Fresno State professor: ‘Squid Game’ resonates with Americans who face debt worries

The recent South Korean television series “Squid Game” has captured the public imagination, spawning a flurry of internet memes and interest in this fictional narrative. The popularity of the show, which depicts heavily indebted characters competing in life-and-death games to win a cash prize, illustrates the global reach of Korean entertainment products.

As a Korean American growing up in the United States in the 1990s, the availability of South Korean media was limited to a few dusty VHS tapes stored in shelves behind the counter of the local Korean grocery store. Since then, the so-called Korean Wave has become ubiquitous, with “Parasite” finding success at the Academy Awards and “Squid Game” sitting at the top of Netflix’s all-time popularity rankings, generating nearly a $1 billion in revenue for the company.

On the one hand, the success of “Squid Game” is the result of decades of strategic investment into the Korean entertainment industry. One of the key moments for the pivot toward entertainment came under President Kim Young-sam and was inspired by the 1993 film “Jurassic Park.” During a cabinet meeting the year following its release, President Kim’s advisers pointed out that the Steven Spielberg hit had generated $850 million in gross revenue. To match this single film, his advisers noted, Korean automobile companies would have to sell 1.5 million cars. Mass entertainment, exported abroad, could seemingly generate more profit than the combined efforts of South Korea’s best and brightest engineers.

Since then, the industry has enjoyed governmental support, and producers of Korean cultural exports have shown themselves agile, identifying market demands and catering to audience tastes.

Yet on the other hand, the success of “Squid Game also points to the public appetite for capitalist critique. There is a clear allure in South Korea for such criticism: the debt trap fictionalized in this series is a reflection of a very real phenomenon. South Korea has a household debt to GDP ratio of over 100%, meaning that the average person would have to save their entire income for more than a year to pay off their loans.

Aware of this issue, South Korea’s government has curbed lending through tougher restrictions, which only resulted in turning people away from banks and towards gray market loans.

As a research professor at Korea University in Seoul this past year, I recall seeing my local alleyways scattered with business-card sized advertisements for such lenders, promising quick cash with innocuous sounding names like “Smile Loans” or “The Friendly Lender.” Given the visibility of debt, it comes as no surprise that “Squid Game” garnered a domestic following.

The series has clearly found a market for capitalist critique in the United States as well. The pressures of debt, anxieties over a lack of financial stability, and concerns over growing income inequality are all sentiments that translate easily to this side of the Pacific. During this past year, we have all seen friends and neighbors experience these emotions as pandemic shutdowns made clear the lines between white-collar workers, who kept their jobs while working from home, and service-sector employees, who were not afforded this luxury. If the United States was a market looking for capitalist critique, this was a niche that Korean dramas and movies could fill.

Although fictional, “Squid Game” speaks to the economic anxieties shared by Koreans and Americans alike. The success of “Squid Game” and “Parasite” shows us how criticizing capitalism is a lucrative business. The fact that so many are dissatisfied with income inequality and economic instability, and the fact that this discontent is the target of marketing forces looking to profit through dramas and film, might be the best snapshot of our current historical truth and historical present.

Danny Kim, assistant history professo, California State University, Fresno