What does it cost to get rich?

This review contains spoilers.

Genre: Survival drama TV show #television #capitalism

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Capitalist rhetoric claims competition, free markets, and hard work are all it take to make a fortune fair and square, and that those left behind have only themselves to blame. In gory detail, Squid Game explores the cost of that competition and shows how, no matter one’s personal character, acquiring wealth in a capitalist system is necessarily unethical.

The organizers of the game make its participants a promise: Unlike in the real world, where they have little chance of getting out from under capitalism’s crushing boot, they each have an equal opportunity to win. At first, the promise seems genuine. When a player is caught cheating, the game overseer executes him and his abettors without a second thought. And the first game they play — “Red Light, Green Light” — has a pretty fair set of rules.

But the pretense of fairness breaks down quickly. Players had not been told they would be brutally murdered should they lose. And it’s only when the survivors express the desire to leave that the prize is literally dangled above their heads, its message clear and vicious: the more people die, the more money you stand to win.

The game’s creator absolves himself of responsibility, noting the participants agreed to the terms. He conveniently ignores that as a money-lender, he is guilty of contributing to the pressures that led players to accept the terms in the first place — and that his recruiters leveraged the hopeless circumstances he created to convince them to join.

By the time players get to the bridge game, it’s overly clear the entire endeavor is not, as advertised, a respite from the capitalist system, but rather a microcosm of it. The only way to win is by making the right connections, ruthlessly eliminating and backstabbing the competition, and getting extremely lucky.

In the end, the last man standing is neither the savviest nor the most able individual. He could have been any one of the others who died. And his reward, a glowing pot of money, has come at the cost of hundreds of lives and his own humanity. What were the alternatives? To die or not participate at all — the latter an arguably worse fate as shown in the only episode, entitled “Hell,” that takes place entirely outside the games. In real life, though, not participating in capitalism is rarely an option.

In Squid Game, like in Parasite, the lower class fight each other for the scraps of the rich, who got rich by profiting off of them. The system is purported to be fair, but has perverse incentives and primarily rewards luck and exploitative behaviors. To merely fight for one’s survival is to actively participate in the demise of others.

Even though the winner was arguably the nicest person involved, he understands despairing at the blood spilled in the name of survival does not wash his hands clean of it. Consequently, he can’t bring himself to use the money. Spending it would be tantamount to spending those lives once more.

Institutional failure remains as poignant as ever

This review contains spoilers about the show’s themes, but no plot spoilers.

Genre: Crime drama TV show (five seasons, 60 episodes) #television #capitalism

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When The Wire first aired, it didn’t really rate. It won no awards, the viewership was nothing to write home about, and the critical response was good but not phenomenal. Yet today, almost every list of the greatest TV shows of all time feature The Wire somewhere in the top five. Why?

Many of its qualities are timeless. Its portrayal of police work, poverty and drug culture, education, and local government is not only totally honest and unpretentious, but also deeply human. It has a talented ensemble cast of actors who accurately represent Baltimore demographics. And then there’s The Bunk and all of his memorable zingers.

But The Wire is more than just a cops-and-criminals show. Over five seasons, it explores how institutions betray the people they’re meant to serve and the impossible challenges faced by those wishing to do something meaningfully good within those institutions. It’s an unusually realistic look at hopeless circumstances many Americans will find all too familiar.

Though the Baltimore Police Department takes center stage, it’s not the only star of the show. The department’s stories are part of an impressively consistent and well-written narrative thread that runs through all five seasons, weaving itself through those of other important institutions: the port union, the school system, the media, the courts, and of course, the criminal organizations.

Their parallels are ever transparent. Gangs share eerily similar hierarchies as the legal administrations tasked with taking them down — and are often, through backdoor handshakes and laundered money, more connected than it would seem.

And just as street-level thugs “stand tall,” silently eating charges to protect so-called friends whose loyalties end as soon as it is convenient, so too must corrupt politicians stand tall to avoid exposing their fellow white-collar criminals. There’s no such thing as a corrupt person in power working alone. Everyone’s got a hand in somebody’s pocket.

For all the small victories and feel-good moments peppered throughout its 60 episodes, The Wire ends on a bleak note. Its final message is unambiguous: nothing really changes. There are simply too many cogs in the machine, too many perverse incentives, and too many conflicting interests pulling in all directions.

If you have good intentions, institutions will grind you down until you choose to leave, are made to leave, or have nothing left of your former, optimistic self. The only way to get in a position to enact real change is to make so many deals and compromises that, by the time you’ve finally gotten into that position, you’ve essentially traded all its power away.

Almost two decades after The Wire first aired, Americans have long lost any trust that institutions have got their backs. Society is reaching all-time high levels of apathy and cynicism. More than check all the boxes that make good television, The Wire resonates powerfully. Let us hope it eventually falls down the ranks in those greatest TV show lists, not because newer and better ones are released, but because it stops being so goddamn real.