Squid Game(s)

Abstract

Here, the author presents a sequentially yet nonlinearly organized collage of previously published writing, curated under the title “Squid Game(s).” The collage is composed entirely of decontextualized quotations. The excerpts include reviews and analysis of the Netflix series Squid Game; excerpts from accounts and analysis of the Holocaust, Nazism, and their representation; discussions of homeless men paid to attack each other in a video series; and texts drawn from contemporary social theory. The collage, as an experiment, offers readers an opportunity for recontextualization through their own associative sense-making. Readers determine what is important information, what might be fruitfully compared and contrasted, and how a viral hit television program might come to “mean.”

Dystopian Games: Diagnosing Modernity as the Scene of Tests, Trials and Transformations

“…While popularity is not always the best index of the significance of a text, those which achieve global reach are still remarkable, and should be understood as not just ‘catching the zeitgeist’ but socially meaningful through interpretation and emotional engagement between reader and text and thereby offering new understandings of social life. These dystopian texts interconnect with history, theory, journalism and more, taking up contemporary social concerns (Borchard, 2022). Strikingly, within the Anglophone world, generally dystopias are initially popular in novel form, for instance, Divergent or Maze Runner , but only achieve global impact in cinematic or televisual format – which perhaps indicates something about cultural-flows, but equally how the medium draws viewers into the ‘game frame’ which unfolds within them.…”