by SAM YANG
Netflix’s dystopian survival drama Squid Game can help viewers better understand Korea’s history and the blood-soaked shadow of American empire that hangs over it.
The dystopian survival drama Squid Game has a bidirectional relationship with the history of modern Korea—just as Korea’s historical context suffuses the plot and characters of Squid Game, Squid Game as an allegory bleeds backwards onto Korea’s historical material reality. Understanding Korea and Korean history, particularly the second half of the 20th century, can help viewers better understand the show; similarly, the show can help viewers better understand Korea’s history and the blood-soaked shadow of American empire that hangs over it.
And yet, for the most part, the latter has been curiously absent from the torrents of discourse surrounding the series since it became a global sensation. In the show itself, we get an unflinching look into VIP secrets, we see “where all the bodies are buried.” In this article, I hope to show you how those bodies got there; put them on the slab for examination, and I’ll show you the tentacle marks left on their throats and arms by America’s occupation in Korea.
The Imperial Squid
Before Japan’s surrender in 1945, US military planners at the Potsdam Conference took a map and broke the Korean people in half. According to Dean Rusk, this geopolitical gerrymandering was a compromise between the State Department, which wanted Korea, and the Department of Defense, which did not. No Koreans were consulted.
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