A factory turned battlefield, riot police armed with Tasers and a worker who spent 100 days up a chimney – the unrest that inspired Netflix’s most successful show to date has all the hallmarks of a TV drama. Are.
This month sees the release of the second season of “Squid Game,” a dystopian vision of South Korea where desperate people compete in deadly versions of traditional children’s games for massive cash prizes.
But while the show itself is a work of fiction, its director and writer Hwang Dong-hyuk has said that the experiences of lead character Gi-hun, a laid-off employee, were inspired by the violent Ssangyong attacks in 2009.
He has said, “I wanted to show that in the world we live in today, any ordinary middle class person can fall down the economic ladder overnight.”
In May 2009, struggling car company SsangYong, acquired by a consortium of banks and private investors, announced it was laying off more than 2,600 people, or about 40 percent of its workforce.
This was the beginning of the occupation of the factory and a 77-day strike that ended in clashes between strikers armed with slingshots and steel pipes and riot police wielding rubber bullets and tasers.
Many union members were badly beaten and some were jailed.
‘Many people lost their lives’
The struggle did not end here.
Five years later, union leader Lee Chang-kun staged a 100-day sit-in above the factory chimney to protest a ruling in Ssangyong’s favor against the strikers.
He was supplied with food by supporters from a basket tied to a rope and suffered a hallucination of the tent rope transforming into a writhing snake.
Lee told AFP that some people who experienced the disturbance had difficulty discussing the “squid game” because of the trauma.
The fallout from the strike, as well as a lengthy legal battle, caused significant financial and mental stress for workers and their families, resulting in about 30 deaths due to suicide and stress-related issues, Lee said.
“Many people have lost their lives. People had to suffer for a long time,” he said.
He clearly remembers police helicopters circling overhead, causing strong winds that blew workers’ raincoats off.
Lee said he felt he could not give up.
“We were seen as incompetent breadwinners and old labor activists who had lost their minds,” he said.
“The police continued to beat us even after we fell unconscious – this happened at our workplace, and it was broadcast for many people to see.”
Lee said that he was influenced by the scenes in the first season of “Squid Game” where Gi-hun struggles not to betray his fellow competitors.
But he wishes the show had inspired real-life change for workers in a country with economic inequality, strained industrial relations and deeply polarized politics.
“Despite being widely discussed and consumed, it is disappointing that we have not engaged these conversations with more beneficial outcomes,” he said.
‘Shadow of state violence’
The success of “Squid Game” in 2021 left him feeling “empty and disappointed”.
“At the time, it felt like the story of the Ssangyong workers had been commodified in the series,” Lee told AFP.
“Squid Game,” the streaming platform’s most-watched series ever, has been hailed alongside the Oscar-winning “Parasite” and K-pop stars as part of the “Korean Wave,” highlighting the country’s status as a global cultural superpower. Is seen as a symbol of emergence in. As bts.
But its second season comes as the Asian democracy finds itself embroiled in its worst political turmoil in decades, triggered by conservative President Yoon Suk Yeol’s failed attempt this month to impose martial law.
Yoon has since been impeached and suspended from duties pending the Constitutional Court’s decision.
Yoon’s shock decision was followed by a letter saying the declaration of martial law risked sending the Korean wave “into the abyss,” including about 3,000 people from the film industry, including “Parasite” director Bong Joon-ho.
Vladimir Tikhonov, a professor of Korean studies at the University of Oslo, told AFP that some of South Korea’s most successful cultural products highlight state and capitalist violence.
“This is a remarkable and interesting phenomenon – we still live in the shadow of state violence, and this state violence is a recurring theme in highly successful cultural products.”
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
