[Oops, they did it again (weaponized the desperation of the
proletariat for fun).]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

NETFLIX’S SQUID GAME REALITY SHOW IS KINDA GREAT. OH NO.  
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Alex Abad-Santos
December 1, 2023
Vox
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_ Oops, they did it again (weaponized the desperation of the
proletariat for fun). _

Squid Game: The Challenge is like Squid Game, sometimes
accidentally!, Netflix

 

Alex Abad-Santos [[link removed]] is a
senior correspondent who explains what society obsesses over, from
Marvel and movies to fitness and skin care. He came to Vox in 2014.
Prior to that, he worked at the Atlantic.

_____
 

To love _Squid Game: The Challenge _means succumbing, at least a
little bit, to media illiteracy.

The reality show, which was initially conceived by a British
production company, is barely based on the acclaimed 2021 South
Korean Netflix series
[[link removed]] that
is its namesake. _Squid Game_ was about many things, but it was
ultimately about capitalism’s vice grip on humanity. In it, 456
players — all of whom are living in dire financial debt — are
given a wicked opportunity: win a series of children’s games for a
chance to erase all their debt, or die trying. Because their hardships
have rendered their lives pointless anyway, they accept.

Contestants risk getting shot by a robotic doll (among other brutal
challenges) for the chance to not be poor. To stop the debts they’re
drowning in, they’d doom their best friends to death. Even if you
“win”_ Squid Game,_ there’s no winning because you won’t
ever be the same person you were before, and not in a good way. In the
final stretch of the original show, our hero finds out the games were
conceived by impossibly rich people who were just bored, all for their
entertainment.

_Squid Game_’s blistering burn is that it takes place in the real
world. Its games and their consequences might have been fantasy, but
the howling financial desperation its characters face isn’t.

That in mind, it feels as though the showrunners who created _Squid
Game: The Challenge__ _watched the original show and said, “Boy
those bored rich people were onto something.” Similarly, _Squid
Game: The Challenge_ contestants seem like they watched the bloody
series and thought, “Yeah, I could definitely win.”

The reality competition also takes 456 people and brings the games —
the red light/green light machine gun doll, the intricate
cookie-cutting exercise of death, the betrayal-inducing marble
collection, etc. — to life, sans murder. Instead of getting killed,
players pantomime keeling over when a tiny ink sack on their person
detonates, signaling they’re out of the game. Each participant
elimination, just like the original, adds $10,000 to the pot for a
maximum of $4.56 million in prize money — the biggest in
reality television [[link removed]] show history. The new
show also imports other elements from its homicidal progenitor, like
the sky-high four-tier bunk beds and guards in flamingo-pink uniforms.

So, what’s different? Well, besides the lack of dying changing the
stakes, no one is too bothered about capitalism. Everyone thinks they
can win! Some even talk about the show as some kind of learning
experience or a way to extend their social media reach
[[link removed]]. At one point,
they cheer when they see their prison-like bunks. If this is the grim
send-up of modern life that audiences across the world loved and
feared, no one told the people competing.

The gigantic prize money, terrific set design, and signature
challenges create a novel reality TV
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strategizing as best they can to figure out a game that seems to be
created on the fly. It creates an existential panic: regular, real
people grappling with their fragile existence in _The
Challenge_ bring out the worst in everyone.

It turns out that even though Netflix
[[link removed]] cleaved away_ Squid Game_’s
commentary on greed and ruin, you can’t make an actual reality show
based on a fake dystopian reality show without exposing a little
actual dystopia. Even in the often-horrifying sea of existing
competitive reality, there’s nothing quite like _The Challenge_.

The best part of_ Squid Game: The Challenge_ is that no one’s
figured it out yet

What makes _The Challenge_ so thrilling is that, despite the
familiarity with the source material, it’s still brand new.
Competitive reality shows like _Big Brother_, _Survivor_, _Top
Chef,_ and _RuPaul’s Drag Race _have been on the air long enough
that contestants who go on them know what kind of strategies work and
can, if they follow previous seasons, effectively put themselves in
the best position to win. Whether it’s forming an alliance, using a
backdoor veto, or not cooking risotto, participants have largely
figured out the mechanics of these shows and how to play the game.

Because these 456 people are the first ones to play, there’s
absolutely no proven winning strategy in _The Challenge_.

The show’s unapologetic commitment to shock becomes clear early in
the season, as players try and pick the shapes for what’s called
dalgona. Contestants have a tiny needle they need to use to cut a
shape from a brittle honey-sugar biscuit without cracking it. They
only have 10 minutes to scrape their shape out. There are four
different shapes — circle, triangle, star, umbrella — and the more
intricate the shape (umbrella) the more difficult it is to carve
out. _The Challenge _makes four team captains choose the shape that
their team has to chisel, with the catch being that the decision must
be unanimous and be made in two minutes.

Obviously, no captain wants to doom their team and choose the
umbrella. Scratching that little shape would be difficult, even with a
surgeon’s steady hands. There’s also no benefit in choosing the
hardest shape. No one in this game eyeing $4.56 million is going to
say, “Thanks for choosing the umbrella, I’ll have your back next
time.”

The first set of four team players grumble and can’t come to a
unanimous decision within the 120 seconds time limit, and they’re
all eliminated. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Ink packets explode. Their
eliminations are projected on a jumbotron for all the other players to
see. Then the next set of team captains are sent in, having just
witnessed four people get taken out. These ding-dongs can’t come to
a decision either. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Ink packets explode. Four
new team captains are sent in.

The players cannot believe how fast eliminations are happening — and
no one wants the umbrella. Not a single player on that set knows what
to do: pick the umbrella and doom your team or hope the other people
chicken out first? Watching eight players get eliminated for bickering
makes the decision even more urgent.

It’s moments like this, where contestants are faced with the
panicked realization of just how fragile their time in this game is,
that the show truly excels. There’s no magic formula, no prior
knowledge of how this is all supposed to go. These guinea pigs must
figure this all out on their own, even if it means sucking it up and
scratching a humiliating parasol out of a crumbling cookie.

It’s surprisingly easy to enjoy watching people compete on this show
... until it isn’t

_The Challenge_’s uncertainty creates compelling television in the
form of contestant 432, a truly great reality show villain. I refer to
this person as 432 because everyone on _The Challenge_ is referred
to by a number, a cutely deliberate decision to keep with the
dehumanizing spirit of the original series. Calling someone by a
number instead of their name is more clinical. It puts the onus on the
contestants to stand out and be more than their number, but if they
stand out too much they become targets.

With that, my god is 432 annoying. The editors are aware of this,
showing us all the moments of this terminally confident former college
football player at his cockiest and absolute worst.

Early in the game, 432 asserts himself as a dominant force, gathering
up other muscly men to form an alliance. 432 and his buddies bully the
other players in all aspects of the game, from sleeping arrangements
in the bunks to threatening a fellow player for calling him a “frat
bro.” 432 thinks he knows best in this game that no one knows how to
play. It’s infuriating, and even more infuriating is watching his
fellow players bend to him.

One of the challenges is based on the popular board
game _Battleship_. Of course 432 thinks he’s a savant
at _Battleship_. How does one become “good” at a game that’s
largely contingent on lucky guesses? 432 knows. 432 is sure of it. 432
thinks his guesses are better than anyone else’s.

While both the original and this reality show want to make clear that
money makes people act in the worst ways possible, I have a gut
feeling that 432 would act like this for free. And overall, that makes
it easier to watch him compete in this wretched game.

But I found myself feeling slightly bad for 432 and the rest of his
cohort when I learned that the show might have committed some light
human rights abuse while filming.

According to a report from Rolling Stone
[[link removed]],
Netflix made the contestants sign NDAs, but a few anonymous players
have come forward and alleged that contestants were collapsing during
the “Red Light/Green Light” game. In the game, participants had
five minutes to cross the finish line; the timer would stop and start
with each red light or green light. But the players told the magazine
that the game took half a day or so to film, and they had to hold
poses for some 30 minutes at a time, which led to people falling ill
and falling down. Some allege that the empty airport hangar they were
shooting in was extremely cold, while others accused Netflix of fixing
some of the competition so its most camera-ready contestants could get
through to the next round. It’s also unclear how much sleep these
players could get each night or what their shooting schedules are
like. Because the show features confessionals from contestants, we do
know that the food they were getting didn’t taste good and wasn’t
exactly filling. Imagine having to deal with all of that _and_ 432!

This isn’t the first time that contestants on a Netflix reality
show have come forward
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unacceptable living conditions. Yet, there’s something malevolently
comical about auditioning for a show blatantly based on the most
sadistic elements of a brutal social commentary — and then being
shocked that the people behind the show are treating contestants
poorly and may even be rigging the games.

A streaming service airing a sharp satire, and then picking up a
reality show that riffs on the cruelty of those fictional contests
while creating new ways to torture its very real players, thereby
producing a riveting TV show and accidentally giving viewers the
full _Squid Game_ experience is a level of caricature that Netflix
couldn’t have written itself. We’re getting what we paid for, I
guess!

_The Challenge _went to great lengths to scrub away the satire and
symbolism of the original series. With many of its contestants focused
on self-betterment and keeping a manically fun attitude, the new show
isn’t true to the themes of its namesake at all. Yet seemingly
accidentally, it reinforced the ideas — the absence of morality,
sheer desperation, and idiocy, the deranged things people will do in
the name of capitalism — that the source material warned us about.
The show nailed _Squid Game_, down to how entertaining it would be to
watch this all go down.

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* Squid Game
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* reality tv
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* proletariat in culture
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* proletariat
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