial debut and based on his own novel, stars Julianne Moore and Finn Wolfhard as a mother and son with serious social and communication issues, both with each other and the rest of the world. This is an insightful, sometimes funny, sometimes cringeworthy depiction of a conflict between two generational stereotypes: self-satisfied, affluent liberal Boomers and self-absorbed Gen-Zers who are more comfortable interacting online than in person. To its credit, the film doesn’t really take a side as both generations are lampooned.

Julianne Moore plays Evelyn, the director of a woman’s shelter in Indiana. Her teenage son, Ziggy, spends all his free time live streaming a music program that is broadcast globally to, he can’t stop announcing to everyone, 20,000 fans. Jay O. Sanders takes a back seat as Ziggy’s father, whose low key presence mainly consists of drinking wine, retreating with a book to his bedroom, and avoiding conflict as much as possible.

Ziggy is the kind of part Eisenberg himself would have played 20 or so years ago. In fact, this film vaguely evokes a 90s film in which he appeared, The Squid and the Whale, as both depict highly dysfunctional upper middle class families. Wolfhard is very effective in this role as a character who is often less than sympathetic. He’s both awkward and self-centered, oblivious of how off-putting his behavior often is.

Despite his apparent popularity online, Ziggy is socially awkward with his peers. He becomes infatuated with Lila (Alisha Boe), a politically active classmate who reads poetry at a local radical community center. Ziggy makes some ill-planned attempts to impress her. He turns one of her poems about oppressed people into a song and then brags how much money he made online with it. Ziggy suffers from the delusion that social media posturing is the equivalent of making a real difference in the world.

Evelyn is equally uncomfortable to watch. One of Julianne Moore’s strengths is playing characters who try to put on a brave front while barely hanging on emotionally. We saw this recently in May December, where she plays a woman living in the aftermath of a scandal. Here, she is equally off balance at home with Ziggy and her uncommunicative husband and at work, where she awkwardly tries to balance her role as supervisor with her egalitarian values. In one scene, her efforts to get friendly with a receptionist results in the other woman asking if Evelyn is planning to fire her.

Evelyn becomes obsessed with Kyle (Billy Bryk), a teen who goes to school with Ziggy (though the two are not acquainted) who is staying at the shelter with his mother. At first, she appears to take a maternal interest in Kyle, who seems more grounded and easier to communicate with than her own son. However, it starts to go in a queasier direction when she takes him out to dinner and gets giggly and flirty with him.

We need to look beyond Ziggy and his parents to find characters who are relatively normal and well adjusted. We see their foibles through the eyes of Lila and Kyle. The film’s major weakness is probably that the nearly perfect symmetry between Ziggy and Evelyn’s awkward interactions stretches credibility.

What I liked best about the film were some of the casual and offhanded observations. For example, we see Evelyn and Ziggy squeezing into an ostentatiously tiny Smart car, which is parked in one of the neighborhood’s larger and more ornate homes. This perfectly captures Evelyn’s need to be seen as a socially conscious activist while living a comfortable life in an upscale suburb. Then there’s the everyday hostility between Ziggy and his parents, who casually hurl obscenities at one another. This might be shocking to anyone not familiar with the norms of many liberal middle class families. Ziggy is especially territorial about no one disturbing him while he’s vlogging.

When You Finish Saving the World reveals how difficult communication can be in the modern world. . But overall, Eisenberg and the actors do an admirable job of sending up people whose self-importance and grandiosity can overshadow good intentions.

 

Documentary, Netflix

Radical Wolfe -Tom Wolfe Documentary

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I watched Radical Wolfe  right after reading Tom Wolfe’s very first book, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. Considering I lived through all the decades in which he wrote, I’ve had surprisingly little contact with his work. This documentary is a good introduction into a journalist and writer who was often controversial and who helped people to understand many of the most important cultural movements of the 1960s and beyond.

Radical Wolfe, directed by Richard Dewey, written by Michael Lewis, is 75 minutes, relatively short for a piece covering someone with such a long  career. I actually prefer this condensed approach, though someone could easily have made a 2 or 3 hour documentary on such a character.

Although it shows Wolfe in a mostly favorable light, it doesn’t ignore the fact that he was controversial and often provoked censure, as when he published a piece in New York Magazine in 1970 called Radical Chic ( which obviously inspired the doc’s title), targeting Leonard Bernstein and other liberal intellectuals who defended the Black Panthers. This helped to set the stage for Wolfe as a provocateur who would later offend people with The Bonfire of the Vanities among other works.

Towards the end, someone observes that no one in the future could ever replicate a career like Wolfe’s. The reason for this, sadly, is that someone as outspoken and controversial as Wolfe simply wouldn’t be tolerated today. I suppose this is debatable in the social media age, but it raises some interesting questions. People far more extreme than Wolfe have platforms on Twitter and YouTube for example. However, it’s not likely that anyone very controversial or extreme would be able to attain the mainstream popularity of Wolfe.

Radical Wolfe is a good introduction to a writer who captured some essential scenes and cultures of mid-20th century America. It’s currently streaming on Netflix.

dark comedy, Indie film directors, indie films, Netflix

May December -Complex Handling of a Tabloid Topic

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May December deals with the kind of tabloid-type topic you’d expect to see in a Lifetime movie or, going further back,  a TV movie of the week. The kind of movie that superficially condemns the scandalous behavior of its characters while titillating the audience.

Now imagine such a topic as handled by a director known for his insightful and complex approach such as Todd Haynes, and you have May December, a made for Netflix production. To be clear, May December does titillate the audience, but in a way that’s intended to make you feel guilty or at least uncomfortable for this.

May December is loosely based on a real incident of a teacher’s affair with a student.

Gracie (Julianne Moore) is a woman whose life has been defined by a scandal. When she was in her thirties, she seduced a 7th grade kid named Joe (Charles Melton), for which she went to prison. However, after she was released, Grace and Joe married and had kids. As the setting is a respectable suburb in Savannah, Grace’s standing in the community is ambiguous at best.

A strange detail to note is that the family, apparently supported by modest local jobs, somehow live in a grand home that could be called a mansion on a scenic lake. Perhaps Grace inherited it or had family money? Characters living above their realistic means is a common trope of movies and television but doesn’t really fit into  this otherwise more sophisticated film.

Elizabeth (Natalie Portman) is an actress who is playing Grace in a movie. She arranges a visit, staying in town, so she can get to know the family and learn more about the character.

May December is all about the troubled and ambivalent interactions between characters, especially between Grace and Elizabeth but also between Grace and Joe and between Joe and Elizabeth. There are also the nuanced interactions between Grace and Joe and their just-grown children.

In some ways, Grace still treats Joe like a child, even while insisting he was “in charge” in their earlier relationship. Considering his reticent and basically passive nature, this interpretation seems unlikely. Joe retreats to his hobby of raising monarch butterflies, which no doubt has symbolism as he seems trapped in a situation he fell into while still a child.

Elizabeth (Natalie Portman) is a strange case herself. She seems more fascinated and turned on than shocked by Grace and Joe’s history. In one scene, she visits the back room of the pet shop where the couple used to meet and re-enacts a seduction scene.

As with most Todd Haynes films, May December doesn’t answer many questions definitively. All of the characters are troubled and we can’t necessarily trust any of their motives. Elizabeth may have designs on Joe, but to what end remains unclear. Is she an actor who is obsessively dedicated to her craft or more of a voyeur reveling in other people’s scandals? Or perhaps the film is suggesting that these two are not mutually exclusive.

Grace may have been sexually assaulted by a brother growing up, which may partly explain her own behavior. She denies this ever happened and we are left wondering.

The film is alternately dramatic, tragic, and comedic, not giving us a chance to fall into a predictable mood. Haynes directed one of my favorite films, Safe, which came out in 1995 and also starred Julianne Moore.  Like May December, it deals with some heavy issues -in this case, health and how the world can make some people ill- in a disturbing and ambiguous manner. May December is a similarly complex exploration of issues that tend to get oversimplified.

See my review of Safe

dark comedy, Netflix

Beef: Road Rage Leads to Chaos

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Beef, a 10-part miniseries on Netflix, was created by Lee Sung Jin, with Jin along with Hikari, and Jake Schreier alternately directing. Beef has been called a dark comedy but it would probably be more accurate to call it a drama-thriller with some dark humor in the background. It also has elements of Greek tragedy and soap operas.

The premise is deceptively simple, leading to absurdly complex consequences. Set in Laguna Beach and nearby areas of Orange County,  the events are sparked by a seemingly trivial road rage incident.  Danny Cho (Steven Yeun) is a struggling contractor who is alternately depressed (to the point of contemplating suicide) and ambitious, while his soon-to-be nemesis Amy Lau (Ali Wong) is an affluent entrepreneur, wife, and mother who is feeling the pressures of balancing her increasingly stressful responsibilities.

Danny follows Amy home and later tricks his way into her house only to urinate on the bathroom floor. Amy retaliates by giving Danny’s contracting business a series of one-star reviews on Yelp. She escalates things further by catfishing Danny’s brother Paul (Young Mazino). Danny and Amy collide when both are at emotional breaking points. The road rage incident proves to be the last straw for both, as they cast the other as the cause of all the misery in their lives.

Danny and Amy get caught up in forces that seem beyond their control. While neither displays exemplary or even rational behavior, neither is purely evil or sociopathic. Danny is committed to helping his parents move into a new house. While his relationship with his brother is tense and fraught with mutual hostility and envy, he still feels responsible for his brother and experiences guilt over past betrayals. Amy, meanwhile, loves her daughter above everything and also feels guilt when she doesn’t live up to her own standards as a wife or mother.

Other characters contribute to Danny and Amy’s malaise. The closest thing to a pure villain is Danny’s cousin Issac (David Choe), an ex-con perpetually hatching schemes that range from marginally legal to blatant felonies. Amy’s boss Jordan (Maria Bello) is possibly the closest thing to a pure stereotype in the show, an affluent and thoughtlessly condescending entrepreneur/art collector/socialite who reveals the everyday subtle racism Asian Americans often face. Edwin (Justin Min) is a preacher at a Korean evangelical church with passive-aggressive tendencies.

What really drives the series of catastrophes are the seemingly small bad decisions both Danny and Amy constantly continually make. Both act out of rage and despair against their better judgment.

While Beef features a mostly Asian-American cast and cultural themes are certainly present, the story is really much more about the stress of modern life with some heavy doses of class conflict thrown in. For an insightful look at some of the details on Asian culture that most people will miss, see Asian Rage in Netflix’s Beef, by YJ Jun.

If there’s any single message to take away from Beef, it’s that every action can set off unpredictable, and possibly horrific, reactions in other people and the wider world. It has some elements in common with the 2004 Academy Award-winning film Crash, though Beef is far more insightful and nuanced than that heavy-handed and mostly overrated movie.

Beef is one of the best shows Netflix has shown recently. It’s an appropriately bizarre reflection of a world where everyone seems on the brink of disaster.

 

 

Documentary, Netflix

The Hatchet Wielding Hitchhiker: Netflix True Crime Doc

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The Hatchet Wielding Hitchhiker is Netflix’s latest in a long series of true crime documentaries. This one is about Caleb McGillivary, better known as Kai, a homeless nomad who became famous in 2013 for allegedly saving someone’s life by hitting an assailant over the head with a hatchet.

Kai immediately became a media sensation as he came across as a benevolent free spirit who just happened to be at the right place to perform a brave deed. His story, however, takes a dark turn.

The Hatchet Wielding Hitchhiker, directed by Colette Camden, is about many things beyond Kai himself. It’s about homelessness, substance abuse, childhood abuse, mental illness, and, perhaps most of all, a celebrity-hooked culture desperate to find the next reality TV star.

The Next Reality Star

In an attempt to cash in on Kai’s popularity, there was a feeding frenzy to get him booked on TV shows from Jimmy Kimmel to the Kardashians. Through all of this, Kai is revealed to be an unstable character with many facets to his personality. In between TV appearances, he indulges in binge drinking, urinates in public, and makes statements that reveal a troubled past and a tenuous grip on reality.

From Hero to Convicted Killer

Kai is accused of killing a lawyer in his 70s who gave him a place to sleep. According to Kai, the older man sexually assaulted him and he was acting in self-defense. The brutality of the attack makes this hard to believe. Even if there is some truth to Kai’s version, it seems unlikely he couldn’t have escaped the man’s home without killing him.

A Not-So-Speedy Trial

Another issue that the doc casually brings up near the end is how flawed and inefficient the justice system is. All of the events took place in 2013 but Kai’s trial did not occur until 2019. If had been innocent, he would have spent 6 years in jail awaiting trial, which clearly goes against the Constitutional right to a fair and speedy trial.

Fabricating a Celebrity

Kai as a heroic figure was questionable from the start. After all, he was in the very car of the assailant he ended up clobbering. There is also the question of how he happened to have a deadly weapon ready at hand.

The real message of this movie, whether intended or not, is more about the pathology of a celebrity-centric culture. Even if his initial actions were justified, he was clearly a troubled young man, homeless and with a history of abuse. However, he became surrounded by people who focused only on his surface-level charisma and were eager to turn him into the next big thing. Were they to blame for Kai’s eventual act of violence? Probably not, but they certainly didn’t do anything to help him either.

Is The Hatchet-Wielding Hitchhiker Worth Watching?

Unlike many docu-series on streaming services lately, this one is a stand-alone film. In some ways, this is a relief, as many such series are stretched out beyond what the material justifies. In this case, however, the movie could probably have been split at least into two episodes. The quick transition from Kai being embraced by the media to his murder conviction is fairly abrupt. Nonetheless, the story itself has so many compelling elements that it remains interesting, mainly as a sad commentary on celebrity culture.

 

indie films, Netflix

The Lost Daughter: Enigmatic Character Study

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The Lost Daughter, which premiered on Netflix right before the New Year, shows that Netflix aims at quite a diverse audience. The recent hit Don’t Look Up is a sendup of pop culture (with some heavy-handed messages); Cobra Kai attracts a mixture of older viewers nostalgic for The Karate Kid as well as younger, newer fans of the franchise. Meanwhile, The Lost Daughter is an ultra-indie offering based on an Italian novel. If you’re looking for action, sex or politics you won’t find it here. However, it is an interesting character study that also manages to be disturbing in its low-key way.

The Lost Daughter is the first film directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal, who is also the co-writer along with the novel’s author Elena Ferrante. It stars Olivia Colman as Leda, a native of England who is currently a professor in Boston. Leda is on a solo vacation on a Greek island, where she, at first, seems to mainly want to be left alone.

Leda is a difficult character to understand or sympathize with. She is alternately aloof, hostile, and friendly to the people she meets such as her apartment’s caretaker Lyle (Ed Harris) and Will (Paul Mescal), a young Irish student working at the resort for the summer. Her solitude on the beach is interrupted by a large and loud American family. However, after a brief altercation over seating, she becomes interested in Nina (Dakota Johnson), one of the family who has a young daughter.

When Nina can’t find her daughter, everyone panics and searches the beach. Leda, however, finds the young girl and is at least temporarily embraced by the family. However, complications ensue when the daughter’s beloved doll is missing. Probably the closest thing to a spoiler I can reveal here I a film with no real action is that Leda has taken the doll because it apparently reminds her of a doll she used to have.Leda’s encounter with Nina and the child reminds her of the past and the film then slips in and out of flashbacks of Leda as a younger woman (played by Jessie Buckley) who has two young daughters of her own.

I haven’t read the novel, but a lot seems to hinge on Leda’s introspection. Apart from the flashbacks, however, it’s hard to understand her motivations. She is clearly troubled about the past, which seems to be mainly due to a period when she abandoned her husband and children. Perhaps she sees herself in Nina and her daughter, though she seems almost more obsessed with the doll than with the actual people.

The conclusion is a bit ambiguous and can be interpreted in multiple ways. If you’re a fan of quiet, introspective films that don’t offer simple explanations or resolutions, then The Lost Daughter is something worth checking out.

indie films, Korean films, Netflix

Squid Game and Dystopias: What are They Telling Us?

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Squid Game, directed by Hwang Dong-hyuk, is the latest dystopian thriller that recalls aspects of The Hunger Games as well as many Black Mirror episodes. For many fairly obvious reasons, audiences can relate to the idea of a dark present-near future where survival hinges on horrific actions and ethical choices.

This will be more analysis and speculation about Netflix’s huge hit than a review. I’m not going to recount the plot in detail and there will be spoilers, so it’s really meant for people who have already seen the miniseries.

It’s interesting that a Korean film dealing with economic hardship and class struggle, Parasite, won the Academy Award for Best Picture and now a mega-successful miniseries from the same country breaks Netflix records. Of course, Korea is certainly not the only country dealing with such issues or these works wouldn’t resonate in so many other places, including the United States.

I watched the entire miniseries and found it mostly compelling. It’s more depressing than enjoyable, but that’s by design of course. I can’t say I’m anxious to see the next season, assuming there is one. More than anything, I wonder what the intention of such works really are, beyond the obvious motives to entertain and, from the point of view of the creators, to make money.

I can think of three ways to interpret Squid Game: As purely escapist entertainment, as a metaphor of present-day life, and perhaps a warning of where we’re headed or as a tool to demoralize the audience.

Even nightmarish scenarios, such as horror films and dystopian tales are escapist. Perhaps they provide relief by presenting a world even grimmer than the real one.

As a warning and expose, in the vein of 1984 and Brave New World. The games are a fairly obvious metaphor for a ruthless capitalistic society that values only competition and winning.

Russell Brand weighs in on the second possibility, seeing Squid Game as an expose of capitalism. Like many YouTube video titles, his is a bit clickbaity, suggesting that his analysis is unique and unprecedented. While Brand is always entertaining and unusually articulate, I don’t think seeing Squid Games as a metaphor for contemporary life is much of a stretch (sadly).

The third and darkest possibility is that Squid Game, along with other dystopian movies, shows and novels, may actually be part of a plan to condition us for a bleak future. Indeed, there are conspiracy theories that books like Orwell’s 1984 were meant to demoralize readers and get them to accept the inevitable.

Since I can’t get into the heads of the creators, I prefer to consider the effects of works such as Squid Game rather than try to guess the intentions behind it.

Daniel Pinchbeck gives a thoughtful analysis of this perspective, seeing this type of work as nihilistic
“neo-liberal pornography.” From this perspective, the grim choices faced by the contestants are there to prepare us for such a grim reality.

Is the world of Squid Game really one of pure brutality and hopelessness? There are traces of humanity, most notably displayed by the star, Seong Gi-hun, who plays Gi-Hun, a flawed character who joins the game due to gambling debts. Throughout the games, however, his empathy is revealed and, at one point, he refuses to kill an antagonist even though it meant winning the entire game.

Can’t Stop Playing the Game

The ending of Squid Game shows Gi-Hun, the winner (I told you there’d be spoilers), unsatisfied and unable to enjoy his newfound wealth. At the very end, he even decides to rejoin the game rather than visit his estranged daughter. Of course, the obvious reason for this is to set up a possible Season 2. However, it also raises questions about the nature of gambling, games, and life.

What are Gi-Hun’s motives? Presumably, he doesn’t care about winning more money as he hasn’t even enjoyed what he’s already won. Rather, he seems intent on infiltrating and perhaps exposing and destroying the game.

Where Does That Leave Us?

Putting aside the need to end the season on a cliffhanger, where does the ending leave the audience? The game is certainly evil, run by ruthless sociopaths. However, even this is not without ambiguity, as we learn that the old man, player Number 1 (Oh Yeong-su), is actually the creator. His motives are vague –he supposedly wanted to recreate games from his childhood -yet, why make them brutal life-or-death contests then?

The problem is, the people who volunteer to play are in a can’t-win situation. They choose to play because they have nothing waiting for them in the outside world and no way to improve their situation. So, even if a hero such as Gi-Hun were to dismantle the whole enterprise, would he really be helping society? Rather than risk a quick death, the players would just live out their lives in poverty and misery.

So, the world of Squid Game indeed presents us with a grim world where there is no apparent solution. The real world is hopeless for many people and their only chance is to play a game that will most likely mean death. This can be seen as an exaggerated version of poor and working class people relying on the lottery or some other form of gambling as their only salvation. Indeed, Gi-Hun is a gambler himself.

Squid Game may have subversive intentions or it may not. Either way, it doesn’t present a very hopeful vision of the future (or present). Rather, it portrays a scenario where the vast majority of people are helpless pawns in a vast, omnipotent system. It may be time to look beyond dystopian and post-apocalyptic visions. Utopias, which are out of fashion now anyway, don’t really help much either as they seem completely removed from our current reality. Perhaps we need a new genre, one that provides more of a roadmap from dystopia to a utopia or at least a tolerable world.